Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Iquito-English Dictionary published

March 30, 2020

An Iquito-English Dictionary was recently published by Ediciones Abya Yala and Cabeceras Aid Project, compiled by Lev Michael and Christine Beier on the basis of the linguistic and cultural knowledge of Jaime Pacaya Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa, and Ligia Inuma Inuma. Ronald Sprouse played a key role in preparing the dictionary manuscript by further developing a script originally created by Berkeley grad Greg Finley to generate a LaTeX file from the FLEx XML database file. A blurb is available on the Calques site.

Survey updates

February 25, 2020

Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010) archived a new collection on Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan; CA, OR, ID, NV), based on 10 years of research with elders Grace Dick, Leona Cluette Dick, Morris Jack, Inez Jim, Elaine Lundy, Edith McCann, Harold Miller, and Jimmy Nez, and in collaboration with Molly Babel (PhD 2009) and Michael Houser (PhD 2010). The collection consists of 281 recordings of lexical and grammatical elicitation (as he writes, with a focus on "nominalization, clausal embedding, clause chaining, and aspect"), and texts. The project grew out of Andrew Garrett's 2005-2006 field methods course on the language. Conor Daly (PhD Slavic 1991) archived a new collection on Ninilchik Russian, a variety spoken on the Kenai Peninsula and surrounding region of southern Alaska. Based on fieldwork in July and August 1985, the collection consists of conversations, interviews, and linguistic work with 25 people. The five notebooks comprising Marvin Kramer's (PhD 2002) field notes from summers 1968 and 1969 on Kutenai (isolate; British Columbia, ID, MT) are now available (Kramer.002.001-Kramer.002.005). The consultants were Ambrose Gravelle, Catherine Gravelle, and Frank Whitehead. (Thanks to Alex Elias for assisting us in scanning these!)

Agreement, case, and switch-reference in Amahuaca

Emily C. Clem
2019

Discourse connectedness: The syntax-discourse structure interface

Kenneth Paul Baclawski, Jr.
2019

Laparle, Scott publish in NELS 49

January 23, 2020

The proceedings of NELS 49 are now in print, featuring a paper each by Schuyler Laparle and Tessa Scott:

Laparle, S. 2019. Locative inversion without inversion. In NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 2, eds. Maggie Baird & Jonathan Pesetsky, 199-208. [preprint] Scott, T. 2019. Clitic placement in Mam (Mayan) requires a host requirement. In NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 3, eds. Maggie Baird & Jonathan Pesetsky, 117-126. [preprint]

Congrats both!

Bardagil awarded Rubicon grant

January 22, 2020
Postdoc Bernat Bardagil has recently learned that he has been awarded a Rubicon grant by the Dutch funding agency NWO for a postdoc at Ghent University with Jóhanna Barðdal. The project is entitled The subject in the Amazon. Grammatical relations in indigenous Amazonian languages. Congrats, Bernat!

Berkeley @ WCCFL 38

January 16, 2020

The program for the upcoming 38th annual meeting of the West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics has just been released, promising the following presentations by current department members and alumni:

Tessa Scott: Two types of "composite" probes Madeline Bossi: A morphological account of promiscuous agreement and *local > local in Kipsigis Virginia Dawson: Disjunction is not Boolean: novel evidence from Tiwa Nicholas Baier (PhD '18) and Gloria Mellesmoen: Spelling out object agreement in Central Salish Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD '10): TBA (invited talk)

Congrats all!

Elias publications

January 16, 2020

Congrats to first-year student Alexander Elias, whose paper "Are the Central Flores languages really typologically unusual?" is to appear in a book called Austronesian Undressed: How and Why Languages Become Isolating (eds David Gil and Antoinette Schapper), and whose paper "Kabyle Double Consonants: Long or Strong?" will appear in McGill Working Papers in Linguistics!

Alexander has also recently learned that his MA thesis Lio and the Central Flores languages has been nominated for two prizes, the Leiden University Thesis Prize and the Jan Brouwers Thesis Prize!

O'Hagan publishes in IJAL

January 13, 2020

Congrats to Zach O'Hagan, whose paper A Phonological Sketch of Omagua, co-authored with Clare Sandy (PhD 2017), has now been published in the International Journal of American Linguistics!

Survey updates

December 4, 2019

Zach O'Hagan sends the following set of updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Madeline Bossi archived a new collection on Scottish Gaelic (Celtic; Scotland), based on her 2019 fieldwork, including sound recordings of elicitation sessions and texts, field notes, and photographs. Zachary O'Hagan added 9 new file bundles to his extant collection on Caquinte (Arawakan; Peru), based on a short field trip in July, including sound recordings of elicitation sessions and video recordings of traditional stories. Wesley dos Santos added 25 new file bundles to his extant collection on Kawahiva (Tupí-Guaraní; Brazil), based on fieldwork on three varieties, Juma, Karipuna, and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, from 2017 to 2019. The audio and video recordings include elicitation sessions, many texts and conversations, and songs, alongside field notes, photographs, and electroglottagraphy (EGG) work! Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) archived a new collection on Esan (Edoid; Nigeria), based on many years of research, including in-situ fieldwork, that began in a Toronto field methods course over a decade ago! The collection includes sound recordings of elicitation sessions and texts, field notes (still done with a Livescribe Smartpen), and photographs. He also added 15 new file bundles to an extant collection on Izon (Ijoid; Nigeria). Jack Merrill (PhD 2018) archived a new collection on Kobiana (Senegambian; Senegal, Guinea-Bissau), based on fieldwork in Senegal in 2016, including sound recordings of elicitation sessions, field notes, and photographs. Steve Parker (SIL International; Dallas International University) archived over 300 pages of original field notes on Chamikuro (Arawakan; Peru) based on fieldwork with some of the last native speakers of the language in 1985, 1987, and 1993.