Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Bardagil travels

September 22, 2019
Postdoc Bernat Bardagil has had a busy few months. This week he is serving as an external examiner in the doctoral qualification for Edson de Freitas Gomes at the UFPA (Universidade Federal do Pará), for the dissertation Aspectos morfossintáticos em mẽbengokre: transitividade e marcação de argumentos. Earlier in September, he took part in the AGGREGATION Working Meeting at the University of Washington, with Emily Bender's project. Over the summer, he ran the first Escola de Língua Manoki Watjuho Ja'a in the village of Cravari, where a team kick-started a process to revitalize Manoki among a large group of young people in the community. He also more generally did fieldwork over the summer with Mỹky-Manoki, will continue to do some more with the same language and with Panará during the fall.

WSCLA 23 proceedings published

September 22, 2019

The Proceedings of WSCLA 23 (Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas) have recently been published, containing the following papers by department members and recent alumni:

Nico Baier (PhD '18) and Zachary O’Hagan: Morphological reflexes of subject extraction in Caquinte Bernat Bardagil: Person, case, and cliticization: the Panará PCC Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) and Zachary O’Hagan: Different kinds of second-position clitics in Caquinte

Congrats all!

Berkeley @ CCILA IX

September 9, 2019

The program for the 9th Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA IX) has just been released, promising the following presentations by current department members and recent alumni:

Zachary O'Hagan: Complex Temporal Relations in Caquinte: The Case of =ta and =ja Wendy Liz Arbey López Marquez: Los aplicativos en el popoluca de la Sierra Myriam Lapierre, Tessa Scott, Karee Garvin: Morphologically conditioned (sub)segmental subtraction in Mam Kelsey Neely (PhD '19): Metrical phonology in the verbal domain in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru) Amalia Horan Skilton (PhD '19): Demonstratives and reaching space in Ticuna

Congrats all!

Research group meetings & talk series this semester

September 5, 2019
Calques has been made aware of the following research groups and talk series meeting this semester: Experimental Phonology Working Group -- meeting on Mondays, 10:30-11:30am, in Dwinelle 1226. The first meeting will be Monday, September 9. Contact Jesse Zymet for more information. Fieldwork Forum -- meeting on Thursdays, 3:40-5:00pm, in Dwinelle 1303. Organized by Edwin Ko, Emily Drummond and Wesley dos Santos. More info on the website: Fieldwork Forum Gesture and Multimodality Group -- meeting certain Fridays, 9-11am. Contact Eve Sweetser for more information. Group in American Indian Languages -- meeting dates and times TBD; contact Zach O'Hagan for more information. Language Revitalization Working Group -- meeting Thursdays 1-2pm, in Dwinelle 3401. More info on the website: Language Revitalization Working Group Metaphor Group -- meeting times TBD; contact Eve Sweetser for more information. Phorum -- meeting Mondays 12-1pm, in 1229 Dwinelle. Organized by Emily Grabowski and Yevgeniy Melguy. More info on the website: Phorum Society of Linguistics Undergraduates Students (SLUgS) -- meeting certain Thursdays 5pm Sociolinguistics lab -- meeting on certain Tuesdays, 3:30-5pm, in Dwinelle 1229. The first meeting will be Tuesday, September 10. Contact Isaac Bleaman for more information. Syntax & Semantics Circle -- meeting on Fridays, 3-4:30pm, in Dwinelle 1303. Organized by Tessa Scott & Schuyler Laparle. More info on the website: Syntax and Semantics Circle

Survey updates

September 5, 2019

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

If you have questions about the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages and its digital catalog the California Language Archive (CLA), don't hesitate to email us at scoil-ling@berkeley.edu, or talk to Andrew Garrett (Director), Ronald Sprouse (IT), or Zachary O'Hagan (GSR). We collect analog and digital materials on languages of the Americas, as well as from all Berkeley-affiliated researchers, irrespective of region of the world. Our holdings include over 450 collections, with approximately 19,000 items and 32,500 digital files, consisting of paper materials (field notes, file slips, etc.), audio and video recordings, photographs, a stuffed American goldfinch, and more! Much of it is born-digital or has been digitized. You can take the initiative with your own archiving, using our pre-archive interface. Here are some other news items since we last reported in April.

The Survey/CLA is now on Instagram! Follow us @surveycla. Our account profiles the speakers of indigenous languages represented in our collections. (You can also follow us on Facebook at Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, where announce new collections and other pertinent news.) We hosted visits to the archive from people representing Karuk, Nez Perce, Northern Paiute, Pomo, Salinan, and Washo language groups. We rescued from a book giveaway a reel-to-reel tape from the graduate linguistic field methods course on Mongolian taught in 1967-1968 by Karl Zimmer (1927-2019). The recording was produced in what is now the Berkeley Language Center Recording Studio. If you can help us identify the speaker of Mongolian heard on the recording, please email us at scoil-ling@berkeley.edu. We made public three short recordings of Newari (Tibeto-Burman; Nepal) from Mary Haas's 1961-1962 field methods course with speaker Sushila Joshi.
 Emily Clem (PhD 2019) archived audio recordings and slides from her dissertation defense from May 2019, available here. We accessioned the collection Time-aligned Annotations of Bodega Miwok Sound Recordings (Miwokan; CA). These annotations, transcription with glossing, were made in ELAN by Andrew Cowell (CU Boulder) based on Catherine Callaghan's (PhD 1963) recordings of the language with speaker Sarah Ballard (1881-1978) in 1960.
 We accessioned a collection of sound recordings and field notes from the LSA Linguistic Institute's field methods course on Kashaya (Pomoan; CA), taught by Pamela Munro (UCLA) at Berkeley 10 years ago. The language consultant was Anita Silva.
 We accessioned a collection of four recordings (with transcription) of lexical elicitation of Bodega Miwok, made by Richard Applegate (PhD 1972) with Sarah Ballard in 1974.
 We digitized and made public new materials related to Nez Perce (Sahaptian; northwest US). Most are digital images of Series 2 and Series 4 of the Haruo Aoki Papers on the Nez Perce Language, consisting of the original transcriptions, translations, and annotations of the stories that feature in Aoki and Walker's (1989) "Nez Perce Oral Narratives." Also available are Marcus Ware's (1959) recordings with speaker Corbett Lawyer, which include lists of words, phrases, and sentences.
 Kelsey Neely (PhD 2019) archived audio and video recordings and slides from her dissertation defense from October 2018, available here. She also added 50 ELAN annotation files (transcription with Spanish translation) to her collection Materials of the Yaminawa Documentation Project.

Bossi, Wilbanks publish in Glossa

August 25, 2019

Congrats to Madeline Bossi and Eric Wilbanks, whose papers have each appeared this summer in Glossa!!

Bossi's paper is entitled V1 in Kipsigis: Head movement and discourse-based scrambling, co-authored with Michael Diercks.

Wilbanks' paper is entitled Sound change and coarticulatory variability involving English /ɹ/, co-authored with Bridget Smith, Jeff Mielke, and Lyra Magloughlin.

Skilton receives NSF postdoc

August 25, 2019

Congratulations to Amalia Horan Skilton (PhD 2019), who has filed her dissertation and begun a 2-year NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship for her project entitled "Documenting multimodal language development in an indigenous Amazonian community". During the postdoc, Amalia will split her time between UT Austin, working with Pattie Epps and others, and MPI Nijmegen, working with Caroline Rowland and others in the new Language Development department.

Spatial and non-spatial deixis in Cushillococha Ticuna

Amalia E. Skilton
2019

The Linguistic Expression of Affective Stance in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru)

Kelsey C. Neely
2019

Clem to defend dissertation

May 9, 2019
Next Friday, May 19, Emily Clem will defend her dissertation, entitled Agreement, case, and switch-reference in Amahuaca. The defense will take place from 10am-1pm in Dwinelle 1229. All members of the department are invited to attend. Abstract: This dissertation probes the nature of the syntactic operation of Agree through the lens of the morphosyntax of Amahuaca, an endangered Panoan language of the Peruvian Amazon. I explore the language's system of split ergative marking, arguing that case marking in Amahuaca is the result of agreement with multiple functional heads. This leads to a distinction between abstract and morphological ergative (and nominative) case. I also analyze the extensive system of switch-reference marking, demonstrating that the system has the typologically unusual property of tracking the reference and abstract case of all arguments of the verb, not only subject. I argue that this system arises through adjunct complementizer agreement that probes both the adjunct and matrix arguments directly. In analyzing the case and switch-reference systems of Amahuaca, I demonstrate that the empirical facts can be most straightforwardly accounted for if we assume 1) that some probes are insatiable, agreeing with all goals in their search space, and 2) that Agree is narrowly cyclic, with each instance of Merge defining a new cycle of Agree.