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Sesquipedalian #6, November 4, 1993
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Subject: Sesquipedalian #6, November 4, 1993
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The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume IV, Number 6
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November 4, 1993
TOWARDS A NEW WORD ORDER
During the cold war, the balance of power seemed equally
divided between the West, dominated by SVO speakers, and the Soviet
Bloc, dominated by Scrambling speakers. However, with the end of the
cold war, and the emergence of the West as the surviving political
force, there emerged the possibility of a new dominant word order. As
scrambling Russia fell into turmoil, the SVO West waxed. A major
victory for SVO forces came with the reunification of Germany, where
the East Germans threw off the yoke of their scrambling masters, and
were able to assert their fixed-order heritage. Seizing the
opportunity, the United States declared the emergence of a New Word
Order: SVO.
This did not come about without considerable behind-the-scenes
diplomacy. The Parliament of the new, unified Germany, prompted by
lucrative economic incentives, adopted SVO as the 'official' word
order, with the provision that SOV would be tolerated in some
subordinate contexts. Unfortunately this was ill-received by the
Japanese, who responded by introducing a new line of post-fix
calculators. The rest of Western Europe went along, with a few
abstentions (e.g., Ireland), and some internal dissension (the Welsh
MP walked out of the session of the UK Parliament when it became clear
that an SVO provision would be adopted; ETA phoned in a bomb threat
when the Spanish Cortes was to vote on a similar proposal).
However, just as SVO was being established as the New Word
Order, it faced its most formidable challenge: Seeking to assert a
pan-Arab VSO presence, Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait,
a principality that was considered overly accommodating to the SVO
West. The SVO-led 'International' force that responded to this
aggression was, predictably, largely composed of English and French
speakers. In fact it was suggested that Germany and Japan hid behind
their constitutional prohibitions against entering the conflict, but
in fact were prompted by non-SVO sympathies.(*) In the end, the
technological superiority of the SVO force won the day, and the world
seemed safe for the New, SVO Word Order.
But that position is no longer secure. Blossoming threats to
the stability of the SVO world continue to emerge, showing that the
real situation is not as clear as was hoped. The fact that no real
agreement has been reached with the Japanese is disquieting, to say
the least. The recent resignation of Germany's Finance Minister is
seen by some as an indication that SOV forces have not been eliminated
there. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the fact that Israel's position
in the New Word Order remains unclear has perhaps allowed for the
triumphant Middle East Peace Talks, but has fragmented the Arab-VSO
world even further. And problems long overshadowed by the cold war,
such as those in VOS Somalia and scrambling Serbia, have filled the
vacuum left by the Soviet threat. Finally, and most alarming, are the
recent reports of plutonium production in Walpiri speaking regions of
Australia.
-- J. Moore/K. Wohlmut
[* The division between pro- and anti-Hussein forces within the Arab
world did not necessarily fall along SVO/VSO lines. While standard
Arabic is VSO, many of the modern dialects are in fact SVO.
Interestingly, Hussein himself is a speaker of an SVO dialect, used
VSOism as a symbol of pan-Arabism. Pro-Hussein Arabs included SVO
Jordanians and VSO Lybians. Anti-Hussein Arabs included SVO Saudis
and VSO Moroccans. The shifting alliances of the Arab World mystify
political scientists and linguists alike.]
-\-\-\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-/-/-
-- Bill Poser has had a busy few months, presenting twice at the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, and once at
the University of Pennsylvania, in September. On October 17th he
presented 'Comments on the papers on grammaticization' at the Fourth
Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (UCLA), and then presented
'Phonological Adjacency and its Consequences' at the Western
Conference on Linguistics (University of Washington, Seattle) on
October 23. In January, he will be presenting 'The History and
Structure of the D\'en\'e Syllabics' at the LSA meeting in Boston.
-\-\-\ CALL FOR PAPERS /-/-/-
-- CLRF-XXVI: The 26th annual meeting of the Child Language Research
Forum will be held on April 15-17, 1994, at Stanford University. The
Organizing Committee welcomes abstracts for papers and posters on any
topic within first language acquisition, from sociolinguistic studies
of requests to the acquisition of consonant clusters, from
crosslinguistic studies of locatives to the factors governing pronoun
forms, or from constraints on lexical acquisition to the role of
prosody in the acquisition of syntax. Abstract submissions should
include: Ten (10) copies of a one-page, double-spaced abstract of the
paper, preferably in 12-point font or type, with a title. OMIT name
and affiliation; A 3" by 5" card with the title of the paper and the
name(s) of the author(s), address and email address, and specifying
any necessary AV equipment. We can provide projectors for slides or
transparencies ONLY if we know what you will need. A self-addressed,
stamped postcard if you wish to be notified that your abstract has
been received. Abstracts should be postmarked by January 10, 1994.
PLEASE MAIL EARLY! No late abstracts will be accepted. All research
must be completed (ie. no promissory abstracts). No papers already
presented at other conferences will be accepted. Only one paper per
author or co-author will be accepted, although abstracts for more than
one paper may be submitted. Abstracts should contain: a statement of
the hypothesis, a brief account of the study performed, data and
results, and a summary of the conclusions reached. Send abstracts to
CLRF-94
Department of Linguistics, Building 100
Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA
phone: (415) 723-4284
We are also soliciting brief resumes of current research on child
language from all researchers, regardless of whether they plan to
attend the Forum, and regardless of whether they have submitted
abstracts for presentation. These resumes should not exceed 200 words;
they will be reproduced for distribution at the Forum. If you are
submitting an abstract, please send in a resume at the same time.
Resumes should be postmarked by January 10, 1994.
-- International Conference on New Methods in Language Processing
(***REVISED*** CALL FOR PAPERS): 14-16th September 1994 (inclusive).
Location: Centre for Computational Linguistics, UMIST, Manchester, UK.
In recent years there has been a steadily increasing interest in
alternative theories and methodologies to the mainstream techniques of
symbolic computational linguistics. This international conference
will provide a forum for researchers in the broad area of new methods
in NLP, i.e., symbolic and non-symbolic techniques of analogy-based,
statistical, and connectionist processing, to present their most
recent research and to discuss its implications. In order to focus
the conference, however, it is intended to concentrate on research
primarily involving written NLP. It is also hoped that the conference
will promote discussion in general terms of what this branch of NLP
hopes to achieve and how far this paradigm can take NLP in the future.
Preliminary paper submission deadline: 31st March 1994. Authors
should submit FOUR *hard* copies of a preliminary version of the paper
(NOT an outline or abstract) which should be no longer than 6 (A4)
pages long, printed no smaller than 10-point. Papers should include a
brief abstract, and a list of key words indicating which of the above
topics are addressed. A contact address for the author(s) (preferably
e-mail) should also be included. Send papers to
NeMLaP
Centre for Computational Linguistics,
UMIST
Sackville Street
Manchester, UK
email: nemlap@ccl.umist.ac.uk
-\-\-\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
Because of the Sharks-Stars game at the Shark Tank this Friday, there
will be no regular colloquium on November 5. Happy hour will follow
only in the event of a Sharks victory.
(Note: If there is still anyone just itchin' for a talk, we encourage
you to attend the Deborah Schiffrin job talk on Tuesday, November 9--
see below for details.)
-\-\-\ SOCIOLINGUISTICS JOB TALKS /-/-/-
REMINDER: The third Sociolinguistics Colloquium at Stanford will take
place on Tuesday, November 9th at 7:30 pm.
NOTE THE ROOM CHANGE: 60-61H
DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN
Georgetown Univeristy
GENRE AND TOPIC: WHAT NARRATIVES AND LISTS ARE "ABOUT"
Narratives are a discourse unit whose form, meaning, and use have been
especially interesting to scholars in various fields, including
sociolinguistics. Other discourse units that have received less
attention, however, also offer valuable insights into discourse level
constraints on linguistic form. After presenting an overview of the
structure of a relatively unstudied discourse unit-- the list-- I
examine how linguistic variation (e.g. between nouns and pronouns,
existentials and possessives) reflects (and helps to build) text and
sentence level topics in both genres. This comparison suggests that
constraints such as thematicity, recency, and accessibility are
relative to speech genre. On a more general level, the study suggests
the need to integrate what is sometimes seen as two different
methodological and theoretical "camps" in sociolinguistics (i.e.,
variationist and interactional sociolinguistics).
-\-\-\ SPECIAL LECTURE /-/-/-
NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION AND THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH (Peter Tiersma,
Loyola Law School, Los Angeles): Monday November 15th, 7:30 p.m. in
370-370.
The United States Supreme Court has recognized for some time that the
freedom of "speech" pertains not only to speaking, but to certain
other types of action as well. Yet not all activities deemed
"nonverbal communication" raise First Amendment issues. For example,
burning an American flag or wearing a black armband have been held
protected by the Free Speech Clause, but the Court has questioned the
extent to which acts like burning a draft card to protest the Vietnam
War, or sleeping in tents in public places to dramatize homelessness,
are "speech" for First Amendment purposes. I propose that the legal
distinctions acts that count as "speech" and those that do not can be
understood in terrms of the linguistic distinction between when people
communicate by means of conduct and when people merely draw inferences
>From conduct. People indicate that their acts are intended to
communicate by various means, such as performing the act before an
audience, doing it in a ritualistic manner, and performing it for no
apparent purpose. The analysis helps to rationalize a number of First
Amendment cases involving what is termed "symbolic speech" or
"expressive conduct".
Peter Tiersma holds a J.D. from Boalt Law School, a Ph.D. in
Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A.
in German Studies from Stanford University. His talk is given in
connection with Linguistics 54, Speech in Action, a Peters Seminar
designed for sophomores. It is co-sponsored by the Department of
Linguistics, the Department of German Studies, and Crown Law School.
-\-\-\ TRUE LINGUISTS /-/-/-
>From our e-mail correspondent in Finland, Bonnie McElhinny:
I had the privilege of lecturing on the history of feminism, women's
studies and language and gender in Latvia last week. I visited several
faculties of the Univ. of Latvia (the faculty of modern languages, the
faculty of social science and philosophy), at the Latvian Academy of
Sciences, and at the brand-new Academy of Culture.
I learned a lot, even in four days, about some of the issues
facing women, in the academy and outside of it. Apparently male
faculty are being hired much more rapidly by new corporations, which
means that institutions of higher education are feminizing (or being
feminized) at an extraordinary rate. Since faculty at the university
are paid about 25 lahts/month (approximately $50), and workers outside
are earning 5 times as much, there's a rapidly developing economic
division between male and female scholars. In addition, a significant
percentage of the women students we met were wary about
state-supported daycare, given some of its ideological uses during the
Soviet period. This in turn partly contributed towards many of them
thinking that emancipation for women at this point would be
emancipation from the forced labor force participation they had
experienced in the Soviet period (and the double burden of working
full-time, and doing all of the 2nd shift work in a society with
chronic consumer shortages). This reaction has also been documented
in other post-Soviet states in the collection GENDER POLITICS AND
POST-COMMUNISM. Of course, staying home is not an option open to all,
or even many, Latvian women, given current economic conditions, but
it's an aspiration. Many of them were also quite interested in
discussing how to reconcile church teachings on women with feminist
ideas. In general, I was struck by the similarities between the ways
many Latvian women talked about family and church as sources of
emotional support and strength and the ways that African-American
feminists (cf. Patricia Hill Collins) also talk about family and
church.
I was struck, as many recent visitors to Eastern Europe have
been, by the hunger for information of any kind from the West. Though
the availability of such information is no longer restricted
politically, it is restricted economically by universities' and
professors' straitened financial circumstances. I produced a 6 page
handout for an overview lecture on language and gender. The audience
was one of the most avid I'd ever had. Four MA students in
linguistics, in particular, asked me to extend my talk, and we ended
up talking 3 hours instead of one. The students gave the handout
back, so that their instructor could give it to professors elsewhere
in the university. The instructor also arranged for it to be
translated into Russian and Latvian. It was really so very little. I
was embarrassed, in fact, not to have produced a more comprehensive
outline so that it could have been more of a resource. I asked if
there were any particular books that they needed, and of course there
are many, but general surveys are most needed. Of the books listed on
bibliographies I had with me Latvian scholars particularly mentioned
those listed below. If you have an extra copy (an extra desk copy
>From the publisher, for example), or if you'd be willing to buy an
extra copy, any contributions would be welcomed. Photocopies of key
articles are also very welcome, and I'm sure extra coursereaders would
also be useful.
SOME BOOKS that are NEEDED in LATVIA:
A: General surveys on language and gender (mentioned explicitly by those
at my talk on language and gender)
Cameron, Deborah. 1985. Feminism and Linguistic Theory
Coates, Jennifer. 1986. Women, Men and Language
McConnell-Ginet, Sally et al 1980. Women and Language in Literature and
Society.
Philips, Steele and Tanz. 1987. Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative
Perspective.
Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand.
Thorne and Henley. 1975. Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance.
Todd and Fisher. 1988. Gender and Discourse
B: General surveys on linguistics (especially sociolinguistics and
crosscultural communication), including ugrad/graduate textbooks (like
Fromkin and Rodman, Language Files, Hudson, Wardhaugh, Fasold) or
linguistic 'classics' (Hymes, Gumperz). Labov's early works might be
particularly useful, since there is enormous interest in & confusion about
what class means in a 'post-Marxist' context.
C: Books by contemporary women writers, and general works on feminist
literary criticism.
D: Books on social and cultural movements. Political and economic
histories are more easily obtained. Any books about political movements
(Civil Rights, Vietnam Era, Women's Studies, Native American), past and
present, are welcome.
E: Theoretical Surveys on Women's Studies/Feminist Theory,including basic
texts in women's studies, and including classics of other women's movements
e.g.
Davis, Flora. 1992? Moving the Mountain.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash.
Friedan, Betty. Feminist Mystique.
Jaggar, Alison. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature.
Jaggar and Rothenberg. Feminist Frameworks
Rhode, Deborah. 1992. Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference.
Tong, Rosemary. Feminist Thought.
....and many others
F. Books on the management of culture (i.e. books on museum work,
cultural sociology, management of culture (TV, movies, etc.), film
directing, etc.
G. Any books recently published in the West on Eastern Europe and
post-Soviet states. This scholarship is NOT automatically
disseminating back to Eastern European scholars. For instance, the
latest issue of HYPATIA on E. Europe, or the collection GENDER
POLITICS AND POST-COMMUNISM would be welcome.
If you're in the US and have books to donate, you can send materials
to the following address, and I will arrange for them to be forwarded,
along with a note listing all contributors.
179 Browns Mill Road
Evans City, PA 16033
One advantage perhaps to sending one package is I can try to ensure
that we don't duplicate each other's efforts.
If however you'd prefer to directly contact Latvian
institutions, you can send materials to the following addresses.
Please mention to them where and how you heard about them.
Dr. Irina Novikova
Dept. of English Philology
Faculty of Foreign Languages
Univ. of Latvia
Visvalzka 4A
Riga, LATVIA
phone: 371-227-856
fax: 371-222-5039
(Especially interested in books on women's studies--theory, feminist
literary criticism, linguistics, syllabi WITH accompanying reading,
studies published in the West on women and gender in Eastern Euro.
Irina has contacts with Latvian and Russian scholars in the social
sciences and the humanities at the University of Latvia, as well as
journalists. She coordinated my visit.)
Latvijas Kulturas Akademija (Latvian Academy of Culture)
Ludzas iela 24
Riga LV-1003, LATVIA
phone (0132) 140-175 OR (0132) 141-012
Apologies for such a lengthy message. But I hope that at least some
of you will be able to donate extra books and materials you may have.
Bonnie McElhinny
P.S. Please feel free to post or disseminate this on other networks,
bulletin boards (electronic or cork), etc.
-\-\-\ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS /-/-/-
(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
-- The University of the South Pacific: Lecturer in Linguistics.
Applications are invited for a lectureship in Linguistics, within the
department of literature and language. The appointee will coordinate
the department's undergradulate course in semantics and pragmatics and
contribute to the offerings on general linguistics and in English
linguistics. The Regional Univiersity of the South Pacific serves
twelve island states and hundreds of linguistics communities. It thus
offers the scholar unique research opportunities. Applicants should
have strong postgraduate qualifications in Linguistics and experience
of tertiary teaching in the field. Pacific or other third world
experience would be an advantage. Further information can be obtained
>From the Assistant Registrar (Staffing) telephone 31 3900; Telex
FJ2276; Fax (679) 30 3437. Applications should be sent to the
Registrar, The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji, to reach
her no later than 15 November 1993.
-- UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON: A tenure-track appointment is intended in
the area of syntactic theory beginning September 1994. A
specialization in a non-Indo-European language and an interest in
collaborative work with other cognitive scientists on campus are
especially desireable. Applicants should have the Ph.D. degree and be
highly qualified for undergraduate and graduate teaching and
independent research. Applications, including CV, statement of
research, teaching interests, and three letters of recommendation
should be sent to
Prof. Frederick J. Newmeyer, Chair
Department of Linguistics
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195
Priority will be given to applications received before December 1,
1993. Please include your e-mail address. AA/EOE
-- The Palo Alto Unified School District has hourly ($9.75) part-time
positions as bilingual tutors. Qualified applicants must pass an
English proficiency test and be able to speak one of the following
languages: Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Norwegian, Samoan, Vietnamese.
In each language we currently have one or two students who need help.
This would mean three to ten hours per week. Legal work status is a
prerequisite unless you are willing to volunteer. Other languages may
be needed at a later date. Please contact
Judy Nishiyama
ELD Support Services
415/855-9854
(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
-\-\-\ INSTA-PRIZE /-/-/-
THE WORLD OF ART: What is the actual title for J.A.M. Whistler's
portrait of his mother sitting in a chair?
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-\-\-\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /-/-/-
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before you've read it), the Sesquipedalian Weekly Herald is stored
online both at Stanford (in directory /user/linguistics/Sesquip), and
at Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.) The most current issue of
the Herald can be found by typing 'help quip'.
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Assembled in USA
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