Stephanie Shih has a photography collection in the Stanford Art Affair, April 15-17 (8:30-10:00 pm). The show takes place in White Plaza, and Stephanie’s collection is all the way in the back of the tent farthest from the linguistics department. Congratulations, Stephanie!
Cleo Condoravdi is quoted in the BBC article Why machines do not understand human speech.
[Thanks Hal!]
We welcome you to today’s colloquium with Sharon Inkelas (Berkeley) on “A Cyclic Optimizing Approach to Morphology.” That’s Friday 16 April at 3:30pm in the Greenberg room!
This paper addresses the conflict between multiple exponence and blocking and proposes a theoretical model which generates both without the need for stipulating either. Multiple (extended) exponence is the occurrence of more than one morpheme, or morphological construction, in the same word that expones the same morphological category (e.g. Matthews 1974; Stump 1991, 2001, Anderson 2001, 2005; Blevins 2003). The existence of multiple exponence stands in direct competition with principles of economy in morphology, which have been cited as motivating the phenomenon of blocking, e.g. of *man-s by men, in which the structurally simpler and/or lexicalized means of expressing the same complex meaning is preferred. As a result, multiple exponence has been a thorn in the side of constraint-based approaches to morphology. The solution proposed is a cyclic, ‘inside-out’ approach to word formation, couched in a very general Optimality Theory framework, in which both multiple exponence and its opposite, blocking, emerge as outcomes of optimizing word structure along scales of meaning strength (‘faithfulness’) and structural well-formedness (‘markedness’).
Grigori Mints (Stanford) is giving a Stanford Philosophy Colloquium today (April 16), 3:15 pm, Building 90, Room 92Q.
Social aspect of mathematical proofs is often used as an argument against a possibility to complete serious informal proofs to a sequence of statements beginning with axioms and proceeding by fixed inference rules. After review of related opinions (A. Jaffe and F. Quinn, Yu. Manin, J. Auslander, W. Thurston, S.P. Novikov, N. Vavilov) two recent areas of research are described: proof checking and proof mining.
Bas van Fraassen is speaking today (April 16), 12:00-1:30 pm, in Cordura 100. The title of the talk is ‘Representation and imaging’. It’s a Logical Methods in the Humanities special event.
When resemblance is the vehicle of representation the representation relation derives from selective resemblances and selective non-resemblance. That selection are must be highlighted. If the selection or the highlighting is indicated by signs placed in the artifact itself, these also need to be meaningful to play their role, and so the task of identification is pushed back but reappears as essentially unchanged. Thus, what determines the representation relationship can at best be a relation of what is in it to factors neither in the artifact itself nor in what is being represented. While resemblance is certainly not crucial to all forms of representation, there are various modes of representation that trade on resemblance for their success: imaging (representation that is effected through resemblance), picturing (imaging that involves elements of perspective), and scaling. While the main points can be illustrated with examples from art, my main interest lies in their importance for philosophy of science.
Scales Day is tomorrow. This is an all-day workshop organized by the Construction of Meaning group, beginning at 9:45 am. Check out the program for times and more information. Speakers include Adrian Brasoveanu, Larry Horn, Marcin Morzycki, Jessica Rett, and Maziar Toosarvandani.
Stanford Linguists Lucas Champollion and Chris Potts are giving talks at the 6th International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication, Riga, Latvia, April 23-25. Also on the program is grad Itamar Francez (2007 PhD; now a post-doc at University of Chicago).
Just what exactly goes on in Nijmegen? Lis Norcliffe sends us this piece of photographic evidence, taken by Alejandro Guarin, of herself, Laura Staum Casasanto, Daniel Casasanto, and Victor Kuperman at In De Blaauwe Hand, the oldest pub in Nijmegen, which has been going strong since 1542.
