Tyler Schnoebelen, this year’s Corpus TA, has started a blog to make us all more knowledgeable and involved with corpora. The blog hasn’t even been up a month and it’s already choc full of useful information! Tyler tells us that anyone is welcome to contribute a guest post on their favorite corpus or technique.
To get access to Stanford’s corpora, follow the instructions here and email Tyler.
For those who didn’t attend Philip Hofmeister‘s tutorials on methods in experimental linguistics, he’s put the slides online at his website. Check out the slides here if you want to know about Experimental Design, and here if you want to know about Methods in Experimental Linguistics!
Today at noon, Rebecca Starr and Stephanie Shih will be presenting work on “Variation in moraicity in Japanese text-setting” in the Phonetics and Phonology Workshop (in the Greenberg Room of course!). Here’s the abstract:
Text-setting is largely determined by a language’s most salient prosodic units (Yung 1991; Halle and Lerdahl 1993; Hayes 2009; a.o.). Japanese, which exhibits a dominantly moraic prosodic structure, is predicted to have a mora-based text-setting system (Hayes and Swiger 2008). The present study of translated Disney songs and native anime songs finds that, while mora-based text-setting is the default in Japanese, non-moraic variants are common, particularly in loan words and translation contexts. The results offer evidence towards the hypothesis that the differences in moraicity in Japanese partially stem from phonological differences present across Japanese lexical strata (Itô and Mester 1995).
Sali A. Tagliamonte (U Toronto) will be giving a department colloquium today at 3:30pm, in the Greenberg Room. Her topic is “A dialect landscape of linguistic change: The view from Canada.”
Here’s her abstract:
In this presentation I synthesize the results arising from a research program studying the transmission and diffusion of linguistic change in Ontario, Canada’s largest province. Two contrasting linguistic features, each from distinct levels of grammar encapsulate the emerging findings: (1) stative possession and (2) quotatives.
(1) He has a fishing boat but it’s got music in it.
(2) And he said, “What are you insane?” I’m like, “What does insane mean?”The trajectories of change for these variables in Toronto, the largest city in Canada (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2007; Tagliamonte, D’Arcy and Jankowski 2010) provide a base-line. Although Canadian English is often thought to be one large dialect from sea to sea (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006); this homogeneity is an urban phenomenon (Chambers 1991:93). In recent years, fieldwork in cities and towns outlying the city are beginning to unearth a more nuanced picture of these developments (e.g. Tagliamonte & Denis 2008).
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The Stanford Humanities Center and Center for the Study of Language and Information are sponsoring a workshop today on Mental Imagery and Cognition (1:15 – 6:15pm in Cordura 100). The all-star lineup of talks includes Stephen Kosslyn, Tanya Luhrmann, David Kraemer (U Penn), and Lera Boroditsky. Plus there’s free lunch at noon!
The program is reproduced below. See the website for abstracts and more details!
12:00pm-1:15pm Lunch.
1:15pm-2:15pm: Stephen Kosslyn
The Imagery Debate 30+ Years Later: Can Neuroscientific Data Settle the Issue?2:30pm-3:30pm: Tanya Luhrmann
Prayer and mental imagery4:00pm-5:00pm: David Kraemer (UPenn)
Individual Propensities for Visual and Verbal Cognition5:15pm-6:15pm: Lera Boroditsky
Imagining the visible, the invisible, and the impossible
Mark Schroeder (USC) will be giving a talk today at 3:15 pm in room 90-92Q on “Tempered Expressivism”. This event is sponsored by the Philosophy Department’s Hume Society:
This paper explores and compares two versions of what I call Tempered Expressivism: one familiar and one not. What both tempered theories share is the idea that not just any state of mind can be expressed by a declarative sentence, but only states that ‘involve’ ordinary descriptive belief. Both theories use this restriction on what sorts of state can be expressed by declarative sentences to solve many of the problems facing traditional versions of Expressivism. But these two theories understand the ‘involvement’ relation in different ways. The first – Hybrid Expressivism – is a familiar idea, and faces important limitations. The second – what I call Relational Expressivism – turns out to have many of the same advantages of Hybrid Expressivism, but with a very different set of commitments. Though I know of no clear articulations of relational expressivism in the literature, I argue that it is worth understanding and taking seriously.
The Workshop on Context Dependence in Language and Communication, sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, will be hosting Adrian Brasoveanu (UCSC) on Wednesday (11/16) and Thursday (11/17) next week. On Wednesday (4:30 pm in the Greenberg Room), he’ll be giving a tutorial on “The Grammar of Quantification and the Fine Structure of Interpretation Contexts.” This paper is recommended reading! On Thursday, he’ll be giving a talk on “Sentence-internal “Different” as Quantifier-internal Anaphora” (same time, same place). The abstracts are below.
Tutorial abstract:
Providing a compositional interpretation procedure for discourses in which descriptions of complex dependencies between interrelated objects are incrementally built is a key challenge for formal theories of natural language interpretation. This paper examines several quantificational phenomena and argues that we need richly structured contexts of interpretation that are passed on between different parts of the same sentence and also across sentential boundaries to account for these phenomena. The main contribution of the paper is showing how we can add structure to contexts in an incremental way, starting with the basic notion of context in classical first-order logic, i.e., interpretation contexts formalized as single total variable assignments.
Talk abstract:
The main goal of the talk is to develop a unified account of deictic / sentence-external and sentence-internal readings of singular “different”. These two kinds of readings, exemplified in (1), (2) and (3) below, have been known to exist at least since Carlson (1987), but no unified account has been proposed to date:
(1) a. Mary recited `The Raven’.
b. Then, Linus recited a different poem.
(deictic / sentence-external: different from `The Raven’)(2) a. Mary recited `The Raven’.
b. Then, every boy recited a different poem.
(deictic / sentence-external: different from `The Raven’)(3) Every boy recited a di fferent poem.
(sentence-internal: for any two boys a and b, a’s poem is different from b’s poem)
1. He had only one major publication.
2. It was in Hebrew.
3. It had no references.
4. It wasn’t published in a refereed journal.
5. Some even doubt he wrote it by himself.
6. It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?
7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
8. The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.
9. He never applied to the ethics board for permission to use human subjects.
10.When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it by drowning his subjects.
11.When subjects didn’t behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample.
12.He rarely came to class, just told students to read the book.
13.Some say he had his son teach the class.
14.He expelled his first two students for learning.
15.Although there were only 10 requirements, most of his students failed his tests.
16.His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.