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Sesquipedalian #26
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VI, No. 26
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Birth of Aristotle (a bugger for the bottle) May 16, 1996
SIGNS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMM
In the Paint section of a hardware store in Warsaw, Ind.:
"Sorry, Absolutely no paint colors mixed without a note from your
wife"
A sign in a Naperville, Ill., animal clinic: "Doctor will be with you
soon... Sit!... Stay!"
On the front door of a Lincoln City, Oregon bakery:
"PUSH - If that doesn't work
PULL - If that doesn't work
We're probably CLOSED"
Outside a dining hall in Canyon de Chelley Park in Chinle, Arizona:
"Shoes are required to eat in the cafeteria,
Socks can eat wherever they want."
A subtle warning sign over a temperamental water fountain in a Boeing
manufacturing plant in Renton, Washington:
"Old Faceful"
A Church sign across from the Hoosier Dome Stadium in Indianapolis:
"Mass after Colts Game - 4:30 PM, Nov. 17th"
A sign in a hair salon lobby in Grand Rapids, Michigan, carries
this somewhat confusing warning:
"Children with snacks must be eaten in the lobby"
A sign in the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, shows how
things used to be:
"For gas sales after hours
First, honk horn once!
Then keep your shirt on while
I get my pants on.
(No sales less than 5 gallons)"
From the Upper River Road in Pitkin County, Colorado comes this
warning. And while the spelling may be far from perfect, the message
comes through loud and clear:
"Trespasurz will be persequted to the full ekstent uf one mungrel
dog that wuz never soshable to stranjers and one duble barel shotgun
that ain't loaded with sofa pillars. Damn if we ain't tired uv this
hell raisin on our place"
-\-/-\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING \-/-\-
-- CONGRATULATIONS: Please join us in congratulating Robert Allan
Hedges, a junior majoring in Linguistics, on his election to Phi Beta
Kappa, the prestigious academic honor society.
-\-/-\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \-/-\-
Friday, May 17, 3:30 pm.
Margaret Jacks Hall (460), Room 146
Barbara Stiebels
Stanford/Duesseldorf
Complex denominal verbs in German
In my talk I will propose a lexical account of complex denominal
verbs, i.e., denominal particle verbs and denominal prefix verbs,
within the framework of Lexical Decomposition Grammar (Wunderlich
1994). If one requires that morphological derivation and semantic
composition be isomorphic, the German complex denominal verbs give
rise to apparent mismatches between morphology and semantics. I assume
a morpheme-based account and then explore the minimum further
assumptions necessary to account for these mismatches.
I assume that complex denominal verbs obey the same
structural, semantic and conceptual constraints as simple denominal
verbs. Denominal verbs are derived by the instantiation of abstract
templates into which the base noun is integrated. These abstract
templates account both for the distributional patterns of possible and
impossible denominal verbs observed by Clark & Clark (1979) and Hale &
Keyser (1992) and for the required semantic and referential shifts in
the noun-verb conversion. Denominal verbs are structurally constrained
by the Lowest Argument Restriction (LAR), which requires the base noun
to saturate the lowest ranked argument of the abstract template.
I will show that complex denominal verbs exhibit the same
degree of heterogeneity as other complex verbs. This heterogeneity
consists of differences in the preverbs' argument structure effects on
the bases and the mechanisms required for semantic
composition. Preverbs can be classified as lexical arguments, lexical
adjuncts and pure aspectual markers, according to these differences.
In particular, I will consider the following types of complex
denominal verbs:
(1) a. er-schreinern `get sth. by doing carpentry', an-fiedeln `fiddle at'
b. unter-kellern [under-cellar], auf-satteln `saddle up'
(complex locatum verbs)
c. auf-bahren `lay on the bier', ein-rahmen `frame'
(complex location verbs)
d. ver-stauben `get dusty', ver-silbern `silver plate'
e. ver-slumen `become a slum', ver-sklaven `enslave'
I will argue that (1a) has to be considered as the default case: in
the first step, the denominal base is derived, in the second step the
preverb is added as a lexical adjunct. The most problematic cases are
the complex denominal verbs in (1d/e): in (1d) the base noun is
semantically integrated into the relation contributed by the prefix,
in (1e) the prefixes appear to be pleonastic prefixes without a
specific semantic contribution.
I want to show that (i) once the lexical entries of the
preverbs are specified, the required results of the formation of
complex denominal verbs are rendered automatically, (ii) no specific
assumptions have to be made for the preverbs with respect to the
denominal bases, and (iii) the lexical approach I advocate is simpler
and more flexible than Hale & Keyser's syntactic approach.
-----------------
Reception follows.
For directions and a complete list of colloquia, see
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/~kessler/colloq/
[Note: The web page may be temporarily inaccessible.]
-\-/-\ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP \-/-\-
Thursday May 16, 7:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall
OT versus Two-Level Phonology: Limits of Faithfulness
Orhan Orgun
UC Berkeley
In his discussion of opacity in phonology, McCarthy (1996) compares OT
(Prince and Smolensky 1993) with Two Level Phonology (Koskenniemi
1983). He claims that OT is superior on both explanatory and
descriptive grounds. In particular, he claims that " Two Level
Phonology, as formalized by Koskenniemi (1983), is unable to deal with
complex systems of transparency and opacity like Icelandic."
In this talk, I first present a two level analysis of
Icelandic, demonstrating that the descriptive capacity of Two Level
Phonology is greater than McCarthy presumes. Next, I present a number
of phenomena where a faithfulness-based OT analysis is either
impossible ("circle" shifts) or undesirable (case where the reflex of
a diachronic sound change is arbitrary from a synchronic point of
view, also discussed by Blevins 1996). I show that these phenomena
pose no descriptive challenge to Two Level Phonology.
The talk ends with some speculation on the give and take
between descriptive adequacy and explanatory elegance, and on ways in
which the explanatory edge of OT may be preserved without losing the
descriptive and computational advantages of Two Level Phonology.
-\-/-\ LLC-V \-/-\-
-- The 5th Annual CSLI conference on Logic, Language, and Computation
takes place May 31-June 2 at CSLI. For schedule and abstracts, see
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/users/kyle/llc5.html
-\-/-\ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS \-/-\-
-- MSF: The Michigan Society of Fellows announces Postdoctoral
Fellowships: 1997-2000 in the Humanities and Arts, Sciences and
Professions. The Michigan Society of Fellows was founded in 1970
through grants from the Ford Foundation and Horace H. Rackam Graduate
School for the purpose of promoting academic and creative excellence
in the humanities and arts, the social, physical, and life sciences,
and the professions. The objective of the Society is to provide
financial and intellectual support for individuals selected for
outstanding achievement, professional promise, and interdisciplinary
interests. We invite applications from qualified candidates for
three-year postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Michigan.
Candidates should be near the beginning of their professional careers.
Those selected for fellowships must have received the Ph.D. or
comparable professional or artistic degree between January 1, 1994,
and September 1, 1997. Fellows are appointed as Assistant Professors
or Research Scientists in appropriate departments and as Postdoctoral
Scholars in the Michigan Society of Fellows. They are expected ot be
in residence in Ann Arbor during the academic years of the fellowship,
to teach for the equivalent of one academic year, to participate in
the informal intellectual life of the Society, and to devote time to
their independent research. Applications will be reviewed by Society
members and University faculty. Final selections will be made in
January by the senior fellows of the society. Four new Fellows will
be selected for three-year terms to begin September 1, 1997. The
annual stipend will be $32,500. Please send requests for application
materials to
Michigan Society of Fellows
3030 Rackham Building
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1070
phone: 313/763-1259
Completed application deadline: postmarked October 12, 1996
-\-/-\ TRUE LINGUISTICS \-/-\-
A message from Doris Payne of the University of Oregon:
Donate Your Voice to Science and Get a Free Lunch!!
If you are a native speaker of any of the following languages, please
call the appropriate 800 number listed below (a free call), and talk
to our computer. We will record your voice and use the data to train
computers to understand your language. We need 300 calls for EACH
language, so please spread the word to your friends. In appreciation
of your call we will send you a $3 gift certificate for McDonalds or
TCBY frozen yogurt.
Please mention that you heard about this from the University of Oregon
or Doris Payne when you call. (This is important!)
**************************************************************************
In addition to getting a free lunch, your call will result in a $2.00
donation being made to a fund for language and culture preservation
work among the Maasai of Kenya as part of the Maasai Cultural Center!
Thus, 5 minutes of your time will benefit three valuable projects at
once: language and cultural preservation work, research at Oregon
Graduate Institute, and MOST IMPORTANTLY your own lunch!
If you believe there is no such thing as a "free lunch," you can give
up your right to the $3.00 coupon and have that amount also donated to
the Maasai fund! To do this, when you are asked for the address to
mail the coupon to, just say you would like to have it donated to the
Maasai fund.
******************************************************************************
This research is sponsored by the Oregon Graduate Institute. If you
have further questions, call Terri Lander (503) 690-1381, or Doris
Payne (541) 346-3894/342-6706.
Arabic 1-800-298-2311
Indonesian 1-800-276-8381
Cantonese 1-800-298-2346
Czech 1-800-323-5767
Polish 1-800-738-3820
French 1-800-738-3815
Russian 1-800-298-2344
German 1-800-439-1531
Swahili 1-800-738-3837
Hungarian 1-800-738-3819
Swedish 1-800-276-8375
Italian 1-800-298-2308
Vietnamese 1-800-589-7656
Japanese 1-800-819-2903
Korean 1-800-738-3834
-\-/-\ 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.)
-- Research Fellow
Department of Computer Science
The Queen's University of Belfast
Belfast BT7 1NN
Northern Ireland
This post, ref. 96/LL and funded by the EPSRC, is available from June
1996 for three years, to research, design and implement components of
a combined statistical speech and language modelling system.
Applicants must hold a PhD or have submitted their thesis, in computer
science or related discipline, preferably in language or speech
processing. Proficiency in the construction of software systems,
together with a good basic knowledge of mathematics and statistics is
essential. Work published or in progress is desirable. Commencing
salary range: 14,319 - 15,987 pounds, placing depending on age,
experience and qualifications. Closing date: 24 May 1996. It is
intended that interviews will be held on 14 June 1996. Applicants,
quoting reference numbers where indicated, may obtain further
particulars from the Personnel Office. The Queen's University of
Belfast, BT7 1NN (01232) 245133 ext 3044/3246 or Fax (01232)
324944/310629. The university is a charity, established in 1845 to
advance education. Committed to an Equal Opportunities policy and
selection on merit, it welcomes applications from all sections of the
community. Under its affirmative action programme it particularly
welcomes applications from women for academic posts and applications
from Roman Catholics for all posts.
(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 \-/-\-
-- SUM, PRODUCT, PUZZLE: This story has three characters, Sum, Product
and Puzzler. Puzzler thinks of two integers greater than 1, and tells
their sum to Sum and their product to Product. Now, Sum knows that
Product knows the product, Product knows that Sum knows the sum,
Product knows that Sum knows that Product knows the sum, etc. The
following conversation ensues:
Product: I don't know what the two numbers are.
Sum: I knew you didn't know.
Product: In that case, I know now.
Sum: In that case, I know now, too.
What were the numbers?
Solution to HOW MANY GUESTS: 60, which is coincidentally the same
number of people who figured this one out.
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-\-/-\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE \-/-\-
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For best results, squeeze from bottom up
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