Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

There will be six talks by Berkeley linguists at NWAV 52 in Miami, November 7-9, 2024:

Amber Galvano: "Measuring Sibilants in Speech & Sexuality Research: Beyond Spectral Moments" Anna Knall: "Gender Assignment Variation in Spanish-English Mixed Noun Phrases" Nicole Holliday: “'I Don’t Like My Conversations Being Judged By an AI'”: Issues of Bias and Quality in Social Feedback Speech Technology" Julia Peck: "Multilingualism and Gender Assignment:Three Parallel Systems for Loanwords in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish?" Rhosean Asmah: "Coronal Stop Deletion in Megan Thee Stallion's Rap and Speech" Niko Schwarz: "Phonetics of Liquid Neutralization in Isla Margarita, Venezuela"

Congrats, all!

The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony (Nancy A. Ritter & Harry van der Hulst, editors), has just appeared in print with several contributions by current and former Berkeley linguists: 2. The role of consonants in vowel harmony, Gunnar Ólafur Hansson (PhD 2001) 13. Phonology that will not harmonize, Larry M. Hyman 39. Psycholinguistic approaches to vowel harmony, Anne Pycha (PhD 2008) and Sara Finley 51. Vowel harmony in non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages, Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) and Olanike Ola Ori 68. Umlaut in Germanic languages, Gunnar Ólafur Hansson (PhD 2001) and Richard Wiese https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-vowel-harmony-9780198826804?cc=fr&lang=en&# Congrats, all!

Larry Hyman presented a paper "Latent high tones in Limba (Tonko dialect; Sierra Leone)" at a workshop on Pertinacious Phonology & Morphology,
organized by Aditi Lahiri (Oxford University), held September 23- 25, 2024 at Ettington Park Hotel. Congrats!

Colloquium: Peter Svenonius (Tromsø), "When can a single word by biclausal? Word structure and the limits of monoclausality" Monday, September 16, 3-4:30pm in 370 Dwinelle (with reception to follow). Abstract:

"Various diagnostics have been identified to determine whether a complex predicate, such as a causative structure, involves a single clause or two. The diagnostics pick out clausal properties of subparts of the predicate, for example an agent or a distinctly modifiable event description is sometimes understood as a sufficient condition for clausehood, and if the subordinate part of a complex predicate has one of these things independently of the superordinate part, the complex predicate is deemed to be biclausal. This sometimes holds even when the predicate is considered to consist of a single word (as with Japanese indirect causatives, as argued by Shibatani and Kuno in the 1970s; see Matsumoto 1996 CSLI for discussion and references).

However, there are striking limits on biclausal single words, which reveal constraints on the architecture of grammar and the interface between grammar and the lexicon. First, restrictions on the conceptual content associated with listed lexical roots mean that certain kinds of information can only be expressed in syntactically complex forms. Second, functional structure is constrained --- I argue that the constraints follow from a certain conception of extended projections, which are responsible for a sharp difference between what can be expressed with and without embedding of one extended projection in another. This leads to motivated definitions of mono- and biclausality."