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.

Berkeley Field Data Group

The Field Data Group (Lynn Nichols, Coordinator) is a working lab group for the discussion of data from recent and ongoing fieldwork by students and faculty. The Group’s goals include the development of research projects especially at initial and intermediary stages as well as preparation for return to the field.  Participants' research includes North America, Mesoamerica, Africa and Southeast Asia.

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)

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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

Flower Photo by John Ohala

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 Anaphora Project

The Danish Verb Phrase Anaphora project is a joint effort between Michael Houser, Line Mikkelsen, and Maziar Toosarvandani to understand two common, but understudied constructions involving anaphoric verb phrases in Danish: VP ellipsis (as in English Sarah read the paper and I will too) and VP pronominalization (similar, but not identical to, English Sarah read the paper and I will do so/it too). The project draws on corpus data as well as grammaticality judgments and these two data types are currently being integrated into a searchable electronic database. To learn more, go to the project page.

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.