Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Dawson invited speaker at TripleA

October 22, 2018

Congrats to fifth-year grad student Virginia Dawson, who has just been announced as an invited speaker at the upcoming TripleA conference at MIT! TripleA describes itself as "a workshop that aims at providing a forum for semanticists doing fieldwork on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania."

Amahuaca ergative as agreement with multiple heads

Emily Clem
2018

The mechanisms underlying ergative case assignment have long been debated, with inherent and dependent theories of ergative case emerging as two of the most prominent views. This paper presents novel data from the Panoan language Amahuaca, in which ergative case is sensitive to the position of the transitive subject. The interaction of movement and morphological case assignment in Amahuaca cannot easily be captured by current inherent or dependent case theories. Instead, I argue that a view of ergative case as exponing agreement with multiple functional heads (specifically ...

Linguistics events this week (Oct 19-26, 2018)

October 18, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 19 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Susan Steele: The architecture of inflection Syntax and Semantics Circle - Monday Oct 22 - Dwinelle 1229 - 11-12:30pm [note special time and place!]
Ashwini Deo (Ohio State): The emergence of split-oblique case systems: A view from the Bhili dialect continuum (Indo-Aryan) Phorum - Monday Oct 22 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
Eleanor Glewwe (UCLA): Complexity bias and substantive bias in phonotactic learning Linguistics Department Colloquium- Monday Oct 22 - Dwinelle 370 - 3:10-5 pm
Ashwini Deo (Ohio State): Marathi tense marking: A window into the lexical encoding of tense meanings Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Oct 25 - 554 Barrows Hall - 4-5:30PM [note special location!]
Line Mikkelsen, Beth Piatote, Sean Brown, and Lou Montelongo (UC Berkeley): The Many Lives of Indigenous Languages SLUgS - Thursday Oct 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-6pm
Living catalogue: brief overview of linguistics electives for Spring 2019

Cal @ Sound Systems of Latin America

October 17, 2018

This weekend features la tercera conferencia sobre Sistemas de Sonido de Latino América (SSLA3) -- Sound Systems of Latin America III -- at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Berkeley linguistics will be represented in five presentations by students, faculty, and '08 alumni:

Yuni Kim (PhD '08): “La relación entre ortografía e investigaciones fonológicas: Algunas posibilidades en amuzgo. Can phonological research contribute to Amuzgo orthography development – and vice versa?” [invited talk] Myriam Lapierre and Lev Michael: “Nasal harmony in Tupí-Guaraní: A comparative synthesis” Christian DiCanio (PhD '08) and Richard Hatcher: “Does Itunyoso Triqui have intonation?” Gabriela Caballero (PhD '08): “Direccionalidad y localidad en el condicionamiento de alomorfos en Tarahumara Central” Myriam Lapierre (University of California, Berkeley): “Word-initial [I] epenthesis in Panará: A prosodic analysis”

Congrats, all!

Bare nouns, numbers, and definiteness in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec

Amy Rose Deal
Julia Nee
2018

How is definiteness expressed in number-marking languages lacking a definite article? May bare nouns in such languages simply be read as definites or indefinites, without constraint? Dayal (2004) demonstrates that the interpretation of bare nouns with respect to definiteness is significantly constrained in Hindi and Russian. In these languages, singular and plural bare nouns present different possibilities for indefinite interpretation, in a way that receives a natural explanation within a neo-Carlsonian theory of noun meaning (Chierchia, 1998). This makes for a close connection between...

New SSILA Archiving Award

October 8, 2018

A new SSILA Archiving Award has been inaugurated, the award committee for which is chaired by Andrew Garrett. The society says that "this award highlights the importance of creating long-term archival materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such...

Berkeley linguists @ LSA 2019

October 3, 2018

The program for this year's LSA annual meeting has been released, and Berkeley linguistics will be represented in 14 talks and posters (plus an organized session) by students, faculty, and very recent alumni:

Kenneth Baclawski Jr.: Optional wh-movement is discourse-connected movement in Eastern Cham Amalia Skilton and David Peeters (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics): Speaker and addressee in spatial deixis: new experimental evidence Zachary O'Hagan: Two Sorts of Contrastive Topic in Caquinte Emily Clem and Virginia Dawson: Feature sharing and functional heads in concord Noga Zaslavsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp (University of Melbourne), Naftali Tishby (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Terry Regier: Color-naming evolution and efficiency: The case of Nafaanra Susan Lin and Myriam Lapierre: Articulatory patterns in contrasting nasal-stop sequences in Panará John Merrill (PhD '18): Polarity rules in Kobiana consonant mutation Jesse Zymet: Learning lexical trends together with idiosyncrasy: MaxEnt versus the mixed logit Andrew Cheng: Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent Emily Clem: The cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18): A cyclic account of a trigger-target asymmetry in concatenative vs. replacive tone Virginia Dawson: Disjunction scope can be lexically encoded: Evidence from Tiwa Tessa Scott: Cyclic linearization and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Ndengeleko Martha Schwarz, Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, and Sharon Inkelas: Representing Segment Strength: New Applications of Q Theory [in the special session on Inside Segments, organized by Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, Martha Schwarz, Ryan Bennett, and Sharon Inkelas!]

Congrats all!

Berkeley semantics in Sinn und Bedeutung 21 proceedings

October 3, 2018

The Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21 have just been published, containing four papers by faculty, students, and/or alumni:

Pranav Anand & Maziar Toosarvandani (Ph.D. 2010)
Unifying the canonical, historical, and play-by-play present. pdf Amy Rose Deal & Julia Nee
Bare nouns, number, and definiteness in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec. pdf Peter Jenks, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, & Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso
On the lexical semantics of property concept nouns in Basaá. pdf Peter Sutton & Hana Filip (Ph.D 1993)
Restrictions on subkind coercion in object mass nouns. pdf

Congrats all!

Hyman festscrift published

October 3, 2018

Newly published with CSLI is the long-awaited volume Revealing Structure: Papers in Honor of Larry M. Hyman (eds. Eugene Buckley, Thera Crane and Jeff Good)! The book features numerous contributions by alumni, faculty, emeriti, and former visiting scholars, including:

Jeff Good (Ph.D. 2003), Eugene Buckley (Ph.D. 1992) & Thera Crane (Ph.D. 2011): Revealing Structure in Languages and Grammar Jean-Marie Hombert (PhD 1975) and Rebecca Grollemund: Phylogenetic Classification of Grassfields Languages Sharon Inkelas: Overexponence and Underexponence in Morphology Joyce T. Mathangwane (Ph.D. 1996): On Tones in Chisubiya (Chiikuhane) Johanna Nichols: A Direct/Inverse Subsystem in Ingush Deictic Prefixes John J. Ohala: The Aerodynamic Voicing Constraint and its Phonological Implications Imelda I. Udoh (former visiting scholar): Compounding in Leggbó Alan C. L. Yu (Ph.D. 2003): Laryngeal Schizophrenia in Washo Resonants

Congrats, Larry, on the celebratory volume, and congrats to the editors and authors!

Conference double-header!

October 3, 2018

This weekend features two conferences at which Berkeley Linguistics will have a major presence, one each in the east and the west:

The Annual Meeting on Phonology, at UC San Diego, features work by faculty Larry Hyman and Jesse Zymet, along with alumni Nik Rolle (PhD 2018, now at Princeton), Hannah Sande (PhD 2017, now at Georgetown), Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008, now at UCSD), Alan Yu (PhD 2003, now at Chicago), and Eugene Buckley (PhD 1992, now at Penn). NELS 49, at Cornell, features presentations by graduate students Emily Clem, Schuyler Laparle, and Tessa Scott, along with alum Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010, now at UC Santa Cruz).

Congrats all!