New to the California Language Archive (CLA) this week is a collection of Tiwa materials elicited by Virginia Dawson. The collection can be accessed here!
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."
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.
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
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]
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).
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.
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:
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!]
