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Sesquipedalian #20
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VI, No. 20
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Great Mahele (division of land in Hawaii) signed March 7, 1996
(1848)
NO TIME LIKE THE MARITIME
'Although professors may reach for an operatic image to describe a
barnyard phenomenon, it must be even more common for them to discover
that what they had assumed was a metaphor is simply a fact of rural
life. My own experience with the agricultural sciences in Nova Scotia
is limited to a little experiment I'm carrying out on levels of
production in totally neglected apple trees, but I am occasionally
astonished anew to find that a neighbor who mentions the need to prime
the pump is talking not about tinkering with the free-market economy,
but about priming the pump. People in Nova Scotia do make hay, and if
at all possible, they make it while the sun shines so that it will be
dry when they store it in the barn. One day in Nova Scotia Alice came
home with the information that one widely used method of improving
apple production was to gather up all the windfalls every autumn--
gather up not unearned and sudden profit but apples that had been
caused by the wind to fall. (I decided against it, on the theory that
it was the sort of behavior that could invalidate the results of my
experiment.)'
[Calvin Trillin, in 'Alice, Let's Eat']
-\-/-\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \-/-\-
Friday, Mar 8, 3:30 pm.
Margaret Jacks Hall (460), Room 146
Stephen Neale
University of California, Berkeley
Chomsky's Minimalist Program:
Philosophical Reflections on Logical Form
Over the last few years, Chomsky has argued for what he calls a
"minimalist" program in linguistics. In this talk, I shall attempt to
show that reflections on what seems be required in order to provide a
philosophically useful theory of "logical form" lead naturally to a
conception of syntax that is very close to the conception Chomsky
appears to have in mind. To put things another way, I shall outline a
research program in syntax and semantics that seems to explain (i) why
formal languages have tended to look the way they do, (ii) the
empirical and philosophical demands placed on a theories of
variable-binding and logical form, (iii) what was right--and what was
very wrong--about talk of "LF", (iv) what was right about generative
semantics (before it went nuts), and (v) what is right about the idea
that syntax is just a projection of lexical properties.
-----------------
Reception follows. For directions and a complete list of colloquia, see
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/~kessler/colloq/
-\-/-\ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP \-/-\-
A CONSTRAINT-BASED ANALYSIS OF GILBERTESE PROSODY
Juliette Blevins
Stanford University/UC Berkeley/
University of Western Australia
Tuesday, March 12, 1996, 7 pm
Paul Kiparsky's (306 San Mateo Drive, Menlo Park)
In this talk I present evidence for ternary metrical constituents in
Gilbertese, a Micronesian language spoken in Kiribati by approximately
55,000 people, and demonstrate how these constituents can be generated
by well motivated constraints on metrical systems. The terminal
elements of stress feet in Gilbertese are moras, not syllables.
Further, the optimal foot in Gilbertese contains three moras. These
trimoraic constitutents are typical units of stress, and also define
prosodic word size and shape. Ternary feet are quite rare
cross-linguistically, and Gilbertese appears to be the only language
in the world with a ternary constraint on prosodic word size. The
occurence of trimoraic feet where possible in Gilbertese, but bimoraic
feet elsewhere is taken as strong evidence that ternarity is the
consequence of a grammar of ranked and violable constraints.
-\-/-\ SOCIABLE SYNTAX SUPPER \-/-\-
TUESDAY, March 12: 7:00PM, Ivan Sag and Penny Eckert's House (6 Cedar
Court, Menlo Park). A Potluck dinner and Syntax Workshop by Gert
Webelhuth (U. North Carolina and Stanford), entitled:
`Passive'
(prospective graduate students will be visiting this event in
conjunction with our admissions Open House)
-\-/-\ CALL FOR PAPERS \-/-\-
-- WECOL: The Western Conference on Linguistics will be held this year
at the University of California, Santa Cruz from Friday, October 25
through Sunday, October 27, 1996. Included in the program are a
keynote address by Jane Grimshaw and an invited talk by Junko Ito and
Armin Mester. Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks in all areas
of linguistics. Abstracts should be anonymous, and should be no
longer than one page, with margins of at least 1 inch, in a typeface
no smaller than 11 point. An additional page with examples and
references may be appended. Please provide 6 anonymous copies of the
abstract and 1 copy with the author's name and affiliation. A separate
index card should contain the following information: title of paper,
appropriate subfield, author's name, affiliation, address, telephone
number (optional), e-mail address (optional). The deadline for
receipt of abstracts is Wednesday, May 1, 1996. Abstracts should be
sent to the following address:
WECOL 1996
c/o Linguistics Research Center
Stevenson College
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz CA 95064
Santa Cruz is about a 40 minute drive from San Jose International
Airport or an hour-and-a-half from San Francisco International
Airport. Inquiries may be addressed via e-mail to wecol@ling.ucsc.edu
Information will be available on the World Wide Web at
http://ling.ucsc.edu/~wecol/
-- NWAVE-XXV: NWAVE Comes to Vegas! OCTOBER 17-20, 1996. NWAVE will
celebrate its Silver Anniversary in the Silver State. The Sahara Hotel
in Las Vegas will be the site on NWAVE 25, which will include its
usual fare of papers, plenary sessions, and workshops. Tentative
plenary speakers include Jean Aitchison, Allen Bell, and William
Labov; we hope to have workshops on probability theory (what else
would you expect in Las Vegas), computer mapping, field methods, and
statistics. Send a one page abstract by July 12, 1996. All abstracts
will be refereed anonymously, so don't put your name on the
abstract. Include your name, affiliation, mailing address and email
and title on a separate sheet of paper. Send abstracts to
Dr. Jan Tillery
NWAVE Coordinator
UNLV College of Liberal Arts
4505 Maryland Parkway
Box 455001
Las Vegas, NV 89154-5001
EMAIL: gbailey@ccmail.nevada.edu
fax: (702) 895-4097
-\-/-\ TRUE LINGUISTICS \-/-\-
ENGLISH: English is a language in which...
....double negatives are a no-no.
....a fat chance and a slim chance mean the same thing.
....the term "mental institution" can be used to
describe an asylum or a college.
....a Mr. Universe and a couch potato can earn the same
reward: atrophy.
....just one letter makes all the difference between
here and there.
...."hi" and "lo" have the same meaning.
-The good thing about mincing your words is that they're easier
to eat later on.
-Sad but true: Why bother speaking correct English? No one will
understand you.
-Only in English can day break when it's night that falls.
[Anonymous]
-\-/-\ 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.)
-- ENTROPIC: Speech Recognition: 3 positions now open in Menlo Park.
* Recognition Engineer (application development)
* Project Leader (automatic translator Spanish/English)
* Project Leader (telephone services)
Entropic seeks engineers and computer scientists with expertise in one
or more of: hidden Markov models (HMMs), statistics, pattern
recognition, DSP, real-time processing, software engineering in Unix/C
and/or Windows NT/95. Physics/math degree OK. Background in languages
an advantage. Send resume to job@entropic.com
Entropic Research Laboratory, Inc. (Entropic) designs and develops,
software systems for recognition, synthesis, coding and analysis of
speech signals. Entropic offers systems and tools to support
high-accuracy speech recognition for large vocabularies, and for the
efficient storage and synthesis of high-quality speech. Entropic's
core products are a line of advanced speech processing software tools
and virtual instrumentation for the speech research community.
See also http://www.entropic.com.
Entropic offers full benefits and equal opportunity.
-- RICE UNIVERSITY: Director of Korean Language Studies. The
Department of Linguistics invites applications for a one year,
renewable, non-tenure-track appointment as Director of Korean Language
Studies at Rice University. Native or near native competency in Korean
is required. Preference will be given to candidates with a PhD. in
Korean Language or Linguistics, who have specific training and
experience in teaching Korean as a second language. A research
interest in language acquisition or language teaching methodology is
also desired. The person chosen will have responsibility for
developing the Korean language program and expanding enrollments and
course offerings. She or he will interact with other relevant programs
at Rice, including the Asian Studies Program and the Rice Language
Center. Course load will initially be three language courses per
semester, one of which may eventually be in Korean culture and
literature or Korean linguistics. Rice University is an equal
opportunity, affirmative action employer. Minorities and
nontraditional applicants are encouraged to apply. Salary for 1996-97
will be approximately $49,000. Review of applications will begin April
1, 1996 with applications accepted until the position is filled.
Letters of application, together with a curriculum vitae and including
a list of four references, should be sent to
James E. Copeland, Chair
Department of Linguistics
Rice University, MS-23
6100 Main Street
Houston, TX 77005-1892
(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 \-/-\-
-- ANTIGRAMS: An antigram is a rearrangement of letters in a word or
phrase into another word or phrase that is the opposite in meaning.
Find an appropriate antigram for each of the following:
1. A more mild act
2. Over fifty
3. Evil's agents
4. Arch saints
5. Nice to imports
6. On the sly
7. Care is noted
8. Mad policy
9. I won't hear this
First to solve all nine wins the as yet elusive insta-prize...
-\-/-\ SESQUIPEDITOR'S NOTE \-/-\-
The Sesquipedalian will be taking a temporary hiatus until next
quarter. Look for the next issue on April 11th.
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