Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Survey updates

April 2, 2019

Zach O'Hagan writes with the following news from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Wesley dos Santos archived audio recordings of 16 stories in Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and Karipuna (Tupí-Guaraní; Brazil), based on fieldwork in 2017 and 2018. Three stories come with additional video recordings, like this one, "The Alligator Who Wanted to Eat a Monkey." In collaboration with the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), we digitized a circa 1946 home film belonging to Mary R. Haas, founding member of our department and first director of the Survey. The film was recorded at 1435 Arch St., Berkeley, and in downtown, and includes Prof. Haas's husband Heng Subhanka. There's footage of tea, laundry-hanging, and flower-watering in the back yard, a meal in the dining room, dish-washing in the kitchen, a warm hearth, shots of downtown Berkeley at night, and an adorable cat! Amalia Skilton's dissertation defense from March 22 is available to be listened to, with accompanying slides, video clip, and still image. We hope to record and make accessible more defenses in the future! William Sturtevant's (BA 1949, Berkeley) 1951 recordings of Creek-Seminole (Muskogean; Oklahoma, Florida) have been made unrestricted. Scans of several documents have been made public recently, many about Yuki (Yuki-Wappo; California): Notes on Yuki Grammar (Silver, 1967); Notes on Yuki Vocabulary and Grammar (Sawyer, 1967); Phonological Distinctions in Yuki (Sawyer, n/d); Spanish loanwords in Yuki (Sawyer, n/d); The Ghost Dance among the Yuki (Sawyer, c1975); Is Yuki a Tone Language? (Oswalt, 1978); Notes on the Yukian Pronominal System (anonymous); Nez Perce wordlist (Aoki, 1960-1961); and Chinook Jargon class handouts (Kaufman, 1966).

LSA proceedings published

March 25, 2019

The 4th volume of the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America has just been published, showcasing research presented in January at the 2019 Annual Meeting. In the collection are three papers by students and faculty:

Kenneth Baclawski Jr.: Optional wh-movement is discourse-connected movement in Eastern Cham Virginia Dawson: Lexicalizing disjunction scope Martha Schwarz, Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, Sharon Inkelas: Recent advances in Q theory: segment strength

Congrats all!

Linguists keep busy

March 21, 2019

Last weekend was a busy one for Berkeley linguists, with department members at conferences in Dwinelle Hall dedicated to Celtic and Amazonian languages as well as attending conferences in other locations!

Numerous Berkeley attendees at the Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL III)

Symposium on Amazonian Languages III

Virginia Dawson and Samantha Wathugala at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 9, Reed College, Portland (after presenting their paper, In support of a choice functional analysis of Sinhala ðə)

Dawson and Wathugala at FASAL

And to cap things off with some true linguistics in action: here's Susan Lin presenting Linguistics: making sense from noise at the East Bay Science Cafe, last Thursday (March 14).

Susan Lin presenting

Bardagil Mas in Finland

March 19, 2019

This coming week in Helsinki, postdoc Bernat Bardagil Mas will present a talk titled Rethinking the documentation trilogy in endangered language research at a conference called Descriptive grammars and typology. Congrats, Bernat!

Survey updates

March 14, 2019

Zach O'Hagan writes with the following news from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) archived 28 file bundles of sound recordings and field notes in two collections related to Izon and Kalabari (Ijaw; Nigeria), based on fieldwork in Port Harcourt in July and August 2017. A focus of these elicitation sessions is tone, especially grammatical tone. Now a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University, Dr. Rolle's recent dissertation, Grammatical Tone: Typology and Theory, can be found here. An accomplished Africanist, NikRo is also a budding Amazonianist, having collaborated with Marine Vuillermet, a postdoc in this department in 2013 and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (Lyon), on the morphologically conditioned assignment of accent in Ese Ejja (Takanan; Peru, Bolivia). William Sturtevant's (BA 1949, Berkeley) 1951 recordings of Mikasuki (Muskogean; Florida) have been made unrestricted.

Berkeley linguists publish in LD&C

March 6, 2019

The journal Language Documentation & Conservation has recently released a special publication entitled Reflections on Language Documentation: 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998, including three papers by faculty or alumni:

Christine Beier & Patience Epps: Reflections on Fieldwork: A View from Amazonia Jeff Good (PhD 2003): Reflections on the Scope of Language Documentation Wesley Leonard (PhD 2007): Reflections on (De)colonialism in Language Documentation

Survey updates

February 28, 2019

Some updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages:

Tessa Scott archived 34 file bundles related to Ndengeleko (Bantu; Tanzania), from her fieldwork in 2017 and 2018. The audio recordings consist primarily of elicitation (accompanied by scanned and typed field notes), with four short texts and discussions with speakers of consent for the project. George Kamau (BA 1962) was discovered to be the language consultant for Prof. William Shipley's winter-spring 1962 field methods course on Kikuyu (Bantu; Kenya), then listed as 220B "Linguistics Laboratory." His recordings are items 002-005 here. In 1959 Mr. Kamau was part of the first cohort of 81 Kenyans brought from Nairobi to various universities in the US as part of a series of airlifts sponsored by the African American Student Foundation. The goal was to educate a generation of young Kenyans for post-British rule. Barack Obama, Sr. was part of the same cohort. Last week it was reported that Prof. Wallace Chafe, at Berkeley from 1962 to 1986, passed away on February 3. Recordings from the second field methods course he taught here, on Dakota (Siouan; US) in fall-winter 1963-4, are items 012 and 013 here.

Survey updates

February 14, 2019

Some updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages:

Over 60 hours of audio recordings and almost 600 pages of field notes of Romani (Indo-European), dating from 1964 to 1972 and originally produced by Guy Tyler in collaboration with 36 different consultants, were accessioned in 27 file bundles. Julia Nee archived 2 file bundles of storybooks in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec (Otomanguean; Oaxaca): Beniit con xpejigan ("Benita and Her Balloons") and images of one based on Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? A text in Nez Perce (Sahaptian; Idaho), "Gusty Wind and Sunshine," from the papers of Hans Jørgen Uldall, affiliated with Berkeley in the early 1930s, was scanned and made public.

Open house colloquium

February 27, 2019

This Monday we will have a series of presentations by current graduate students in the colloquium spot -- 3:10-5pm, 370 Dwinelle:

Alice Shen: Pitch cues in the perception of code switching Amalia Skilton:Speaker and addressee in spatial deixis: Experimental evidence from Ticuna and Dutch Emily Clem:The cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes Myriam Lapierre:Two types of [NT]s in Panãra: Evidence from production and perception

Amazonianist and Celtic conferences

February 25, 2019

March 15-17 will see not one but two conferences of interest for, and organized by, department members:

Third biennial Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL3)
March 16-17; 1229 Dwinelle Hall
Program here! The 41st California Celtic Conference
March 15-17, 2019; 370 Dwinelle Hall
Program here!