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.
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?)
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.