18th Spring Workshop on Linguistic Reconstruction: CANCELLED

This workshop has unfortunately been cancelled to the campus shut-down of most in-person events.

Department of Linguistics, University of Calfornia, Berkeley

Friday – Sunday, March 13-15, 2020

Friday, March 13, 3335 Dwinelle

• 9:00: Coffee and pastries
• 9:30: Claire Bowern (Yale), "Towards a theory of lexical replacement"
• 10:15: Alex Smith (North Texas), "Diverse repairs for word sub-minimality in Austronesian: Motivating drift with theory"
• 11:00: Coffee break
• 11:30: Jeffrey Heath (Michigan), "Origins of Dogon tonosyntax and tonation"
• 12:15-2:15: Lunch break
• 2:15: Na'ama Pat-El (UT Austin), "Reconstructing 'inefficient' morphological systems: 2 meanings — one form"
• 3:00: Darya Kavitskaya (UC Berkeley) and Florian Wandl (Zürich), "Common Slavic contrastive palatalization: Fact and fiction"
• 3:30: Break
• 4:00: Brian Joseph (Ohio State), "Balto-Slavic revisited revisited"

Saturday, March 14, Poole Conference Room (2063 VLSB)

• 8:30: Coffee and pastries
• 9:00: Terrence Kaufman (Pittsburgh), "Reflexions on the completion of an OtoMangean etymological dictionary and a comparative OtoMangean grammar"
• 9:45: Eric Campbell (UC Santa Barbara), "Advances and challenges in comparative Mixtec tonology"
• 10:15: Coffee break
• 10:45: Lyle Campbell (Hawai'i), "Historical linguistic implications of Nivaclé unusual typological traits"
• 11:30: Patience Epps (UT Austin): "Exploring relative stability in grammatical morphology"
• 12:00-2:00: Lunch break
• 2:00: Jay Jasanoff (Harvard), "Double nasal presents in Indo-European"
• 2:45: Ben Fortson (Michigan): "Armeniaca"
• 3:15: Break
• 3:45: Craig Melchert (UCLA), "Hittite 'hyperbaton' — the syntax-phonology interface"
• 4:30: Mark Hale (Concordia Montréal), "Tmesis in Hittite (and Indo-European?)"

Sunday, March 15, Poole Conference Room (2063 VLSB)

• 8:30: Coffee and pastries
• 9:00: Martha Ratliff (Wayne State), "On the development of elevation deictics in Hmong-Mien"
• 9:30: James A. Matisoff (UC Berkeley), "'Brightening' and Tibeto-Burman subgrouping"
• 10:15: Coffee break
• 10:45: Rikker Dockum (Swarthmore), "Evaluating claims about the Tai family tree using the Tonal Comparative Method"
• 11:15: Marianne Mithun (UC Santa Barbara), "The evolution of lexical patterning through time"
• 12:00: Lunch (catered)

Paranimf: Bill Poser (Yinka Dene Language Institute)

Housing information

We suggest the following Berkeley hotels (more amenities and expense, close to campus):

• Bancroft Hotel
• Berkeley City Club (historic)
• Graduate Berkeley
• Hotel Shattuck Plaza

... and motels or "inns" (fewer frills, sometimes farther from campus):

• Downtown Berkeley Inn (a few blocks from campus)
• Rose Garden Inn (hard to classify as hotel vs. motel; a short walk from campus)
• Berkeley Rodeway Inn (1 mile from campus)
• Holiday Inn Express (2 miles from campus)
• La Quinta Inn (2 miles from campus)

Another good option may be airbnb. It may be hard to find affordable accommodations at the last minute.

Additional information

This biennial workshop series was developed by Terry Kaufman and Sally Thomason; the first 17 meetings were at Pittsburgh and then Michigan. The 2020 organizing committee is: Alexander Elias, Paula Floro, Andrew Garrett, Teela Huff, Larry M. Hyman, Darya Kavitskaya, Edwin Ko, Myriam Lapierre, Raksit Lau, Zachary O'Hagan. We acknowledge the support of the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics and the Diebold Fund for Indo-European Studies.

Last update: March 9