Language and Social Context

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!

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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)

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Michael in Brazil and Mexico

November 28, 2018

This coming week Lev Michael will be in Florianópolis, Brazil, where he will be giving a plenary talk entitled Captive-taking and language contact in Amazonia at the 10th meeting of Associação Brasileira de Estudos Crioulos e Similares. Before the December 5 talk, he'll be giving a mini-course (Dec 3-4) at the same conference, entitled ''El contacto lingüístico en la Amazonía: Áreas, procesos y metodologías" (Language contact in Amazonia: Areas, processes, and methodologies).

In previous travel, talk and class news, on November 8 Lev gave a 'conferencia magistral' at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos of UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) entitled La gramaticalización impulsada por la cultura: el caso de las evidenciales reportativas en el idioma nanti (Culture-driven grammaticalization: The case of Nanti reportative evidentials), and on November 9 he gave a class for faculty members at UNAM and other affiliated universities entitled "Temas y metodologías en la lingüística antropológica" (Topics and methodologies in Anthropological Linguistics).

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Cheng, Clem recognized by the LSA

October 4, 2018

Fifth-year grad students Andrew Cheng and Emily Clem were each recognized by the LSA this week in connection with the upcoming annual meeting in New York City. Andrew was named a finalist for the Five-minute Linguist event, which features short, informative, engaging, and accessible talks about linguistics research on a variety of topics. Andrew's presentation is entitled Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. Emily has been named as the third place winner of this year's Student Abstract Award, recognizing "the three best abstracts submitted by a student for a paper or poster presentation at Annual Meeting". Emily's prize-winning abstract is entitledThe cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes.

Congrats, Andrew and Emily!

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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!

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Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation

Jeffrey Reaser

Eric Wilbanks

Karissa Wojcik

Walt Wolfram

2018

Read more about Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation

Diglossia and change from below in Eastern Cham

Kenneth Baclawski Jr.

2018

Diglossia canonically refers to language situations with unequal attitudes towards a formal ‘H’ variety, connected to writing, and a colloquial ‘L’ variety, connected to everyday speech. This paper claims that variation that arises as a marker of diglossia can become dissociated from it and persist in the L variety, if it is sufficiently orthogonal to the writing system. With a sociolinguistic survey (n = 30), this paper examines five variables that were markers of quasi-diglossia in Eastern Cham in previous decades. Three of the variables continue to be...