Salutations to more of our visitors:

Adrian Brasoveanu received his PhD in linguistics with a cognitive science certificate from Rutgers in January 2007 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program and a visiting faculty member in the department. His primary research interests (pursued over the last two years at Rutgers, University of Frankfurt, IMS Stuttgart and UC Santa Cruz) are in formal semantics and pragmatics, in particular: (i) anaphoric and quantificational parallels between the individual, temporal, modal and degree domains, (ii) ways of integrating different semantic and pragmatic frameworks, e.g. various strands of Montagovian and dynamic semantics, and (iii) the cross-linguistic semantics (and syntax) of various constructions, e.g. measure expressions and nominal phrases containing them, correlatives, singular and plural donkey sentences, exceptional wide scope indefinites, discourse particles like "therefore" and their interaction with quantificational & modal subordination, attitude & speech act reports etc. He is also interested in Optimality Theory, in particular the logic of ranking arguments and learnability.

Ulrike Pado is a visiting scholar working with Dan Jurafsky. She studied at Saarland University and the University of Edinburgh, balancing her interests in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. Her research focus is on computational models of human sentence comprehension and lexical semantics.

Bury the N-word?
Denver Post - Denver,CO,USA
`Whether ceremonies can force a language change is doubtful', said John Rickford , linguistics professor at Stanford University. ... Read about it HERE.

Biz360 Appoints Stanford Professor, Christopher Manning, as Company Advisor. You can find out about that HERE or HERE.

Doug Ball's paper just appeared in the most recent version of Oceanic Linguistics, available HERE. Nice going, Doug!

Quote of the Week: `Pronouns are my fruitfly'. Andy Kehler, during his colloquium presentation (Oct. 19).

We had quite a Stanford turnout at NWAV this year (again!). Here's some of the Stanford folks who were presenting there:

Presented papers:

• Sarah J. Roberts: The demographics of Creole formation in Hawaii
• Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Ohio State U): What did you think she'd say? Expectations and sociolinguistic perception
• Sakiko Kajino and Robert J. Podesva (Georgetown U): Non-pronominal self-reference and the construction of an alternative Japanese femininity
• Ellen Bernard, Curtis Andrus and Arto Anttila: Linking-r in Eastern Massachusetts and Optimality Theory
• Robert J. Podesva and Elaine Chun (U. South Carolina): On indeterminacy in the social meaning of variation
• Carmen Fought (Pitzer College): "I'd better schedule an MRI": The linguistic construction of 'white' ethnicity
• Ceil Lucas, Amber Goeke, Rebecca Briesacher and Robert Bayley: Phonological variation in American Sign Language: 2 hands or 1?
• Elaine Chun (U. South Carolina): 'Oh my god!': Stereotypical words at the intersection of sound, practice, and social meaning
• Ian Tippets and Scott Schwenter (Ohio State U): Relative animacy and differential object marking in Spanish
• Lauren Hall-Lew, Elizabeth Coppock and Rebecca Starr: Variation in the 'Iraq' Vowel: Conservatives vs. Liberals

Posters:

• Patrick Callier (Georgetown U): An obvious surprise: language, gender, and sentence-final particles in Mandarin
• Norma Mendoza-Denton (U. Arizona): Modelling synchrony and entrainment for sociolinguistic variation

A Workshop:

• Ceil Lucas, Bob Bayley, and Joseph Hill: Variation in sign languages: Methodological and analytical issues

In addition, check out this photo of Stanford folks at the NWAV party:

Also:

• Elizabeth Traugott was the plenary speaker at the Japan Cognitive Linguistics Association (JCLA8) in Tokyo September 22nd, presenting a paper titled Constructional emergence from the perspective of grammaticalization: The case of pseudo-clefts; she also gave two seminars on Motivation in Language Change.
• Elizabeth was also the plenary speaker at Studies in English Historical Linguistics (SHEL5) in Athens, Georgia in early October, speaking on Dialogic and dialogual contexts for morphosyntactic change.
• Joanna Nykiel also presented a paper at SHEL5 called Grammaticalization of English Sluicing?, where her brother Jerzy Nykiel was also presenting a paper. Well, if the Ferreira siblings can do it in psycholinguistics....
• Lauren Hall-Lew presented a joint paper with Nola Stephens at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Culture, Language, and Social Practice, held October 5-7 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The paper was called Talkin' Country: Locating an Ideological Speech Community.
• Adrian Brasoveanu presented Structured Contexts for Natural Language Interpretation. Part 1: Contextually Encoded Quantificational Dependencies (Part 2 was given by Sam Cumming, Philosophy, UCLA) at the Fall 2007 Semantics Workshop, Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University.
• Eve Clark gave a plenary talk - 'Les adultes comme source de construction des connaissances linguistiques des enfants' - at the 3ème Colloque: Constructivisme et Education: ``Construction intra/intersubjective des Connaissances", in Geneva. (Did you firstyears know that it's Eve who administers the Department's French exam?)

Thank God for church ladies with typewriters. These sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced in church services:

The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.



The sermon this morning: "Jesus Walks on the Water." The sermon tonight: "Searching for Jesus."



Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.



Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say "Hell" to someone who doesn't care much about you. (i.e. "hello")



Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.



Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way again," giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.



For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.



Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.



Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.



A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.



At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What Is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.



Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.



Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.



Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.

• THIS WEEK'S EVENTS
• UPCOMING EVENTS (always under construction)
• LINGUISTIC DEPARTMENT EVENTS PAGE
• Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.
• WHAT'S HAPPENING AT UC SANTA CRUZ?
  
• WHAT'S GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY?
  

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of O-, O+, A-, A+, B-, and AB-. For an appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. The Blood Center is also raising money for a new bloodmobile.

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Contribute something at the top of this page or write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.