The New Sesquipedalian

The United States has defeated teams from 17 other countries in the International Linguistics Olympiad in Poland,  a competition for High School students involving various puzzles based on linguistic data sets. Our own undergrad Joshua Falk worked with Jenny Finkel and Kyle Noe to organize the local Stanford competition, and US team member Anand Nataraja will be a freshman here. Sesquicongratulations!

I have kleptomania, but when it gets bad,
I take something for it.

FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS!
Except that one where you’re naked in church.

Welcome to Utah. Set your watch back 20 years

In just two days from now,
tomorrow will be yesterday.

A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.

The statement below is true.
The statement above is false.

I may be schizophrenic, but at least I have each other.

I am a nobody
Nobody is perfect
Therefore I am Perfect

I LOVE COOKING WITH WINE
Sometimes I even put it in the food.

When you work here,
you can name your own salary.
I named mine, “Fred”.

Money isn’t everything,
but it sure keeps the kids in touch.

CUSP 2 (California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics 2) will take place at UCSC, November 21-22.

The organizers are soliciting abstracts for 30-minute talks on any topic in natural language semantics and pragmatics. Abstracts should be at most 1 page in length (US Letter), including examples and references, using a 12pt font with 1-inch margins on all four sides, and should include the name and affiliation of the author(s).

Submissions go to: username cusp at the server ling.ucsc.edu. The deadline is October 4, 2009. For more information, check out the workshop website.

Everyone was busy talking all summer, and these are some of the words they said. We’ve gathered as much information as we could find (many thanks to Beth Levin for the help!), but we fear that this isn’t a comprehensive accounting. Please let us know if we missed your talk — we’ll add it to this entry, thereby improving our records.

• Peter Sells appeared at the International Conference on Sentence Types in Frankfurt in June and talked about “Form and Function in Negative Imperatives.” Shortly thereafter, Paul Kiparsky held forth on “A Null Theory of Voice.”
• Geoff Nunberg talked about his book “The Years of Talking Dangerously” at Kepler’s on June 25.
• AMLaP 2009 welcomed several Stanford people to Spain this August 15th:
  • Hal Tily spoke on “Probabilistically conditioned phonological variation in spoken Dutch,”
  • Neal Snider talked about “Syntax in flux: structural priming maintains probabilistic representations,”
  • Rui Chaves and Deary Jaruen discussed “Complexity, ellipsis and agreement puzzles in NP coordination.”
• SIGDial 2009 included a number of papers with Stanford connections:
  • Marie de Marneffe, Scott Grimm, and Chris Potts: Not a simple yes or no: Uncertainty in indirect answers
  • Trung Bui, Matthew Frampton, John Dowding and Stanley Peters: Extracting decisions from multi-party dialogue using directed graphical models and semantic similarity
  • Matthew Purver, Raquel Fernández, Matthew Frampton and Stanley Peters: Cascaded Lexicalised Classifiers for Second-Person Reference Resolution
• Tatiana Nikitina presented ‘Word order typology and the SOVX order of Mande’ at African Linguistics for Understanding and Progress.
• Shiao Wei Tham, Louis Champollion, Martina Faller had papers at CHRONOS 2009.
• The 16th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar included papers by Ivan Sag, Doug Ball, and numerous Stanford Linguistics alums.
• The 33rd Stanford Child Language Research Forum was organized by Stanford Linguistics folks and featured talks by a number of Stanford faculty and students.
• First-year student Alex Djalali and alum Stefan Kaufmann presented ‘Probabilistic inferences in dynamic semantics’ at the 10th Symposium on Logic and Language.
• First-year student Isla Flores-Bayer presented ‘Localizing the loss and attrition of the subjunctive through generations: The case of Central Texas adult bilinguals’ with Chiyo Nishida at the 2009 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium and Conference (HLS 2009).
• Inbal Aron presented ‘Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: How order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned’ at CogSci 2009.
• There were lots of presentations by Stanford folks at the ACL meeting in Singapore.
• Meghan Sumner is more or less recently back from Interspeech 2009, where she presented ‘Learning and generalization of novel contrastive cues’.
• Tom Wasow is even more recently back from Dubrovnik, where he was part of the Philosophy of Linguistics course. His talk was called ‘Evidence, Explanation, and E-language’.
• The program for Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing included several Stanford connections, including current grad student Hal Tily, current postdoc Victor Kuperman, recent PhD Neal Snider, former visiting student Rui Chavez, current Psych faculty Michael Ramscar, former Psych grad student Kirsten Thorpe, former SSP undergrad Mahesh Srinivasan, and former Psych faculty Zenzi Griffin.