Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Bardagil Mas in Brazil

February 7, 2019
Postdoc Bernat Bardagil Mas is currently in Brazil for fieldwork with Mỹky and Panará until mid-March. He sends the following update on his activities there: February 11-15: he will co-teach a language course for indigenous teachers with Aline da Cruz at the Federal University of Goiás (Núcleo Takikahakỹ de Formação Superior de Professores Indígenas) February 15: he will give an invited talk at the Núcleo de Tipologia Linguística at the University of Brasilia, "As línguas jê e a exponência do caso ergativo" March 12: he will give an invited talk at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, in Belém, "A morfologia do caso nas línguas jê" Recently published by Bernat, in collaboration with Charlotte Lindenbergh, is a Linguistics in the Netherlands paper entitled "Realigning alignment - The completeness typology applied to case marking in Jê languages".

Survey updates for January 2019

February 2, 2019

Some new updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages regarding activities for 2019 so far:

Chris Beier & Lev Michael archived an initial 13 file bundles related to Iquito (Zaparoan; Peru), including over 8 hours of audio recordings of 59 texts from the early years of their research (2002-2005). Zach O'Hagan added 63 file bundles from 2018 fieldwork to his collection on Caquinte (Arawak; Peru), including over 39 hours of audio and video recordings of stories, interviews, elicitation, and other interactions. Vivian Wauters (MA 2012), now a graduate student in horticultural science at the University of Minnesota, archived 22 file bundles related to Arabela (Zaparoan; Peru), including over 36 hours of audio recordings of elicitation and some texts, field notes, and a FLEx database. Three boxes of lexical file slips (here, here, and here) of Atsugewi (Palaihnihan; California) created by Len Talmy (PhD 1972) have been digitized and are available. An unpublished manuscript on historical Tucanoan linguistics, written by Alva Wheeler (PhD 1970) as a term paper for a seminar taught by Mary Haas, has been digitized and is available. Jorge Rosés (Alberta) & Erin Hashimoto (Alberta) archived "Time-aligned Annotations of Makah Narratives" (Wakashan; Washington), which combines speakers Ralph LaChester and Mabel Robertson's (1965) recordings of the language made with William Jacobsen (PhD 1964) with handwritten transcriptions of them, making them more accessible to users in ELAN and SayMore.

BLS workshop on countability distinctions

February 1, 2019

Coming up next week is a workshop on Countability Distinctions, organized by Emily Clem, Virginia Dawson, Amy Rose Deal, Paula Floro, Peter Jenks, Tyler Lemon, Line Mikkelsen, Tessa Scott, and Yi-Chi Wu. The workshop will feature two plenary talks, one each on Friday Feb 8 and Saturday Feb 9:

Suzi Lima (Toronto): A typology of the count/mass distinction in Brazil and its relevance for count/mass theories David Barner (UC San Diego): Quantification in Context is Multidimensional

In addition, there will be talks on mass/count related phenomena in Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Kipsigis, Hungarian, Romanian, and English. All are welcome. Check out the full schedule here!

Linguistics events this week (Feb 1-8, 2019)

February 1, 2019

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 1 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Round Robin Lecture in Hispanic Linguistics - Friday Feb 1 - 5125 Dwinelle - 1-2pm Jhonni Carr (Berkeley): Spanish in Los Angeles Urban Signage: Language Attitudes and Linguistic Communities Phorum - Monday Feb 4 - 1303 Dwinelle - 12-1pm
Gopala Anumanchipalli (UCSF), Josh Chartier (UCSF, Berkeley), & Edward Chang (UCSF): Synthesizing speech directly from the human brain Language Variation and Change reading group - Wednesday Feb 6 - 5303 Dwinelle - 11a-noon Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Feb 6 - Dwinelle 1229 - 11-12:30PM
Meg Cychosz (Berkeley): TBA SLUgS - Thursday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-6pm
Game night, plus informal tutoring afterwards from 6-7pm BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions - Friday Feb 8 and Saturday Feb 9 - Dwinelle 370
Schedule available here!

Survey updates

January 31, 2019

The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages has just sent along some updates on its activities in Fall 2018:

Kenny Baclawski archived 67 file bundles related to his 2014 and 2015 fieldwork on Cham (Austronesian; Vietnam), including audio recordings of texts, and of elicitation on grammar and sociolinguistic variation. Karee Garvin archived 32 file bundles related to her 2017 fieldwork on Nafaanra (Senufo; Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire), inclulding audio recordings of phonetic, lexical, grammatical, and narrative elicitation, and field notes. Edwin Ko archived 17 file bundles related to his 2018 fieldwork on Crow (Siouan; Montana), including audio recordings of elicitation and texts, and photographs. Amalia Skilton archived 625 gigabytes (here, here, and here) of audio and video recordings of Ticuna (isolate; Peru, Colombia, Brazil), spanning fieldwork from 2015 to the present. Included are transcriptions of some 3 hours of conversation, 3 hours of interviews, and 8 hours of traditional monologic texts.

Stay tuned for more Survey updates from this new year!

O'Hagan papers to appear in WSCLA

January 27, 2019
Zach O'Hagan has two new papers to appear in the proceedings of WSCLA, both based on his fieldwork on Caquinte and both in collaboration with 2018 PhD alumni: Baier, Nico and Zachary O'Hagan. to appear. Morphological Reflexes of Subject Extraction in Caquinte. Proceedings of WSCLA 23. [pdf] Rolle, Nicholas and Zachary O'Hagan. to appear. Different Kinds of Second-position Clitics in Caquinte. Proceedings of WSCLA 23. [pdf]

Congrats, Zach!

PhonLab Annual Report 2018 published

January 23, 2019

The 2018 edition (volume number 14!) of the UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report is now up at https://escholarship.org/uc/bling_reports. This year's report includes 15 papers by faculty, students, and alumni:

Hyman, Larry M.: Causative and Passive High Tone in Bantu: Spurious or Proto? Rolle, Nicholas and Hyman, Larry M.: Phrase-level Prosodic Smothering in Makonde Johnson, Keith and Sjerps, Matthias: Speaker Normalization in Speech Perception Johnson, Keith: Vocal Tract Length Normalization Faytak, Matthew and Akumbu, Pius W.: Kejom (Babanki) Cychosz, Meg: Holistic Lexical Storage: Coarticulatory Evidence from Child Speech Garvin, Karee: An Acoustic Outlook on Initial Stops in Northern Shoshoni Cheng, Andrew: A Longitudinal Acoustic Study of Two Transgender Women on YouTube Cheng, Andrew: 1.5 Generation Korean Americans: Consonant and Vowel Production of Two Late Childhood Arrivals Melguy, Yevgeniy: Strengthening, Weakening and Variability: The Articulatory Correlates of Hypo- and Hyper-articulation in the Production of English Dental Fricatives Johnson, Keith: Speech Production Patterns in Producing Linguistic Contrasts are Partly Determined by Individual Differences in Anatomy Shibata, Andrew: The Influence of Dialect in Sound Symbolic Size Perception Dil, Sofea: Effects of Learning Strategies on Perception of L2 Intonation Patterns Zymet, Jesse: A Case for Parallelism: Reduplication-repair Interaction in Maragoli Faytak, Matthew: Articulatory Uniformity Through Articulatory Reuse: insights from an Ultrasound Study of Sūzhōu Chinese

Keith Johnson says: We have also moved all of the back issues of the Annual Report to escholarship.org where the archive will be indexed and maintained in perpetuity (thanks for the nudge in this direction, Andrew Garrett; and thanks to Ronald Sprouse for the technical support).

Baclawski in Europe

December 6, 2018

Kenny Baclawski will be traveling to Muenster, Germany, this week for the Information Structure in Spoken Language Corpora (ISSLAC3) Workshop, where he will speak on Topic, Focus, and Wh-Phrases in Cham and Moken. Then he will travel on to the University of Geneva to give an additional talk there.

Linguistics events this week (Nov 30-Dec 7, 2018)

November 29, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 30 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm
Zach O'Hagan: Two sorts of contrastive topic in Caquinte SLUgS Linguistics Symposium - Saturday Dec 1 - Dwinelle 370 - 8:30am-5pm Linguistics Holiday Potluck - Monday Dec 3 - Dwinelle 1229 - 12 noon Linguistics Department colloquium - Monday Dec 3 - Dwinelle 370 - 3-5pm
Carlos Gussenhoven (Radboud University Nijmegen): Between phonetics and phonology: Of the beast and the untamed savage Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Dec 6 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5:30PM
Quirina Geary (UC Davis): TBA Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Dec 7 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm
Noga Zaslavsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Karee Garvin (UC Berkeley), Charles Kemp (University of Melbourne), Naftali Tishby (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), & Terry Regier (UC Berkeley): Color-naming evolution and efficiency: The case of Nafaanra

QP fest 2018!

November 22, 2018

QP Fest will be held on Monday, November 26, in Dwinelle 370, from 3-5pm. (Note the rescheduled date!)

The schedule is as follows:

Introduction (3:10-3:15) Tessa Scott: "Conjoint/disjoint in Ndengeleko: A head movement alternation" (3:15-3:35) Karee Garvin: "Positional effects on timing and coordination of segments within the syllable" (3:35-3:55) Yevgeniy Melguy: "Talker ethnicity and listener expectation in the perception of foreign-accented speech" (3:55-4:15) Mini-break (4:15-4:20) Noah Hermalin: "Ambiguity and efficiency trade-offs in Sumerian cuneiform" (4:20-4:40) Myriam Lapierre: "A phonological analysis of Panãra" (4:40-5:00)