Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Phorum 2023

Spring 2023 January 20

Sarang Jeong (Stanford): The relation between perception and production in an ongoing sound change: A pilot experiment on the younger group's perception of Korean three-way stop contrast

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether individual language users’ perception is parallel to their production when their language community is going through a sound change. When a sound change is in progress, do speakers with the new and old variants...

Phorum 2022

Spring 2022 January 21

Kie Zuraw and Paolo Roca (UCLA): Rhythms in OPM (Original Pinoy Music)

We use music and lyrics of OPM, Original Pilipino Music, to investigate a controversy about whether it is stress or vowel length that is active in Filipino, and whether words divide mainly into penult-stressed vs. ultima-stressed, or into penult-stressed vs. unstressed. We found in a small corpus of songs that "stressed" syllables, as compared to "...

Phorum 2024

Spring 2024 January 19

No meeting.

Please check out the panel at 3:30pm (at Social Science Matrix, 8th floor Social Sciences Building) on Prof. Andrew Garrett's new book 'The...

Phorum 2025

Spring 2025 January 31

Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives

I describe and analyze the phonological form and historical trajectory of nominal derivatives in A’ingae (ISO 639-3: con), an underdocumented Amazonian isolate (Dąbkowski 2021). Some words historically derived with otherwise preglottalized nominalizers have lost their glottalization over time. I propose that these “exceptions” are reflexes of originally glottalized words, which underwent semantic shift and lost glottalization due to...

Phorum Archive

Past Phorum talks can be found here:

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Laryngeal features and segmental length: Cases studies in Yánesha’, Barese, Maranese, and Italian

Allegra Robertson
2025

This dissertation examines the relationship between laryngeal features and the segment in four languages, with a focus on phonetic traits, phonological representation, and the roles of length, weight, and stress. The case studies present laryngeal phenomena from disparate language contexts that are united in their subsegmental nature and typologically unexpected occurrence: laryngealized vowels in Yánesha’ (Arawakan), pre-aspirated geminate stops in Barese (Upper Southern Italo-Romance) and the local variety of Standard Italian (Central Italo-Romance), and post-aspirated geminate stops in...

A Grammar of Nomlaki

Anna Björklund
2025

This thesis is a grammar of Nomlaki, a Wintuan language of northern California preserved exclusively through archival documents. Many early documenters did not consider Nomlaki sufficiently differentiated from its sister language Wintu to justify separate investigation. As a consequence, Nomlaki is the only Wintuan language without a grammatical description.


This grammar is a preliminary answer to this gap in the Californianist literature. This work is divided into eight chapters. The introduction includes an orientation of Nomlaki in its genetic context, a finding guide for its...

Berkeley linguists at Exploring Boundaries workshop

March 5, 2025

Several Berkeley linguists will present at an upcoming workshop on Exploring Boundaries: Phonological domains in the languages of the world in Tromsø, Norway on March 13-14, 2025.

Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Katherine Russell will give a talk entitled "Wordhood at the heart of Paraguayan Guaraní morphology" Hannah Sande will give a talk entitled "Identifying domains in Lobi: Downstep, tone spreading, and harmony" Kai Joseph Schenck will present a poster on "Morphological domains in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony"

Melguy and Johnson publish in the Journal of Phonetics

March 3, 2025

Congratulations to Yevgeniy Melguy (PhD 2022) and Keith Johnson, whose article "What are you sinking about? Experience with unfamiliar accent produces both inhibition and facilitation during lexical processing" was published this week in the Journal of Phonetics.

Berkeley linguists at Variation in Cyclicity workshop

February 24, 2025

There will be two Berkeley talks at the upcoming workshop on Variation in Cyclicity at DGfS in Mainz, Germany, March 4-7:

Hannah Sande will give a plenary talk on "Discontinuous harmony in Guébie: Consequences for cyclic spell out." Maksymilian Dąbkowski will talk about "The spell-out of A'ingae functional phases and its phonological consequences."