The New Sesquipedalian

Emily Bender, Stanford Linguistics PhD 2000, has just released a new book entitle Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax. Check it out here.

Congratulations, Emily!

Laura Staum Casasanto, Stanford Linguistics PhD 2009, was recently appointed Project Manager for the 2015 Linguistic Institute, which will be held July 6 – 31, 2015.

Mary Dalrymple, Stanford Linguistics PhD ’90 and current Professor of Linguistics at University of Oxford, has just been elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Congratulations, Mary!

Stanford linguists are busy traveling around the world this fall to speak about their work. Here are some September highlights:

Vera Gribanova will speak on “Subject position, case and agreement in Uzbek” at the Berkeley Syntax & Semantics Circle on September 13.

Several grad students and recent Stanford PhDs are presenting at Sinn und Bedeutung 13 in the Basque country (September 11-13):

• Tania Rojas-Esponda: “A QUD account of the German particle doch”
• Lelia Glass: “The creative and the fluffy: construing properties two ways in English D+Adj”
• Scott Grimm: “Individuating the abstract”
• Karlos Arregi, Itamar Francez and Martina Martinovic: “Specificational subjects are individual concepts”

Paul Kiparsky will speak on

The program of the Colloque de syntaxe et sémantique à Paris 2013 (September 26-28) is chock-full of current and former Stanford linguists:

• Lauri Karttunen, Annie Zaenen, Cleo Condoravdi and Stanley Peters: “What does one do when one is not stupid? Factive and implicative dialects of evaluative adjectives”
• Eric Acton: “Standard change and the Finnish partitive-accusative object distinction”
• Timothy Dozat and Jeffrey Runner: “Someone will attend this talk (and it definitely should be!), I just don’t know by whom: An analysis of voice mismatch in VP ellipsis and sluicing”

Congrats to all – and check back for more October announcements in the next issue!

We have a considerable backlog of talks given by Stanford folks this summer to announce as well.

At ACL 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9:

• Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Moritz Sudhof, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec and Christopher Potts: “A computational approach to politeness with application to social factors”
• Adam Vogel, Christopher Potts and Dan Jurafsky: “Implicatures and Nested Beliefs in Approximate Decentralized-POMDPs”
• Kevin Reschke, Adam Vogel and Dan Jurafsky: “Generating Recommendation Dialogs by Extracting Information from User Reviews”
• Marta Recasens, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Dan Jurafsky, ”Linguistic Models for Analyzing and Detecting Biased Language”
• Spence Green, Sida Wang, Daniel Cer and Christopher D. Manning: “Fast and Adaptive Online Training of Feature-Rich Translation Models”
• Mengqiu Wang, Wanxiang Che and Christopher D. Manning: Joint Word Alignment and Bilingual Named Entity Recognition Using Dual Decomposition
• Richard Socher, John Bauer, Christopher Manning and Andrew Ng: Parsing with Compositional Vector Grammars
• At the colocated CoNLL 2013 conference: Thang Luong, Richard Socher, and Christopher Manning, “Better Word Representations with Recursive Neural Networks for Morphology”

At UK Language Variation & Change 9, University of Sheffield, September 2-4:

• Podesva, Robert; Calder, Jeremy; Chen, Hsin-Chang; D’Onofrio, Annette; Flores Bayer, Isla; Kim, Seung Kyung; Van Hofwegen, Janneke: “The California Vowel Shift in a Rural Inland Community”
• Alum Lauren Hall-Lew with Ruth Friskney and James Scobbie: ”‘If you will allow me, Mr Speaker…’: Audience Design and Phonetic Variation in the House of Commons”
• Alum Devyani Sharma: “The Social Foundation of Feature Pools: An example from ethnolectal change”

Stanford Linguistics faculty, grad students, alums and affiliates at CogSci 2013, Berlin, July 31-August 3:

• Meghan Sumner, Chigusa Kurumada, Roey Gafter, Marisa Casillas: Phonetic variation and the recognition of words with pronunciation variants
• Marisa Casillas and Michael Frank: The development of predictive processes in children’s discourse understanding
• Chigusa Kurumada, Meredith Brown, Sarah Bibyk, Daniel Pontillo, Michael Tanenhaus: Incremental processing in the pragmatic interpretation of contrastive prosody
• Chigusa Kurumada: Contextual inferences over speakers’ pragmatic intentions: Preschoolers’ comprehension of contrastive prosody
• Chigusa Kurumada and T. Florian Jaeger: Communicatively efficient language production and case-marker omission in Japanese
• Molly Lewis and Michael Frank: Modeling disambiguation in word learning via multiple probabilistic constraints
• Molly Lewis and Michael Frank: An integrated model of concept learning and word-concept mapping

At the International Conference on Dependency Linguistics, Prague, August 27-30: Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Miriam Connor, Natalia Silveira, Samuel R. Bowman, Timothy Dozat and Christopher D. Manning, “More constructions, more genres: Extending Stanford Dependencies”

Arto Antilla was an invited speaker at the 2013 International Conference on English Linguistics in Seoul, South Korea.

Alex Djalali gave a talk entitled “Extending a Natural Language Proof Theory: On Ordinary Comparatives” at the workshop Natural Language and Computer Science in New Orleans on June 28, 2013.

A number of papers were presented at the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics at Cornell on August 23-25, 2013 (including three which emerged from last year’s fieldwork class!).

• Bonnie Krejci and Lelia Glass: The Noun/Adjective Distinction in Kazakh
• Hanzhi Zhu: Raising in Kazakh: Case, Agreement, and the EPP
• Asya Pereltsvaig and Ekaterina Lyutikova: Functional Structure in the Nominal Domain: A View from Tatar
• Samuel R. Bowman and Benjamin Lokshin: Idiosyncratic transparency in Kazakh vowel harmony

At ESSLLI 2013 at the University of Düsseldorf,

• Dan Lassiter and Noah Goodman taught a course on “Probability in semantics and pragmatics”
• Dan Lassiter and Heather Burnett taught a course on “Gradability, scale structure, and vagueness”
• Lelia Glass presented a poster on “Degree-Modified Nongradable Adjectives and Metalinguistic Comparison as Pragmatically Negotiated Scales” at the Student Session

Joan Bresnan was an invited speaker at the LSA 13 Workshop How the brain accommodates variability in linguistic representations, organized by alum Florian Jaeger.

Paul Kiparsky presented

• “Phonemic analyses are not data: on the empirical basis of phonological typology” at Phonological Typology at Somerville College, University of Oxford on September 11-13;
• “Ranking volume predicts directionality: an OT-based theory of syntactic drift” at the LSA 2013 workshop Patterns of Alignment in the Indo-Iranian Languages: Towards a Typology, July 13-14.

Alumna Aswini Deo also presented a paper at the LSA 2013 workshop Patterns of Alignment in the Indo-Iranian Languages: Towards a Typology, entitled “The emergence of accusative objects in New Indo-Aryan ergative clauses”.

Several Stanford affiliates will be teaching courses at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute:

• Penny Eckert and alum Kathryn Cambell-Kibler will be teaching The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics.
• Rob Podesva will be teaching Sociophonetics of Gender and Sexuality.
• Postdoc Kevin McGowan will be teaching Praat Scripting.
• Alum Florian Jaeger will be teaching Mixed-effect models.
• Alum John Paolillo will be teaching Social Media as Linguistic Data
• Alum Judith Tonhauser will be teaching Semantic Fieldwork Methods
• BA alum Elaine Chun will be teaching Ethnolinguistic Repertoires in American English.

Our very own alum Ashwini Deo will be giving a colloquium today at 3:30pm in the Greenberg Room. Come on out to hear her talk “The Semantic and Pragmatic Underpinnings of Grammaticalization Paths: the progressive and the imperfective”. Afterwards there will be a social, so stick around for drinks, snacks, dinner, and progressively imperfect conversation!

In this talk I offer an analysis of a robustly attested semantic change in which progressive markers “spontaneously” emerge in languages, get entrenched in the grammatical system, and diachronically grammaticalize into imperfective markers. Read the rest of this entry »

Our intrepid field reporter Sesqui was present at IvanFest last week, and found the following links to prove just how wonderful a time it was:

• Some pictures and a video: http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Bilder/ivanfest/
• The infamous HPSG man, performed by The Dead Tongues: http://youtu.be/M1tUW_LNnfo

(Thanks to Stefan Müller)