Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Wu, Deal publish in Snippets

January 23, 2019

The journal Snippets has recently released a special issue on Non-local Contextual Allomorphy. Included in the volume are two short papers by Berkeley linguists:

Amy Rose Deal: Locality in allomorphy and presyntactic bundling: A case of tense and aspect Yi-Chi Yvette Wu: Non-local allomorphy in Kannada

Congrats, Yvette, on your first publication!

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).

Phorum 2018

Spring 2018 March 5, 2018 - Brian Smith (UC Berkeley)

"Surface optimization in English function word allomorphy"

In OT accounts of Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy (PCA), phonological conditioning is the result of markedness constraints, which favor allomorphs that optimize surface structure (e.g. Mester 1994, Tranel 1996, Mascaró 1996, Kager 1996). For example, the use of an before vowels in English can be analyzed in OT as the result of a high-ranking constraint against onsetless syllables, which...

Linguistics events this week (Dec 7-14, 2018)

December 7, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Dec 7 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
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 Phorum - Monday Dec 10 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
LSA Practice Talks by Amalia Skilton & David Peeters (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics): Speaker and addressee in spatial deixis: new experimental evidence; Andrew Cheng: Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Dec 14 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm
Jorge Hankamer (UC Santa Cruz) & Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): CP complements to D

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)

Linguistics events this week (Nov 23-30, 2018)

November 23, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Phorum - Monday Nov 26 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
Simon Todd (Stanford): Word frequency effects in sound change: A listener-based exemplar model QP Fest - Monday Nov 26 - Dwinelle 370 - 3-5pm Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Nov 29 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5:30PM
Julia Nee: TBA Syntax and Semantics Circle Friday Nov 30 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm
Zach O'Hagan: Two sorts of contrastive topic in Caquinte

Hyman travels, publishes on Benue-Congo

November 13, 2018
In the days ahead Larry Hyman will be traveling first to the University of British Columbia, where he will present "In search of prosodic domains in Lusoga" and attend workshops on Kinata and Medumba, and then to Ghent University for the International Conference on Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar, at which he will present "Causative and Passive H tone: Spurious or proto?" Continuing the African languages theme, Larry also has three new papers in the newly published book East Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns, and verbs. The book is open access and can be downloaded in its entirety here. Larry's three chapters are entitled: “Bantoid verb extensions”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns, and verbs, 175-199. Berlin: Language Science Press. “Third person pronouns in Grassfields Bantu”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns and verbs, 201-223. Berlin: Language Science Press. “More reflections on the nasal classes in Bantu”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns and verbs, 225-238. Berlin: Language Science Press.

NELS 48 proceedings published

October 30, 2018

The Proceedings of NELS 48 have just been published in a three-volume set. The set contains three papers by faculty and/or alumni:

Boris Harizanov and Line Mikkelsen, Resumption and Chain Reduction in Danish VP Left Dislocation Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18), Output-Output Correspondence via Agreement by Projection Hannah Sande (PhD '17) and Peter Jenks, Cophonologies by phase

Congrats all!

Cal Alonquianists gather in Edmonton

October 30, 2018

The 50th Algonquian Conference took place last weekend in Edmonton, Alberta, featuring four talks by Berkeley faculty or alumni:

Rich Rhodes: Morphological transitivity in Ojibwe Amy Dahlstrom (PhD '86): A Meskwaki construction in narrative texts: independent pronoun + full NP David Costa (PhD '94): Verb negation in Indiana Miami Jerome Biedny, Matthew Burner, Andrea Cudworth, & Monica Macaulay (PhD '87): Classifier Medials Across Algonquian: A First Look

Berkeley authors are depicted below!

Cal faculty & alumni at the Algonquian Conference 2018