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Sesquipedalian #12
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VI, No. 12
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First pineapples planted in Hawaii (1813) January 11, 1995
ENGLISH
Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. There is no egg in
eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England [really?] or French
fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which
aren't sweet, are meat.
We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we
find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and
a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers
don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth,
why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one
moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend,
that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal? If
you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of
them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preacher praught? If a vegetarian
eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? If you wrote a
letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?
Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to
an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people
recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send
cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise
man and wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be
opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can
the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another.
Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they
are absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful
gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever
run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable?
And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or who would
ACTUALLY hurt a fly?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your
house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by
filling it out and in which an alarm clock goes off by going on.
English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the
creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at
all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but
when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind
up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it.
[author unknown]
-\-/-\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING \-/-\-
-- BLS-XXII: The Berkeley Linguistic Society conference takes place
February 16-19. Tracy King will present 'Licensing Negative
Pronominals in Georgian,' and Rob Malouf will present 'A
Constructional Approach to English Verbal Gerunds.'
-\-/-\ VISITORS \-/-\-
We're pleased to welcome the following new visitors to the linguistics
department:
JULIETTE BLEVINS: Visiting Associate Professor from the University of
Western Australia. She will be continuing her research on Australian
aboriginal languages and is teaching a course on syllable structure
this quarter. Her husband, Jim Blevins, is also a visiting scholar at
CSLI.
GABRIELE DIEWALD: Visiting Scholar, University of Erlangen-Nuernberg.
She is doing research on German modals, especially the
semantics-pragmatics of their development. Her earlier work was on
deixis.
GERT WEBELHUTH: Visiting Assistant Professor, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is teaching graduate syntax courses this
quarter and next quarter. His recent work, with Farrell Ackerman,
lies squarely in the middle of HPSG, LFG, and Construction Grammar.
-\-/-\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \-/-\-
The colloquium series beging NEXT week, JAN. 19, with Dani Byrd. No
colloquium this Friday.
-\-/-\ SOCIOLINGUISTICS RAP \-/-\-
A special Sociolinguistics Rap session in honor of Charles A.
Ferguson, Emeritus Professor, will be held this Thursday Jan 9 at 7.00
pm at the home of Charles Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, 711 Ensign
Way, Palo Alto. The session will feature a short talk by John
McWhorter (Stanford alum/UCB asst prof) on "Looking into the Void:
Zero Copula and the Creole Mesolect" and will include sociolinguistics
well-wishers from outside our usual circle (including Thom Huebner of
San Jose State who is editing an Oxford U Press book of CAF's papers,
and Suzanne Romaine, on her way back to Oxford from Hawaii). Snacks
will be provided--bring your own drinks, including wine and champagne
to celebrate Fergie's many accomplishments. The session will be
relatively short--only an hour or so, so please be prompt.
-\-/-\ CALL FOR PAPERS \-/-\-
-- GLS 1996: The Georgetown Linguistics Society presents: 'Discourse
as Mosaic' (linguistic re/production of identities and ideologies).
October 11-13, 1996, Georgetown University. We encourage papers which
illuminate how local linguistic practices produce and reproduce
identities and ideologies, and how, in turn, identities and ideologies
simultaneously constrain these practices. The metaphor of mosaic
stems from this relationship: the interaction of small and large
patterns to yield a coherent whole. works submitted may include, but
are not limited to, such areas as discourse in the media, the
workplace, the classroom, everyday conversation, and in medical,
political, religious, legal, and other institutional contexts. Papers
should be based on natural language data. Abstracts must be received
by GLS no later than Friday, March 18, 1996. Individual presentation
of papers will be 20 minutes long with 10 additional minutes for
discussion. Please send three copies of an anonymous 500-word
double-spaced abstract (hard copy preferred, e-mail accepted). On a
seperate sheet, please provide your name, paper title, mailing and
e-mail address, phone number, and institutional affiliation. In
addition, please submit a 100-word summary of the paper for the
conference program. For further information contact
Georgetown University GLS 1996
479 Intercultural Center
Washington DC 20057-1068
phone: 202/687-6166
email: gls@guvax.georgetown.edu
-- ROCKY MOUNTAIN AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY: 50th Annual meeting,
October 24-26, 1996. The RMADS welcomes proposals for Minute
presentations at the Rocky Mountain Modem Language Association Annual
meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Authors may submit abstracts of
300 words or less dealing with any aspect of dialects in the United
States (both English and other languages) to
Xiaozhao Huang
Department of English
University of North Dakota
Grand Forks, ND 58202-7209
Attn: RMADS Session
for additional information: telephone: (701) 777-6393
e-mail: XHUANG@BADLANDS.NODAK.EDU
DEADLINE: March 15,1996
-- WHAT CHILDREN HAVE TO SAY ABOUT LINGUISTIC THEORIES: An Acquisition
Symposium on June 28th-30th, at the Research Institute for Language
and Speech (OTS) Utrecht University. Much of the research on language
acquisition in the generative grammar tradition addresses the general
question "How is an adult grammar acquired?" This directly affects
methodology: An innateness hypothesis of one form or another is set as
the experimental hypothesis, while the supposition that language
acquisition is driven by nonlinguistic learning mechanisms is taken as
the null hypothesis. Although this paradigm has proven to be extremely
fruitful over the years, it has also precluded, of necessity, an
additional important potential function for language acquisition
research. Since the beginning of theoretical linguistics, it has been
well-known that theories of UG can be numerous, and that a criterion
of "explanatory adequacy" is needed to distinguish the empirically
adequate from the insightful. In this regard, language acquisition
research can play an important role. A good test of the explanatory
adequacy of a given hypothesis about some aspect of UG is its ability
to predict the linguistic performance of children learning an adult
grammar. In this regard, language acquisition research offers a
potentially rich source of additional information useful for answering
the theoretical linguist's question "What exactly does UG consist in?"
This symposium is focused on this second potential function of
language acquisition research. Therefore, to be accepted, submitted
abstracts must meet the following basic requirements: (1) Two (or
more) distinct hypotheses in the literature, in any theoretical
framework, about any linguistic phenomenon (e.g. weak cross-over,
clitic climbing, stress, weak WH-islands, specificity, metalinguistic
negation, case, whatever), are presented and compared; (2) The
competing hypotheses are shown to make different predictions about
children's linguistic performance, under a given set of conditions,
given some set of general assumptions about language processing and
first language acquisition; (3) Acquisition evidence argues in favor
of one, and against the other, hypothesis. Abstracts, for a 40-minute
presentation on any topic in syntax, semantics or phonology, may be no
longer than 1000 words (excluding references, diagrams and examples),
must be postmarked no later than February 20, 1996 (no e-mail; no fax;
no extensions), and should be sent to
WCHTSALT - OTS/Utrecht University
Trans 10, 3512-JK Utrecht
The Netherlands
Final selection will be determined by an international panel of
experts, some of whom will attend the symposium as commentators. For
more information: WCHTSALT@let.ruu.nl
-- WVLC-4: Second call for papers. The Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL) and its special interest group for linguistic data
and corpus-based approaches to NLP (SIGDAT) are organizing the
FOURTH WORKSHOP ON VERY LARGE CORPORA (WVLC-4)
August 4, 1996 - in conjunction with COLING 96 (Tutorials: Aug 2-3,
Main conference: Aug 5-9, 1996), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen,
Denmark. This workshop, like preceding ones in the series, will offer
an international and general forum for the presentation of new
advances and applications in the area of large scale, corpus-based
natural language processing. The fourth workshop will focus on the
theme of Innovative uses and applications of large corpora. Large
corpora, i.e. corpora ranging anywhere from 10^4 to 10^9 words, are
coming into existence for several different languages, and techniques
for analyzing them are improving. How are these resources actually
being used? The workshop encourages contributions that show
innovative applications of corpus-based NLP to problems of practical
industrial importance. The theme will provide an organizing structure
to the workshop, and offer a focus for discussion and debate between
researchers and industrialists. We also expect and will welcome a
diverse set of submissions in all areas of statistical and
corpus-based NLP. Authors should submit a full length paper (3500 -
8000 words), either electronically or in hard copy. Electronic
submissions should be mailed to "WVLC-4@ling.umu.se" and must be
either (a) a plain ascii text, (b) a single postscript file, or (c) a
single LaTex file (no separate figures or .bib files), following the
COLING 96 stylesheet, which is retrievable by anonymous ftp from
ling.umu.se, /pub/SIGDAT/colsub.sty. A model submission is provided in
/pub/SIGDAT/modelsub.tex. Hard copy submissions should be mailed to
Eva Ejerhed (address below), and should include four (4) copies of the
paper. Submission Deadline: April 10, 1996. Notification Date: May
10, 1996. The camera ready hard copies of final papers, laser
printed, should be air-mailed to Eva Ejerhed (address below) and must
be received by June 10, 1996.
Eva Ejerhed Ido Dagan
Dept of Linguistics, DGL Dept of Mathematics & Computer Science
University of Umea Bar Ilan University
S 90187 Umea, Sweden Ramat Gan 52900, Israel
e-mail: WVLC-4@ling.umu.se e-mail: dagan@bimacs.cs.biu.ac.il
http://www.ling.umu.se/SIGDAT/WVLC-4.html
The Fourth Workshop on Very Large Corpora is one of two meetings
organized by SIGDAT in 1996. The other meeting is the Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, that will be held at
the University of Pennsylvania, May 17-18, 1996, in conjunction with
the University's 50th Anniversary celebration of the Eniac Computer.
The URL for the UPenn conference page is:
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/faculty/brill/Conf_on_Emp_Meth.html
-- ECAI-96: Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language
Systems. 12th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
Budapest, Hungary, currently scheduled for August 12 or 13, 1996. The
development of dialogue components for interactive systems that employ
speech as input and/or output modality has to take into account
problems that are specific for the treatment of spoken language. Among
these problems are the following:
* Segmentation of dialogue contributions into basic units
While for dialogue systems that cope with written / typed
language a sentence can serve as basic unit for dialogue
modeling, this approach cannot be applied for the treatment of
spontaneous speech or even read speech, where phrasing of
sentences may differ from speaker to speaker. Spoken input is
often incomplete, incorrect and contains interruptions and
repairs; full sentences occur only very occassionaly.
Therefore, new basic units for the development of dialogue
models have to be proposed in order to also capture
fragmentary input.
Related to this problem is the determination of the boundaries
that exist between the various dialogue units in longer
single-speaker dialogue turns. While for written language
punctuation and paragraphing serve as indicator for
segmentation, reliable cues for the segmentation of spoken
language still have to be determined.
It can be expected that dialogue models that build on such a
new notion of basic dialogue units differ significantly from
dialogue models that treat only written language. A
contrastive examination of the differences between dialogue
models that treat spoken and written dialogue contributions is
a point of future research.
* Interaction of prosody and dialogue processing
For some of the above-mentioned issues the consideration of
prosody can contribute to a solution of the problems. Prosody
can perform many functions such as chunking turns into smaller
units, emphasizing important information, indicating
discontinuities (e.g. interruptions, corrections), expressing
intention and emotion.
Therefore components which make prosodic information accessible
to dialogue processing become more and more important.
* Robustness
Robustness of all components is an important issue in the
design and the development of spoken language systems. With
respect to dialogue components robustness is related to the
following topics:
* recognition errors and missing information
* unexpected input
* clarification
* disfluencies
* Evaluation
So far the evaluation of spoken language systems has been
focusing on the quality of the speech components. Evaluation
criteria for the dialogue components of such systems are still
to be developed.
A careful evaluation can contribute to the improvement of the
system with respect to what a user expects from the machine
and how she adjusts to its abilities. Therefore criteria like
user acceptance and user satisfaction have to be taken into
account.
We invite contributions that address any of the topics indicated above
and provide innovative solutions. We are also interested in seeing
papers that discuss NEW APPLICATIONS addressing the above-mentioned
problems. Papers (maximally 10 pages, point size no less than 12) can
be submitted either as hard copy or in electronic form (prefered):
Hard copy submissions should consist of four copies and have to be
sent to the address indicated below. Electronic submissions will be
accepted for papers in self-contained Latex style or plain text. They
must not refer to any external files or styles. Papers generated from
other sources, e.g., Word, must be submitted by mail. Papers must
include on the first page: the title, author's name(s), affiliation,
complete mailing address, phone number, fax number, e-mail, an
abstract of 300 words maximum, and up to five keywords. Each paper
will be refereed by at least two members of the program committee. In
order to encourage discussions before the workshop we intend to make
all submitted papers electronically available. We will announce the
site address after the submission date. Hardcopies AND postscript
files must arrive not later than 1st March 1996 at the address below.
Workshop proceedings will be published by ECAI. We currently also
investigate the possibility to publish the workshop papers in book
form. Since workshop attendance will be limited to maximally 40
people, persons without a paper should contact the organizers as soon
as possible. Preference will be given to people who present a paper,
to their co-authors and to persons who submitted a paper. Other
persons interested in attending will be asked to provide a one-page
description of their background and of their interest in the workshop.
This workshop will take place directly before the general
ECAI-conference. It is an ECAI policy, that workshop participation is
not possible without registration for the general conference. Papers
have to be submitted to the following address:
Elisabeth Maier
DFKI GmbH
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
D-66123 Saarbruecken
Germany
e-mail: Elisabeth.Maier@dfki.uni-sb.de
Please address any further correspondence to
Marion Mast
Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg
Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung (Inf. 5)
Martensstr. 3
D- 91058 Erlangen
Germany
e-mail: mast@informatik.uni-erlangen.de
http://wwwis.cs.utwente.nl:8080/mars/ECAI96.html.
Information about ECAI-96 workshops is listed under
http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/ecai96/workshops.html
-\-/-\ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS \-/-\-
-- SENTENCE PROCESSING RESEARCH: Are you interested in researching the
cognitive mechanisms underlying the production and comprehension of
language? For example, what leads us to choose between "I called my
friend up the other day" and "I called up my friend the other day"?
Or, how do we understand who "she" refers to in "Sally told Jane to
call her before she went to bed", and when would we choose to repeat
the name instead of using a pronoun? If you've been wondering how we
process and produce langauge on-line, consider these opportunities:
1. RESEARCH ASSISTANT needed for a project on word order. Compensation
availbale in the form of pay or units. This position could involve
designing , running, and analyzing experiments and/or searching through
on-line corpora for linguistic data.
2. RESEARCH ASSISTANT needed for a project on the processing of pronouns
and discourse comprehension in English and Spanish. Compensation
available in the form of units. This position would involve designing
stimuli, running experiments and analyzing data.
3. UNDERGRADUATE SEMINAR IN SENTENCE PROCESSING - this course will be
offerred in the spring. Work done as a research assistant could be
continued in the form of a class project.
For more information, email or call:
Jennifer Arnold arnold@csli.stanford.edu, 408-429-9135
Tom Wasow wasow@csli.stanford.edu, 3-2472
-\-/-\ TRUE LINGUISTICS \-/-\-
>From the "GRE General Test Descriptive Booklet" published by the
Educational Testing Service:
"The common belief of some linguists that each language is a perfect
vehicle for the thoughts of the nation speaking it is in some ways the
exact counterpart of the conviction of the Manchester school of
economics that supply and demand will regulate everything for the
best. Just as economists were blind to the numerous cases in which the
law of supply and demand left actual wants unsatisfied, so also many
linguists are deaf to those instances in which the very nature of a
language calls forth misunderstandings in everday conversation, and in
which, consequently, a word has to be modified or defined in order to
present the idea intended by the speaker: "He took his stick - no, not
John's, but _his own_." No language is perfect, and if we admit this
truth, we must also admit that it is not unreasonable to investigate
the relative merits of different languages or of different details in
languages.
24. The primary purpose of the passage is to
(A) analyze an interesting feature of the English language
..."
[Submitted by Rudy Delson]
-\-/-\ 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.)
-- CSU-STANISLAUS: Assistant Professor of English with an emphasis in
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Doctorate required;
Specialist in one of the following areas: TESOL, Second Language
Acquisition, Composition/Rhetoric; Strong emphasis in both ESL and
writing theory and pedagogy; Evidence of successful teaching
experience in composition and ESL. The successful candidate will be
expected to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in second
language acquisition theory, TESOL methods, writing and writing
theory, and discourse processes. Send a vita, three (3) reference
letters, copy of transcripts along with your letter of interest to
Dr. George E. Settera, Chair
Department of English
California State University, Stanislaus
801 West Monte Vista Avenue
Turlock, CA 95382
Telephone: (209) 667 3361
(EOE/AA)
-- UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND AT COLLEGE PARK: The Department of
Linguistics and UMIACS (University of Maryland Institfute for Advanced
Computer Studies) invite applications for a position (open rank) in
Computational Linguistics to begin in the Fall semester of 1996. We
seek candidates with established records of research excellence who
are interested in working on topics at the interface of linguistic
theory and computational modeling. The candidate's work should
complement research interests of current faculty. Possible areas of
interest include formal models of language learning or models of the
lexicon, syntactic or semantic components that can be applied to
computational problems such as automatic acquisition of lexicons,
parsing grammars, or semantic interpreters or the implementation of
these components for single language or cross linguistic
applications. Teaching experience is also desirable. Ph.D. is
required by August, 1996. For best consideration, applications should
arrive by February 1, 1996. Applicants should send a complete dossier
(letter of application, CV, samples of published work) and arrange to
have three letters of recommendation sent to
Professor Stephen Crain
Computational Linguistics Search Committee
University of Maryland at College Park
1401 Marie Mount Hall
College Park, MA 20742
e-mail: linguist@umdd.umd.edu (Interet) linguist@umdd (Bitnet)
The University of Maryland is a AA/EO Title IX employer. Women and
minority candidates are especially encouraged to apply.
(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 \-/-\-
-- DISCIPLINE: Three aristocrats and three laborers are trying to
cross a river. However, as the laborers do not trust the aristocrats,
they can never outnumber the laborers on either side of the river.
What is the fewest number of steps necessary to make the crossing,
given that the boat holds only two people and while all the laborers
can row, only one of the aristocrats can row?
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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/), and at
Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.), or on the Linguistics
Department home page (http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/). 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. Any
similarity to actual linguists, living or dead, is purely
coincidental. 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.
If you lived here, you'd be home by now
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