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Sesquipedalian #2

the SESQUIPEDALIAN 				       Volume V,  No. 2
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'More than you ever wanted to know'		       October 13, 1994


	    	     NEW AND DELAYED RELEASES ON VIDEO
	(Available in the video section of the new Greenberg Room(*))

REBEL WITHOUT A SMALL CLAUSE: Sandy Dean joins a small town
linguistics department where they think small clauses are
'problematic.'  During the merit review meeting the chair says, 'I
want your feet off the table.'  Sandy says 'Gotcha' and gets tenure.

CITIZEN CHOMSKY: The story of Noam Foster Chomsky.  He rises from
obscurity to become the head of the most powerful syntax empire the
East Coast has ever seen, yet dies a lonely man.  His last word:
"RES(NIC)."  What could it mean?  In a series of modules, this film
traces the parameters of his life.
	'An American Classic' -- Frederick J. Newmeyer

\^ THE \v STAIRCASE: Sandy Lee, a young semanticist seeking a unicorn,
joins a tough inner-city linguistics department where they know who
killed Richard Montague-- personally.  But with her good intensions
and well-meaning postulates Sandy leads her students to see the true
meaning of love: love'.

GRAMMATICALITY JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBURG: A group of madmen,
psycholinguists, and other social misfits tries to change German from
a verb-second to a verb-third language.  Finally apprehended and
brought to trial, they are charged with crimes against Universal
Grammar.  Judy Garland (of Garland Press) presides.

THE FRENCH CONNECTIONIST: A French linguist arrives to give a paper at
a cognitive science conference which is being held on an entirely
smoke-free campus in Oregon.  Deprived of his Gauloises, he blacks out
and stabs the entire San Diego contingent to death during the question
period. 

SOV: The wife of a Japanese linguist displays a pair of bare N's in
sentence final position at an LSA meeting and all hell breaks loose.

THE SOUND PATTERN OF MUSIC: Sandy Duncan.  A young housekeeper joins
the household of a widowed Austrian linguist and his seven children
and brings distinctive features into their lives.  When she teaches
them to reduce the 8-note scale to three binary features, members of
the local MLA (Musik-Lehrer-Akademie) become outraged.
	'Two thumbs up' -- Chomsky and Halle.

FATAL CASE ATTRACTION: A passive participle has a weekend fling with
an unattached argument.  What started out as an innocent dative
quickly turns accusative to the max.  (Rated +r for violent argument
suppression)

THE TRANSDUCERS: Two down-and-out academics decide to get an NSF grant
by developing a theory of grammar so obscure that no one will want to
pronounce their acronym, let alone read their book.  This plan
backfires when their work is so widely acclaimed that they are invited
to speak at the LSA, MLA, CLS, and CIA meetings, elected to the
Academie Francais, and awarded MBEs.

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TeX BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK:
In this series of skits, Stanford graduate students lead us on a
risque romp through the lighter side of the TeX formatting progam.

Foreign Films:

LA STRATA: Italian Linguist Fellini Belletti's poignant portrait of
the stratum and its inhabitants: the common 1's and 2's, blustery
brothers-in-law, sad chomeurs, and Belletti's favorites, the saintly
dummies.  'Makes you realize what a dull place a mono-stratal world
would be' -- David Permutter.

MOSCOW DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TIERS: This film conflates the lives of
three young phonologists in the Moscow circle as they struggle to
overcome the stress pattern of Russian in a system which considers
both distinctive features and the sonority heirarchy to be symbols of
Western decadence.

(Village Idiom)
* Not!!
		
 	           ^/^/^/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \^\^\^

-- REMINDER: Stanford Linguistics Colloquium, Oct. 14, Friday, 3:30 in
CSLI, Cordura 100.  Happy hour will follow.

       	      Mental spaces and the grammar of conditionals
    				Eve Sweetser
		        Linguistics Dept, UC Berkeley

(See abstract in last week's Sesquipedalian.)

	 	      ^/^/^/ CALL FOR PAPERS \^\^\^

-- Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (University of
California, Irvine): We are pleased to announce that the first two
workshops on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics in the 1994-1995
series will be held on November 12 and December 10. Following the
tradition of previous years, these workshops are intended to provide a
forum for friendly discussion and exchange of ideas. As usual, there
will be three 60-minute talks per workshop (40-minute presentation,
plus 20 minutes for discussion).  Participants are invited to a dinner
at the end of each workshop.  We plan to have 6 workshops (two for
each quarter) during this academic year (1994-1995). Those interested
in presenting a paper in the first two workshops can contact us at
ling-work@uci.edu. Note that slots towards the end of the year are
usually filled quite early, so if you plan to present a paper in the
Winter and Spring workshops, please tryto notify us as soon as you
can.
	Lisa Cheng
	Department of Linguistics
	University of California, Irvine

-- ISSUES OF PERFORMANCE (UC Berkeley, March 18-199, 1995): The German
Studies Department at UC Berkeley invite graduate students and faculty
members to submit abstracts that explore, widen, and challenge the
concept of performance in politics, the arts, and other fields.
Topics for this interdisciplinary conference might include, but are
not restricted to: Intellectuals and artists in the public sphere;
Performance in language theory and linguistics; Gender and
performance; Politics as theater; performance in philosophical
discourse; poetry and performance; performing history.  Please submit
anonymous abstracts of no more than 500 words (three copies) and a
cover letter including your name and the title of your paper by
November 25, 1994.  The language of the conference is English;
proposals in German will be considered.  Direct proposals to
	Thomas Ketron, Dept of German
	University of California
	Berkeley CA 94720
	phone: 510/642-2005
	email: tlketron@uclink2.berkeley.edu

 	         ^\^\^\ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS /^/^/^

-- Three-year postdoctoral-level position in computational linguistics
starting January 1995 in a joint project of the University of
Tuebingen (project leader Steve Abney) and the University of Stuttgart
(project leader Mats Rooth), funded by the DFG (German Science
Foundation).  The project is concerned with building lexicalized
statistical chunk parsers for German and English, and using such
parsers in the induction of lexical representations, including models
of subcategorization and semantic type.  While it will use engineering
techniques, it has primarily scientific goals.  Areas of expertise
which are relevant to the project (we don't expect to find all of
these in one person) include programming (C, Lisp, or anything
reasonable), statistics and stochastic processes (HMMs, SCFGs,
clustering, classification, regression), linguistic and AI models of
the lexicon, natural language parsing algorithms, psycholinguistic
parsing models.  While the project has specific goals, the position is
a postdoctoral research position, not an applications position.
Creativity, initiative, the ability to conduct and publish original
research, are essential.  Degree requirements: doctorate in hand.
Applications (statement of interest, CV, several research papers) are
being accepted by email (preferred) or by mail to:
   Mats Rooth                            Steve Abney
   IMS, Univerit"at Stuttgart            Seminar fuer Sprachwissenschaft
   Azenberstrasse 12                     Wilhelmstrasse 113
   70174 Stuttgart                       72074 Tuebingen
   Germany                               Germany

-- SSRC DISSERTATION RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS IN LINGUISTICS: Fellowships
are offered to graduate students in linguistics who have completed all
requirements for the Ph.D. except their dissertation, to spend from
two to nine months engaged in dissertation research requiring
fieldwork in the Middle East.  Support is available for single country
or comparative projects requiring research in more than one country
and for research using Middle Eastern cases to address methodological
and theoretical issues of importance to the discipline. Previous
Middle East fieldwork is not required. Language training may be
required as one component of the fellowship when appropriate. In most
cases, fellowship recipients will be expected to affiliate with an
American overseas research center. This program will be administered
with the support of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
Full time students who meet the above criteria, who are U.S. citizens
or permanent legal residents, who are currently enrolled in a Ph.D.
degree program in linguistics, and who will have completed all Ph.D.
requirements except their dissertation by June 30, 1995, are eligible
to apply.  Requests for program information and applications should be
directed to
	Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East
	Social Science Research Council
	605 Third Avenue
	New York, NY 10158
Application deadline: November 1, 1994

-- SSRC POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS IN LINGUISTICS: Fellowships are
offered to scholars in linguistics for periods from two to nine months
engaged in advanced research requiring fieldwork in the Middle East.
The purpose of the fellowship is to promote the integration of area
knowledge into research on the Middle East in disciplines currently
under-represented in Middle East Studies.  Scholars may propose single
country or comparative research projects; request support for language
training; develop collaborative research with local colleagues in
government, academia, and research centers; and/or propose to acquire
familiarity with the problems of their disciplines as they apply to
the Middle East. In most cases, fellowship recipients will be expected
to affiliate with an American overseas research center. Previous
Middle East fieldwork is not required. This program will be
administered with the support of the Council of American Overseas
Research Centers.  Scholars who are U.S. Citizens or permanent legal
residents and who hold the Ph.D. in linguistics are eligible to apply.
Scholars who are less than 10 years past the Ph.D. are particularly
encouraged to apply.  Requests for program information and
applications should be directed to
	Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East
	Social Science Research Council
	605 Third Avenue
	New York, NY 10158
Application deadline: December 1, 1994

		      ^\^\^\ TRUE LINGUISTICS /^/^/^

-- Jim Grossman (BA Princeton '92) is the new research assistant for
Eve Clark in 1994-95.  Jim is preparing to apply for graduate work in
Psychology; he took courses at Stanford last year, in addition to
working at Bing Nursery School and volunteering on a research project.
This year, he will be working on studies of language acquisition.

-- Hannah Berman returns to the Special Language program as the Hebrew
lecturer.  Hannah has been associated with Stanford for the past ten
years in the Jewish Studies program, History of Science program, and
the university libraries.  Prior to Stanford, she held inservice
coursework and workshops at the Bureau of Jewish Education of San
Francisco.  She graduated from Tel-Aviv University.

REAL QUOTES DEPARTMENT: 
	'Your intuitions don't count because you speak Dutch.'
		(Stanford Linguist A to Stanford Linguist B)

THINGS YOU REALLY DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT FAMOUS LINGUISTS
DEPARTMENT: Edwin Williams is terribly allergic to peanuts.
(Next issue: Arnold Zwicky's penguins.)

		     ^/^/^/ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS \^\^\^

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

-- The University of Sheffield, Department of Computer Science: Two
research associate posts are available in the Natural Language
research group from January 1995. These posts are associated with a
grant from the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council on
'Large Scale Information Extraction from Text'. Both appointments will
be for 36 months.
Post 1: The candidate will be involved in the development of a general
architecture for text extraction (GATE) which will support the integration,
testing, and enhancement of existing language processing components to produce
evaluable information extraction systems. The candidate should have a strong
background in computational linguistics or artificial intelligence, including
good programming skills, and should have a PhD or equivalent research
experience in a relevant area. The post will be on the UK RA1A scale, with a
starting salary of around 15K pounds p/a.
Post 2: The candidate will be required to liaise with UK and international
research sites to obtain, install and evaluate language processing components,
corpora, and lexical resources in the context of GATE. The candidate should
have a good degree in computer science or related area, with knowledge of
computational linguistics and should have good Unix/Internet skills. The post
will be on the UK RA1B scale, with a starting salary of around 13K pounds p/a.
The candidate may have the opportunity to register for a PhD.
Informal enquiries to Yorick Wilks (y.wilks@dcs.shef.ac.uk) or Rob
Gaizauskas (r.gaizauskas@dcs.shef.ac.uk).  Further particulars from
        Director of Human Resource Management,
        The University of Sheffield,
        Western Bank,
        Sheffield S10 2TN
        phone: +44 (0)742 824144
Closing date for applications: 15 October 1994. Ref: B2321.

-- BOSTON UNIVERSITY: Tenure-track position for an Assistant Professor
of linguistics with a specialization in language acquisition and
linguistic theory, beginning September 1995.  Applicants should have a
strong background in linguistic theory, a broad range of interests,
demonstrated teaching ability and commitment to undergraduate and
graduate teaching, and research interests in theoretically-based study
of language acquisition.  Native or near-native competence in French,
German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, or Hebrew would
be an asset.  Ph.D. required.  (possible position) Send complete
dossier (including letter of application, cv, 3 letters of reference
and sample publications), by December 1, 1994, to
	Linguistics Search Committee, Attn: Prof. Carol Neidle
	Boston University, Department of Modern Foreign Languages
	718 Commonwealth Avenue
	Boston, MA  02215
For further information, phone 617-353-6218 or send e-mail to
carol@louis-xiv.bu.edu.

-- UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT: The Department of Linguistics at the
University of Connecticut anticipates two positions.  Position 1 is a
temporary position for the spring semester of 1995 (January 1 - June
30).  Appointment for this position is anticipated at the Assistant
Professor level. Position 2 is a tenure track position beginning in
the fall semester of 1995.  Appointment is anticipated preferably at
the Assistant/Associate Professor level, but outstanding candidates at
a higher level will be considered. Salary is negotiable. For both
positions, we are interested in candidates in three main areas of
linguistics: psycholinguistics (including language acquisition and/or
sentence processing); semantics; or morphology/phonology. Applicants
whose research interests interact well with those of the current
faculty are especially sought. Applicants should be prepared to teach
in the area of their specialization at the graduate level, as well as
more general linguistics courses at the undergraduate level.  An
applicant's ability to teach in more than one area will weigh in our
decision.  Applicants should send a complete dossier (letter of
application, curriculum vitae, samples of work in progress or
published) and at least three letters of recommendation to
	Professor Diane Lillo-Martin, Chair
	Linguistics Search Committee
	Department of Linguistics, U-145
	University of Connecticut
	341 Mansfield Rd
	Storrs, CT 06269-1145
	phone: 203/486-4229
	fax: 203/486-0197
	email: linqadm@uconnvm.uconn.edu
Please indicate clearly which position(s) you are applying for.
Applications received by October 15, 1994, for the temporary position,
and January 1, 1995, for the tenure-track position, will be given
preference in the screening process. Applications will be accepted
until the position is filled.

-- UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS: Position in Second Language Acquisition.  The
Linguistics Department at the University of Kansas invites
applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor
level beginning August 15, 1995, contingent upon budgetary approval.
Candidates must possess a Ph.D. in Linguistics or a closely related
field with a specialization in second language acquisition. The ideal
candidate will be thoroughly conversant with current syntactic theory
and have research experience in the application of syntactic theory to
the study of second language acquisition. Experience in obtaining
external funding will be an advantage. Duties will include research,
teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and the direction
of graduate theses and dissertations. Applications received by
December 15, 1994 will be given full consideration. Please send
applications (including a current curriculum vitae, a description of
your current research program, representative publications, and the
names of three references) to 
	Clifton Pye, Chair
	Linguistics Department
	427 Blake
	University of Kansas
	Lawrence, KS 66045
Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply. EO/AA
Employer.

-- BROWN UNIVERSITY: The Department of Cognitive and Linguistic
Sciences invites applications for a tenure-track position in visual
perception or visual cognition, beginning July 1, 1 995. Candidates at
the Assistant Professor level, including those nearing tenure, are
welcome to apply.  Preference will be given to the areas of vision,
perception, object recognition, imagery, attention, and visual-motor
control. Applicants should have a strong experimental research
program, strong computational interests, and a broad teaching ability
in cognitive science at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply. Send
curriculum vitae, three letters of reference, reprints and preprints
of publications, and a one-page statement of research interests to 
	Dr. William H.  Warren, Chair
	Vision Search Committee 
	Dept. of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
	Brown University
	Providence, RI 02912 
by January 1, 1995.  Brown University is an Equal
Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

-- TEACH IN KAZAKHSTAN: Two-month English teaching position in
Kazakhstan available in December & January.  Contact Beverley
McChesney 5-1554, mcchesne@csli) for details.

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

		        ^\^\^\ INSTA-PRIZE /^/^/^

TRISKAIDEKAPHOBIA: Sometimes, getting to know professors isn't easy.
'Come over,' she says.  'All the houses on my side of the street have
consecutive even numbers-- but it's a very long street.  The numbers
of the six houses on my side of my block add up to 9870, and I live in
the lowest numbered house on the block.'  Could you find her house?

First e-mail response (to kyle@csli) indicating the correct house
number wins this week's prize.

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                    ^\^\^\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /^/^/^

So you may delete your copy after you've read it (or better yet,
before you've read it), the Sesquipedalian Weekly Herald is stored
online at Stanford (in directory /user/linguistics/Sesquip/93-94), and
at Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.)  The most current issue of
the Herald can be found by typing 'help quip'.

Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
their employees, makes any warranty, whatsoever, implied, or assumes
any legal liability or responsibility regarding any information,
disclosed, in this publication, or represents that its use would not
infringe privately owned rights.  No specific reference constitutes or
implies endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by Stanford
University or the Linguistics Department, or their employees.  The
views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those
of Stanford University or the Linguistics Department, or their
employees, and shall not be used for advertising or product
endorsement purposes.

Not recommended for children under 3

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