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

The "who did the what now?" project (Alice Gaby)

In any conversation, interactants need to
Pormpuraaw anthill
constantly monitor the numerous people, entities and locations under discussion, ensuring that the referent they have in mind is the same as that in the mind(s) of their interlocutor(s). Every language has a set of linguistic resources that help interactants keep track of which referents have been mentioned before and which are new, which are known to both speaker and hearer(s) and which are unknown, but the structure and function of this reference tracking system varies from language to language.  This project explores how reference tracking is achieved in Pormpuraaw, an Indigenous community of Cape York Peninsula in which most interactions involve two to four languages.  Significantly, the three most widely spoken languages there (English, Kuuk Thaayorre and Kugu Nganhcara) possess extremely different reference tracking systems. Graduate student Jessica Cleary-Kemp is contributing to the “who did the what now” project by exploring the semantics and pragmatics of demonstratives in Pormpuraaw English. Graduate student Justin Spence is examining the different kinds of contribution gesture and language make in referring to locations, depending on the language being spoken.