Research
A full list of research projects can be found by going to the individual research areas. This is a sampler of several currently active projects in the department.
Omagua: Documentation and Sociohistorical Analysis (Lev Michael)
Lev Michael and a group of students are documenting and developing a grammatical description of Omagua, a highly endangered language of Peruvian Amazonia, and are working to understand the linguistic and social history of this remarkable language. Omagua was the language of one of the largest and most powerful pre-Colombian Amazonian societies, and was spoken along most of the upper main Amazon River. However, Omagua is now spoken by fewer than ten elderly individuals, and the Omagua research group has the privilege of working with two of them: Arnaldo Huanaquiri and Manuel Cabudiva. Together they are documenting the grammar and lexicon of this language, and creating a large corpus of Omagua narratives and other texts that are useful both as a historical resource for the Omagua community and as a basis for linguistic analysis.
Intriguingly, recent work suggests that Omagua is a creole language arising from contact between speakers of some language of the large Tupí-Guaraní family and some as-yet-undetermined indigenous language. Beyond the fundamental task of analyzing and describing this historically important language, therefore, the Omagua research group is attempting to better understand the relation of Omagua to the Tupí-Guaraní family and other nearby language families. The team is making use of both linguistic analysis and historical records to develop a picture of the sociohistorical circumstances of its genesis and to evaluate the hypothesis that it is creole language. If Omagua does indeed prove to be a creole language, this would have significant consequences for work on language contact, creole linguistics, and our understanding of the social and cultural history of Pre-Colombian Amazonia.
Social Functions of Evidentiality (Lev Michael)
Evidentiality is a grammatical category, found in many of the world's languages, that directly encodes the sensory or cognitive modality by which speakers come to know the facts they articulate in utterances. Linguists have made significant strides in recent decades in understanding the cross-linguistic morphosyntactic and semantic properties of this previously little-studied category, but the social and interactional uses to which speakers put evidentials remain poorly understood.
Lev Michael is engaged in a long-term project to explore the social and interactional functions of evidentiality by examining how speakers of Nanti, an Arawak language of southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, use evidentials in everyday social interactions. Based on ethnographically contextualized transcripts of recorded interactions in the Nanti communities, Michael looks at how Nantis deploy evidentials in various forms of social and rhetorical positioning and maneuvering. Among the results of this work, Michael has found that evidentials play in important role in negotiating moral responsibility, and not solely epistemic responsibility, as was long assumed, and that even at the level of pragmatics, or language-in-use, it is important to distinguish evidentiality from epistemic modality (the grammatical realization of speakers' degree of certainty that what they say is true). Ongoing work includes the study of how Nantis employ evidentials to indicate social closeness or distance from other individuals, and how evidentials are used to take moral stands in Nanti discourse.
Optimal Construction Morphology (Sharon Inkelas)
Sharon Inkelas and Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008) are developing a theoretical production model of morphology, called Optimal Construction Morphology, whose aim is to predict the optimal combination of morphological constructions that can produce a word of a given target meaning in a given language. OCM builds on earlier theories such as Lexical Morphology and Phonology, A-Morphous Morphology, Paradigm Function Morphology, and Construction Grammar, synthesizing the contributions of realizational, item-based and cyclic morphological theories in novel ways. In OCM, each layer of morphology in a complex word is the winner of a competition. All the possible single morphological constructions that could combine with a given stem compete, in Optimality-theoretic fashion, to see which does the best job of bringing the word under construction into conformity with the target meaning. Thus far, Inkelas and Caballero have focused on the phenomena of blocking (worse blocks *badd-er and *worse-r) and its apparent opposite, multiple exponence (e.g. tol-d, in which the root and the suffix both mark past tense). The co-existence of anti-redundancy (blocking) and redundancy (multiple exponence) in morphology has long been a thorn in the side of morphological theories; OCM promises to illuminate this uneasy co-existence.LSA 2009
Word meanings across languages (Terry Regier)
Word meanings across languages are sometimes viewed as reflecting a universal conceptual repertoire - or, at the other extreme, culturally varying linguistic convention. This project explores a third possibility: that there are better and worse ways of partitioning semantic space for the purposes of communication, and that systems of word meanings across languages tend to reflect near-optimal partitions of such a space. This idea can in principle account for both universal tendencies and some degree of linguistic convention. Ongoing work tests the idea against cross-language databases of spatial terms and color terms, and extensions are planned to other semantic domains.
The "who did the what now?" project (Alice Gaby)
In any conversation, interactants need toThe 'For Want of WANT' Project (Alice Gaby)
This project explores how wants and desires are expressed cross-linguistically, with a particular focus on Australian Aboriginal languages. Expressing one’s individual desires can be pragmatically risky, either because they are not shared by one’s interlocutor or because of their association with requests. It is therefore common for speakers to express this semantic category by means of constructions primarily associated with other semantic domains (cf. English want’s original meaning, ‘to lack’). This project explores the range of strategies (pragmatic, morphosyntactic and multi-modal) speakers employ to express their desires synchronically, as well as the various diachronic sources and destinations of WANT expressions. Graduate student Hannah Pritchett is currently contributing to the project by investigating the relationship between negation and WANT-coding in Australian languages.Pronominal Coordination (Line Mikkelsen with undergraduates Jed Pizarro-Guevara and Milla Nizar)
As part of a larger investigation of the structure, meaning and use of near-synonymous expressions, this project examines coordination of pronouns (like `you and me') in contrast with plural pronouns (`us'). The goal is to determine the factors that govern the use of coordinated vs plural pronominals and relate these to properties of pronouns and coordination more generally. A large-scale corpus study demonstrates that pronominal coordination occurs disproportionately with expressions of exclusivity and distributivity, and also occurs disproportionately in environments reserved for plural noun phrases as well as in non-canonical syntactic positions, such as left-dislocated and right-dislocated positions. The next phase of the project involves an experimental investigation aimed at testing the semantic and pragmatic factors that cause this distribution.Phonetics and Phonology Forum (Phorum)
Phorum is a lively weekly talk and discussion series, coordinated by graduate students and attended by students, visitors and faculty. Phorum features presentations on all aspects of phonology and phonetics by Berkeley linguists and out-of-town visitors. A schedule of talks for the current semester can be found here.The Neural Theory of Language project (George Lakoff, Eve Sweetser)
The Neural Theory of Language (NTL) project is an interdisciplinary research effort to answer the question: How does the brain compute the mind? Specific research questions include: How can the brain -- a highly structured network of neurons -- support thought and language? How do the specific neural structures of the human brain shape the nature of thought and language? How are language and thought related to other neural systems, including perception, motor control, and social cognition? What are the computational properties of neural systems? What are the applications of neural computing?
The Yurok Language Project (Andrew Garrett)
The Yurok Language Project combines active fieldwork with Yurok elders with philological analysis of earlier fieldnotes and recordings to develop a Yurok documentary corpus. The Yurok materials are organized into a single digital archive, publicly available on the project web site, which incorporates information from as early as 1850 to the present day. The goal of the project is both to document and promote scholary research into Yurok and to contribute to the language revitalization efforts of the Yurok community. The scope of the Yurok Language Project includes formal classes in public schools, community language classes, summer camps, and other activities sponsored by the Yurok Tribe language office and by community groups such as the Yurok Elder Wisdom Preservation Project.
Phonology Laboratory
The Phonology Laboratory (Keith Johnson, Director; John Ohala, emeritus Director) is a research and teaching laboratory within the Linguistics Department. The lab is equipped with instrumental and software resources for acoustic, perceptual, and articulatory phonetic research. Home to a thriving group of visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and student researchers, research in the phonology lab is sponsored by federally funded research projects on speech production and perception. The lab hosts a weekly talk series (Phonetics and Phonology Forum) and publishes an Annual Report.
Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages has three main activities: language documentation; archiving; and community service and public outreach. The Survey was founded by Mary Haas and Murray Emeneau in 1952, a year before the present Department of Linguistics, and it continues the linguistic work of the Archaeological and Ethnographic Survey of California, established by A. L. Kroeber in 1901. Its work is currently supervised by Andrew Garrett (Director) and Leanne Hinton (emeritus Director).
The Survey sponsors documentary linguistic work throughout California and elsewhere in the western hemisphere. Most published grammars and dictionaries of California Indian languages are based on work supported by the Survey, usually by Berkeley graduate students, and we have also sponsored extensive research in Algonquian, Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, Zapotec, and other language families mainly spoken outside California. In our permanent archive we have 2000 separately cataloged items (field notes and other unpublished materials), with manuscripts dating as early as 1902 covering 130 separate languages and at least half of the 100 indigenous languages of California. The archive is climate controlled, will soon be managed by a professional archivist (under a three-year NSF-NEH grant), and is in the middle of a project to digitize its holdings and make them available on the internet. Finally, as the state's primary repository of native language documentation the Survey sponsors programs to make its collections accessible to Native people. For example, the biennial Breath of Life Workshop brings to campus California Indians whose languages no longer have native speakers, so they can learn how to use our archives, learn about their languages, and in some cases begin language revitalization projects.
Cross linguistic studies on spoken language processing (Keith Johnson)
The long-term objective of this NIH-funded research project is to understand human spoken language processing (particularly speech perception and auditory word recognition) in linguistic context. Speech signals are unique in human experience because they are highly familiar, and have great practical significance in daily life. Therefore, it is not too surprising to find that people develop optimized processing strategies tuned specifically for speech. In this work we study how this tuning process may be sensitive to linguistic structure. Cross-linguistic spoken language research is important because without it we are in danger of concluding that the phenomena found in one language (or even dialect) are somehow normative for speakers of other languages. Such a narrow understanding of 'normal' spoken language processing is likely to have a negative impact on clinical speech and hearing practice in a pluralistic society.Danish Verb Phrase Anaphora Project
The Danish Verb Phrase Anaphora project is a joint effort between Michael Houser, Line Mikkelsen, and Maziar Toosarvandani to understand some common but understudied VP constructions in Danish, including VP ellipsis, VP pronominalization, and VP fronting. These constructions are important because they offer new insights into the organization of the Danish verbal system, especially the status of auxiliaries, and the organization of the clause, especially the information-structural underpinnings of the verb-second order characteristic of Germanic languages. The theoretical and analytical implications of these language-particular facts are laid out in a series presentations and papers. The emprical foundation of this work is a large searchable database of annotated examples drawn from a variety of sources. To explore the database and for links to papers and handouts go to the project page (http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~danish/)
The Xtone project (Larry Hyman)
The Cross-Linguistic Tonal Database (XTone) is a web-accessible forum developed at Berkeley to which interested researchers worldwide can contribute basic descriptive characterizations of as many tone systems as possible, with the goal of discovering new language-specific and cross-linguistic tone patterns. While tone is known to be especially prevalent in Subsaharan Africa, East and Southeast Asia, and parts of New Guinea, Meso-America and Amazonia, languages with tonal contrasts are found in almost all parts of the globe. The database has been organized to highlight four aspects of tone systems: inventories of tones and tone-bearing units; inventories of tone alternations; inventories of the tonal melodies found within grammatical domains of different sizes; interactions of tone with other phonological properties.
Syntax and Semantics Circle
The Syntax & Semantics Circle is a weekly forum dedicated to discussion of the descriptive, experimental, and theoretical study of syntax and semantics, featuring presentations of ongoing research by members of the Berkeley Linguistics Department and other departments, as well as discussion of previously published works. The current schedule can be found here.