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Sesquipedalian #22
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VI, No. 22
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1906 Earthquake Anniversary April 18, 1996
ANALOGIES YOU PROBABLY WON'T FIND IN GREAT LITERATURE
-----------------------------------------------------
(Thanks to Alan Keith Carver, original source unknown)
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a
guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of
those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country
speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar
eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. (Joseph Romm,
Washington)
She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to
dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door
open again. (Rich Murphy, Fairfax Station)
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a
bowling ball wouldn't. (Russell Beland, Springfield)
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled
with vegetable soup. (Paul Sabourin, Silver Spring)
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie,
surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and
"Jeopardy" comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30. (Roy Ashley,
Washington)
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze. (Chuck
Smith, Woodbridge)
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the
center. (Russell Beland, Springfield)
Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access
T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by
mistake (Ken Krattenmaker, Landover Hills)
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. (Fishing In America)
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree. (Jack Bross, Chevy
Chase)
Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a
movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like
"Second Tall Man." (Russell Beland, Springfield)
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the
grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having
left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka
at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. (Jennifer Hart, Arlington)
The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr.
on a Dr Pepper can. (Wayne Goode, Madison, Ala.)
They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that
resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth (Paul Kocak, Syracuse, N.Y.)
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had
also never met. (Russell Beland, Springfield)
The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet
of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
(Barbara Fetherolf, Alexandria)
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like
underpants in a dryer without Cling Free (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge)
The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
(Jennifer Frank and Jimmy Pontzer, Washington and Sterling)
-\-/-\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING \-/-\-
-- Congratulations to both Brett Kessler and Scott Schwenter, who have
each been awarded Whiting Dissertation Fellowships for 1996-97. These
are very competitive, prestigious awards, and represent a tribute to
the high regard with which their work is held both in the Department,
and in H&S as a whole.
-- Speaking of Scott Schwenter, he also presented 'From hypothetical
to factual and beyond: independent SI-clauses in Spanish conversation'
at the Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language conference last
weekend at SUNY-Buffalo. [This omission from last week's 'Look Who's
Talking' was brought to our attention by Fishing I. America --Eds.]
-- POINT OF INTEREST: The First International Symposium on
Ibero-Romance Language Contact takes place this weekend at San Jose
State. For more information on this symposium, please contact Juan
A. Sempere (jsempere@email.sjsu.edu).
-\-/-\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \-/-\-
Friday, Apr. 19, 3:30 pm.
Margaret Jacks Hall (460), Room 146
Armin Schwelger
University of California, Irvine
On the disputed origins of Caribbean Spanish
It has long been claimed that several phenomena found in
Afro-Caribbean Spanish point to the prior existence of a uniform
pan-Caribbean Spanish pidgin or creole. The ultimate source of this
contact vernacular presumably was the pidgin Portuguese
`reconnaissance language' used along the Coast of colonial West
Africa.
As Lipski (1994) recognizes, this sweeping monogenetic claim,
if substantiated, would totally reshape our understanding of the
formation of American Spanish. He and the majority of Hispanists
have, however, rejected the monogenetic hypothesis because, as they
point out correctly, none of the evidence adduced can convincingly
resist alternative analyses (e.g., spontaneous innovation or
peninsular origins). Schwegler (1993) insists that the discovery of
even a single "deep" grammatical Afro-Portuguese feature in
Caribbean Spanish will automatically validate the monogenetic theory.
Concentrating on bozal Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc.),
Palenquero (Colombia), and Chota (Highland Ecuador) Spanish, this
paper presents two such "deep" (Afro)Portuguese features, thereby
offering a unequivocal evidence in favor of the monogenetic
pidgin/creole theory.
The data to be examined include reflexes of the
Afro-Portuguese 3d person singular pronoun ele (< Port. jle `he' and
jles `they') and "strange" double negatives of the type "NO hablo
inglis NO" `I don't speak English'. These grammatical items may
comfortably be qualified as "deep" features. As Arlotto (1972) and
others have recognized, pronouns are rarely borrowed, and if so only
in intense and prolonged contact situations. The pronominal data
(some of which were collected in situ) discussed in this talk promise,
therefore, to be uniquely helpful for proving the genetic relationship
between the putative Afro-Portuguese pidgin/creole and the speech
varieties in which they are found.
-----
Reception follows.
For a list of upcoming colloquia, see
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/~kessler/colloq/
-\-/-\ CALL FOR PAPERS \-/-\-
-- THE ESSLLI'96 STUDENT SESSION: A novelty at ESSLLI'96 is the
student session. The purpose of the student session is to provide
students with an opportunity to present their work in progress and get
valuable feedback by senior researchers and "colleague-students". To
that end, students are encouraged to submit papers describing *work in
progress* (so as to benefit most from feedback). The emphasis will be
on papers that show creativity, innovative ideas and promise rather
than on papers that present well-polished results. The student
session has been designated its own timeslot in the schedule of
ESSLLI'96. Such basically means that there will be a 90-minute
student session EVERY DAY. Depending on the number and quality of
submitted papers, either only in the first week or in both weeks. The
session will not be a poster session! Students will be presenting
their work in a 20+10 minutes talk. The areas of interest are
essentially the areas of the summer school: Logic, Language,
Computation, Logic & Language, Logic & Computation, and Language &
Computation. Submissions should not be longer than 5 pages, including
references and abstract but excluding a title page with the addresses
of the authors so as to facilitate anonymous reviewing. The
'stylesheet' for submissions is: Font Times Roman 12pt, margins 1 inch
all around, 1.5 line-spacing, no columns. Electronic submissions are
highly encouraged, and should have arrived with the program chair at
Friday May 31st at 12am CET. Please, do send the title page separately
from your paper! Formats in which papers can be submitted are Latex,
RTF, and PostScript.
Address: Anne-Marie Mineur
Computerlinguistik, Bau 17.1
Postfach 151150
66041 Saarbruecken
Germany
E-mail: mineur@coli.uni-sb.de
Note that, in order to present a paper at the ESSLLI'96 Student
Session, you have to register as a participant to ESSLLI'96. As a
special benefit for authors of accepted papers, registration at early
registration fee will be offered.
-\-/-\ TRUE LINGUISTICS \-/-\-
-- A concerned reader writes:
'I first heard the "yeah yeah" story ['True Linguistics,' April 11]
about 25 years ago, it was a philosopher who was giving the lecture
(since linguists know that very few languages can use double negatives
to express a positive). And the person who said "yeah yeah" was the
famous logician, Raymond Sullivan.'
[Fancy that! --Eds.]
-\-/-\ INSTA-PRIZE \-/-\-
-- EMILY'S STEPFATHER: Emily's stepfather's name
1. is four letters long
2. has exactly one letter in common with 'Paul', but
in a different position
3. has exactly one letter in common with 'Gary', and
in the same position.
4. has exactly two letters in common with 'Mark': one
in the same position and one different.
What's Emily's stepfather's name?
[Submitted by Jean Braithwaite]
Solution to GRY: 'Angry,' 'hungry,' and 'aggry' were the best efforts
on this one.
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