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Sesquipedalian #28
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VII, No. 28
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National Never Turn Your Back On The Ocean Day May 15, 1997
WEIRD SCIENCE
Results of a contest for "theories" sponsored by Omni magazine.
GRAND PRIZE WINNER
When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when
toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side
facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back
of a cat; the two will hover, spinning inches above the
ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed
monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.
RUNNERS-UP:
#1
If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite
number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun
rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will
eventually produce all the world's great literary works in
Braille.
#2
Why Yawning Is Contagious: You yawn to equalize the
pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change outside
your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so
they must yawn to even it out.
#3
Communist China is technologically underdeveloped because
they have no alphabet and therefore cannot use acronyms to
communicate ideas at a faster rate.
#4
The earth may spin faster on its axis due to deforestation.
Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases when the
arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall
trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.
HONORABLE MENTION:
The quantity of consonants in the English language is
constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another.
When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate
southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in
"erl wells."
-/-\-/ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-\-/-
-- Henriette de Swart gave the UCSC linguistics colloquium on Friday,
May 2, entitled, 'Aspect shift and coercion.'
-/-\-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-\-/-
Friday, May 16, 1997, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall (460), Room 146
Jennifer Arnold
Stanford University
The Role of Frequency in Reference Processing
What leads speakers to choose, for example, a pronoun over a
name, and how does this choice affect language comprehension?
Although many approaches to this problem have been taken, the one
thing all approaches all have in common is the claim that pronouns are
preferred when the referent is salient. But what determines this
salience? Many diverse factors have been proposed, but they seem to
have very little to do with each other except that they are purported
to affect the thing called "salience".
In this paper, I will propose that comprehenders prefer
certain forms of reference depending on how easy it is to establish
reference. The ease of establishing reference, in turn, is influenced
by multiple constraints, one of which is the frequency of reference
patterns. This frequency information is available because speakers
and writers produce language in a highly systemmatic way.
I will support the claim about frequency information by
looking at four sources of information with both experimentation and
corpus analysis. I will demonstrate that pronouns are preferred when
the referent is the grammatical Subject (a topic position), or when it
is in the focus of a cleft. NPs in these positions are prominent with
respect to the following discourse, even though topics and foci have
traditionally been opposed. I will also demonstrate that thematic
role information affects reference form preferences, where pronouns
are used more often to refer to goals than sources. In addition, I
will present detailed evidence that pronouns are preferred more for
things which have been mentioned recently.
For all four sources of information (Subjects, the focus of
clefts, goals, and recent NPs), I will also show that subsequent
reference to these items is more frequent than subsequent reference to
other elements of the utterance. In this way, I will show that four
very different types of information are similar in two ways: frequent
types of reference correspond to increased preference for pronouns.
Based on this evidence, I will propose an activation framework, in
which frequency information affects the activation of the mental
representations of discourse entities. High activation means that
establishing reference is easier, and less specified forms of
reference are preferred.
------------------
Reception follows.
For directions and a complete list of colloquia, see
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/colloq/colloq.html
-/-\-/ SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM /-\-/-
-\-/-\ SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER LECTURE \-/-\-
The Symbolic Systems Student Society Presents
The 1997 Distinguished Speaker Event
"Post Symbolic Systems"
by Jaron Lanier
Annenberg Auditorium
15 May, 1997
4:00pm-6:00pm
Biography of Speaker:
--------------------
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.
Lanier is probably best known for his work in Virtual
Reality. He coined the term 'Virtual Reality', and founded the VR
industry. He started the first VR company, VPL Research, Inc., which
produced most of the world's VR equipment for many years. He is the
co-inventor of fundamental VR components such as interface gloves and
VR networking.
Lanier was also the first to propose and implement a variety
of technologies that have since spawned industries in their own
right. Among his lineup of "firsts" are the first "avatar" for network
communications, the first moving camera virtual set for television
production, and the first performance animation for 3D computer
graphics. He was the first to propose web-based network
computers. Along with Dr. Joe Rosen and Scott Fisher he initiated the
fields of real-time endoscopic surgical simulation and telesurgery. As
a computer scientist, Lanier is also known as a pioneer in the field
of visual programming.
Music is Lanier's first love and he has been an active
composer and performer in the world of new classical music since the
late seventies. He is also a pianist and a specialist in unusual
musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of
Asia. Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass,
Ornette Coleman, Vernon Reid, Terry Riley, Barbara Higbie, and Stanley
Jordan. He also writes chamber and orchestral music. His record
"Instruments of Change" was released on Point/Polygram in 1994. In the
works are a new album of chamber music for Sony Classics, an
orchestral commission for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and a
Ballet, "The Thinning of the Veil".
Lanier's paintings and drawings have been exhibited in
galleries in the United States and Europe and in the Internet. In 1994
he directed the film "Muzork" under a commission from ARTE
Television. His 1983 "Moondust" is generally regarded as the first art
video game, and the first interactive music publication. In 1996 he
presented the "Video Feedback Waterbed", a large installation at Exit
Art in New York City. Lanier's best known visual art, however, is his
work in the design of virtual worlds, including "The Sound of One
Hand", and many others.
Lanier is also a well known author and speaker. He writes on
numerous topics, including the philosophy of consciousness, internet
politics, and the future of humanism in a technological world. He is a
founding contributing writer for Wired Magazine, and was the guest
editor of a special issue of the magazine SPIN devoted to the future
(November 1995). He appears on national television regularly, on
shows such as "Nightline" and "Charlie Rose", has been profiled in
many prominent publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, and has
had his original research featured on the cover of Scientific American
twice.
Abstract of Talk
----------------
Virtual Reality has lead me to explore some of the extremes of what
might be possible in both natural languages and programming languages, and
these two explorations have influenced each other in surprising ways.
I originally became involved with VR in the hopes of improving user
interfaces for large and complex computer programming tasks. In the course
of this work, I became convinced that advanced user interfaces would
influence the core as well as the surface of programming language design.
Some of the most entrenched ideas about computer programming languages
might be understood better as mnemonic devices to help users cope with
text-based or text-influenced user interfaces. I have explored this
possibility by designing a series of user interface-intensive programming
languages that reject seemingly ubiquitous ideas like parsers and source
code.
I also started to wonder about the role of symbols and abstraction
in natural language. I have postulated a new type of natural
communication, as a thought experiment, that might be at least
theoretically possible at some time in the future. There would be
excellent modeling and programming tools for networked VR in this future,
and a community of people highly skilled in the fast construction of shared
virtual worlds. Members of this community could hypothetically communicate
by creating rapidly changing content in a shared, objective world. They
would create and share content directly, instead of referring to
contingencies indirectly with words or other symbolic devices. This is
what I call post-symbolic communication.
While it might at first seem that symbols, abstractions, and
categories would be needed to communicate anything substantial, even in
this future, that does not appear to be the case. For just one example,
instead of abstract categories or platonic ideals, it might be possible to
create a concrete, but very large, collection of objects that are to be
considered as similar. Such a collection could be held inside a virtual
jar, for instance, that is small on the outside but big inside, and could
be available as conveniently as a word.
Another way to say this is that concreteness could be as versatile
as abstraction, if it becomes very easy to make and change concrete things.
If it is at least possible that our understanding of the range of
potential natural languages has been limited by assumptions based on text,
it is certainly worth re-examining our assumptions about computer
languages.
-\-/-\ CALL FOR PAPERS \-/-\-
-- PhD/Young Researcher Workshop on: FORMAL ELEGANCE AND NATURAL
COMPLEXITY IN MORPHOLOGY. August 18-22. A workshop held as part of
the 9th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
(ESSLLI97), August 11-22, 1997, Aix-en-Provence, France. Formally
oriented approaches to morphology often start from familiar and well
documented natural languages, which more often than not throw up
complex questions. For instance, questions about the relation between
particular morphosyntactic features, underspecification, rules of
referral, or disjunctive representations, among other things, can
arise from analysis of familiar languages. Languages which provide
key evidence on such issues may be less well known. Through the
workshop, researchers working on particular languages can become
acquainted with issues which are of interest for formal approaches,
and formally oriented researchers can learn more about the complexity
of natural language morphology. The workshop will therefore provide a
forum for young researchers working in either or both of these areas
to come together and exchange ideas.
WORKSHOP AIMS:
This workshops aims to:
* provide a setting for PhD Students/Young researchers to present and
discuss their work, in a small, friendly and constructive environment;
* facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers working on
particular languages or language typology and those interested in
formal approaches to morphology
You are invited to submit two copies of an abstract for a
twenty-minute talk (plus 10 minutes) discussion. Submissions of more
than one abstract will also be considered.
DEADLINE: May 31, 1997. Abstracts should be sent to:
Dunstan Brown
Linguistic and International Studies
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 5XH
England
Tel: +44 1483 259957
Fax: +44 1483 302605
Email: d.brown@surrey.ac.uk
-\-/-\ 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.)
-- HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Lecturer on Linguistics. The Department of
Linguistics at Harvard announces a one-semester nontenured position,
Lecturer on Linguistics, for the fall term, 1997 (September
1997-January 1998). Candidates must demonstrate expertise in
historical linguistics and be prepared to oficl an unirgrad~-Wel
introduction to historical linguistics and a graduate-level course in
historical and comparative linguistics. Ph.D. required. A detailed
curriculum vitae, including a complete bibliography, should be
received at the following address by May 30, 1997:
Prof. Michael S. Flier, Chairman
Search Committee (Historical Linguistics)
Department of Linguistics
Harvard University
77 Dunster Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Three letters of recommendation should be sent directly by the authors
to arrive no later than May 30. Harvard University is an Affirmative
Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified women and minority
candidates are especially encouraged to apply.
-- STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO: ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE
PROFESSOR, Linguistics Department. The Departrnent of Linguistics at
SUNY Buffalo seeks to fill a tenure-track position at the Assistant
Professor or beginning Associate Professor level (subject to final
budgetary approval); the position will begin September 1, 1998. We are looking
for someone engaged in substantial and ongoing field research in one
or more non-Indo-European languages (preferably one from the
Arnericas) and demonstrated research expertise in phonology. The
successful appiicant will be expected to contribute to Cognitive
Science at UB. S/he will be expected to teach introductory and
advanced courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Review of
applications will begin October 15, 1997. Applicants should send CV,
letter of application, names of three references, and samples of their
work to
Search Committee
Department of Linguistics
685 Baldy Hall
SUNY at Buffalo
Buffalo NY 14260-1030 USA.
Ph.D. must be completed by September 1, 1998. AA/EOE
(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 \-/-\-
-- INSTA-PRIZE PLAYOFFS: Answer all ten questions correctly for this
week's Insta-Prize.
1) How long did the Hundred Years War last?
2) Which country makes Panama hats?
3) From which animal do we get catgut?
4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
5) What is a camel's hair brush made of?
6) The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?
7) What was King George VI's first name?
8) What color is a purple finch?
9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
10) How long did the Thirty Years War last?
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