Welcome!
Welcome to the Berkeley Linguistics Department! With the first linguistics department to be established in North America (in 1901), Berkeley has a rich and distinguished tradition of rigorous linguistic documentation and theoretical innovation, making it an exciting and fulfilling place to carry out linguistic research. Its original mission, due to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the Sanskrit and Dravidian scholar Murray B. Emeneau, was the recording and describing of unwritten languages, especially American Indian languages spoken in California and elsewhere in the United States. The current Department of Linguistics continues this tradition, integrating careful, scholarly documentation with cutting-edge theoretical work in phonetics, phonology and morphology; in syntax and semantics; pragmatics; sociolinguistics and language revitalization; historical linguistics; typology; and cognitive linguistics. Berkeley PhDs tend to be interdisciplinary and creative, benefitting from interactions with distinguished faculty in such other Berkeley departments as anthropology, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and departments devoted to particular languages. The Department emphasizes research that seeks to discover and provide deep explanations for general properties of linguistic form, meaning, and usage.
In the Spotlight
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.