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Sesquipedalian #8, November 18, 1993

The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD		       Volume IV, Number 8
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                                                       November 18, 1993

			    PHILOSOPHY CORNER:
		      THE JEAN-PAUL SARTRE COOKBOOK

We have been lucky to discover several previously lost diaries of
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stuck in between the cushions of
our office sofa.  These diaries reveal a young Sartre obsessed not
with the void, but with food.  Apparently Sartre, before discovering
philosophy, had hoped to write "a cookbook that will put to rest all
notions of flavour forever."  The diaries are excerpted here for your
perusal.


October 3, 1932
Spoke with Camus today about my cookbook.  Though he has never actually
eaten, he gave me much encouragement.  I rushed home immediately to begin
work.  How excited I am!  I have begun my formula for a Denver omelet.

October 4
Still working on the omelet.  There have been stumbling blocks.  I keep
creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea,
but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone.  I want to create an omelet
that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste
like cheese.  I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back.
Tried eating them with the lights off.  It did not help.  Malraux
suggested paprika.

October 6 
I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is
bourgeois.  Today I tried making one out of cigarette, some coffee,
and four tiny stones.  I fed it to Malraux, who gagged.  I am
encouraged, but my journey is still long.

October 10
I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional
dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely.
Today I tried this recipe:

Tuna Casserole
Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish
Place the casserole dish in a cold oven.  Place a chair facing the oven
and sit in it forever.  Think about how hungry you are.  When night
falls, do not turn on the light.

While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its
inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle.  How can the eater recognize
that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish?  I
am becoming more and more frustated.

October 25
I have been forced to abandon the project of producing an entire
cookbook.  Rather, I now seek a single recipe which will, by itself,
embody the plight of man in a world ruled by an unfeeling God, as well as
providing the eater with at least one ingredient from each of the four
basic food groups.  To this end, I purchased six hundred pounds of
foodstuffs from the corner grocery and locked myself in the kitchen,
refusing to admit anyone.  After several weeks of work, I produced a
recipe calling for two eggs, half a cup of flour, four tons of beef, and
a leek.  While this is a start, I am afraid I still have much work ahead.

November 15
Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a
live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word cake.  I was
very pleased.  Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for
dessert.  Still, I feel that this may be my most profound achievement
yet, and have resolved to enter it in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

November 30

Today was the day of the Bake-Off.  Alas, things did not go as I had
hoped. During the judging, the beaver became agitated and tried to
bite Betty Crocker on the wrist.  Though the beaver's powerful jaws
are capable of felling blue spruce in less than ten minutes, they
proved no match for the whirling steel kitchen implements of America's
favourite homemaker.  I only got third place.  Moreover, I am now the
subject of a rather nasty lawsuit.

December 1
I have been gaining twenty-five pounds a week for two months, and I am
now experiencing light tides.  It is stupid to be so fat.  My pain and
ultimate solitude are still as authentic as they were when I was thin,
but seem to impress people far less.  From now on, I will live on
cigarettes and black coffee.

(Marty Smith in "Free Agent")

                   -\-\-\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-/-/-

-- Charlotte Linde will present a paper at the American
Anthropological Association, November 20, 1993, in the Session on
Cultural Perspectives on Computing and Technology, entitled, '"I don't
wanna be computer literate": Group Construction of Workplace Learning.'

		 -\-\-\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-

The next Linguistics Colloquium will take place on Friday, November
19th at 3:30 pm in Cordura 100.  The speaker will be Herb Clark of the
Psychology Department.  The usual Happy Hour will follow.

		    JOINT ACTION AND LANGUAGE USE
			   Herbert H. Clark

Language use, I will argue, is best viewed as a species of joint
activity.  In a two person conversation, the current speaker and
addressee, A and B, must coordinate (1) A's vocalizations with B's
attention, (2) A's presentation of an utterance with B's
identification of that utterance, (3) what A means by that utterance
with what B takes it to mean, and (4) and A's and B's commitments to
larger joint projects.  That is, spontaneous language use has at least
four levels of joint actions.  According to this view, many phenomena
of everyday conversation are really the more general consequences of
joint actions.  I will take up a range of phenomena from both
experimental and natural settings and show how they follow from this
view of language use and joint action.

NEXT WEEK: No colloquium due to the Sharks-Ducks game.  There will be
a special colloquium on November 30 with Eva Hajicova (details TBA).

		  -\-\-\ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP /-/-/-

Our next Phonolgy Workshop will take place next TUESDAY, Nov. 23, 7:30
p.m., Ventura 17.  There will be two separate talks.

Final consonant invisibility in Amele: evidence for domain windows
                        Sharon Inkelas
              University of California, Berkeley

Prince and Smolensky 1993 and McCarthy and Prince 1993 have recently
argued that so-called extrametricality, or invisibility, effects can
be reduced in Optimality Theory to the alignment (or misalignment) of
metrical structure with the segmental string. The relevant
(mis)alignment takes two forms: overparsing, in which a final syllable
is overlarge due to a requirement that the word-final consonant be
syllabified, and underparsing, in which a final syllable or consonant
is left unparsed due to a nonfinality constraint. This reductionist
approach requires none of the various representational devices
developed in the past for invisibility.
	In this paper, I introduce data from Amele (Papuan; Roberts
1987) which pose a problem for the reductionist claims of Optimality
Theory, concluding that the theory should incorporate a nonmetrical
representation of invisibility in terms of domain windows (Inkelas
1989).

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         An optimality account of n/0 alternation in Korean
                       Young-mee Yu Cho
                     Stanford University                        

Deletion of the coronal nasal /n/ in the 18th century resulted in
complete neutralization of /ni/ and /i/ in initial position in the
synchronic grammar of Korean. However, the n/0 alternation in the
medial position is much more complex; not only the etymologic
(historically true) but also the nonetymologic (historically
unattested) /n/ surfaces in the non-initial position. The paper
demonstrates that a rule-based account is not descriptively adequate
since neither the historically true deletion account nor the rule
inversion account with an insertion rule can account for the data.  It
will be argued that the relevant constraint should be based on the
language's strong preference for sonorant clusters in the juncture
position, thus accounting for the appearance of [n] in
post-consonantal position in contrast with /0/ in post-vocalic
position.

 	           -\-\-\ WORD OF THE WEEK /-/-/-

Speaking of cooking, ten bonus points to everyone who knew that
engastration is 'the act of stuffing one fowl inside another.' (I'm
serious!  Look it up!) All others, do your best to mix the word into
your conversation before the end of the month (perhaps during your
holiday preparations?), and in the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving.

 	            -\-\-\ CALL FOR PAPERS /-/-/-

-- The 1994 Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders (June
3-4, 1994, University of Wisconsin, Madison) provides a dynamic forum
for the pesentation of research in child language disorders.  The
format of this symposium fosters continuity and interaction among
participants because there are no parallel sessions.  This interaction
is maintained during professional and social activities scheduled
throughout the symposium.  Travel awards are available for students,
and a number of these awards have been set aside for minority
students.  Paper and poster presentations addressing syntactic,
semantic, phonologic and pragmatic disorders in children, and other
related topics are being solicited.  Authors should indicate their
preferred presentation format.  However, the final format of all
presentations will be determined by the program committee.  Each paper
presentation will be allotted 20 minutes.  Only completed research
that has not been previously published or presented should be
submitted.  No more than two proposals per author.  Proposals will be
reviewed blindly by the committee.  Submissions must be received by
Monday, January 17, 1994. Please contact
	SRCLD c/o Vicky Meyers
	1500 Highland Avenye #481
	Madison WI 53705-2280
	phone: 608/623-6791
	fax: 608/263-0529
	email: meyers@waisman.wisc.edu

-- WORKSHOP IN PROSODIC MORPHOLOGY (22-24 June, 1994): Landelijke
Onderzoeksschool Taalkunde presents the Workshop in Prosodic
Morphology at the Research Institute for Language and Speech, Utrecht
University, The Netherlands.  The aim of the workshop is to contribute
to the discussion of the Phonology-Morphology interface, within the
framework of Prosodic Morphology.  The central goal in this field is
to gain insight into the nature of the mutual dependence of
morphological and prosodic categories.  The key observation of this
field is that in many languages, morphological categories are
characterized by a fixed phonological shape, or 'template.'  Moreover,
it is claimed that templates are defined in terms of prosodic
categories, such as mora, syllable, foot, and prosodic word.  Some
typically 'templatic' phenomena are reduplication, truncation, canonic
stem specifications, and minimal word statements.  The workshop will
cover empirical, theoretical, and methodological aspects of this
approach.  Send maximally a 2-page abstract by 1 February 1994 to
	Rene Kager/Wim Zonneveld
	Workshop in Prosodic Morphology
	OTS, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands
	email: kager@let.ruu.nl,zonneveld@let.ruu.nl

-- SALA-XVI: The Department of South Asia Regional Studies and the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania announce
the sixteenth South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable, 20-22 May
1994: 'Languages in Contact.'  Proposals for papers are invited on any
topic related to South Asian Languages in Contact, such as:
Multilingualism, Indian English, Diglossia, Code Switching, etc.
Other proposed panels: South Asian Language Teaching and Acquisition
(for further information contact Vijay Gambhir at 215/898-8437 or
vgambhir@mail.sas.upenn.edu), and Language of Political Rhetoric (for
further information contact Peter Gaeffke at 215/898-7431 or
pgaeffke@mail.sas.upenn.edu).  Send abstracts to
	Organizing Committee, SALA-XVI
	South Asia Regional Studies
	820 Williams Hall, University of Pennsylvania
	Philadelphia PA 19104-6305
	fax: 215/573-2138
	email: scholars-request@southasia.upenn.edu

		     -\-\-\ TRUE LINGUISTS /-/-/-
                    
AREN'T THEY ALL DEPARTMENT: 
	'...Kenneth and Sheila D----- reside in Beloit; he teaches
	 high school mathematics, and she is an at-risk teacher.'
		[Beloit College Magazine]

'SIX OF ONE...' DEPARTMENT:
	'Thirteen people, five men and seven women sat around three
	 round tables in the Adrian Tobias room to discuss...'
		[Adrian College _World_]

AREN'T THEY ALL PART II: 
	Headline from _The Dartmouth_: FACULTY KILLS BIOCHEM MAJOR

		   -\-\-\ 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.)

-- NYU: The Department of Linguistics at New York University has been
authorized to advertise a position (tenured or tenure-track) in the
area of natural language semantics. Candidates must be conversant with
modern syntac- tic theory, and be capable of teaching an introductory
syntax course as well as courses in their area of specialization.
Preference will be given to candidates whose work deals primarily with
the interface between syntax and semantics. The candidate would also
be involved in working with a developing group of linguists,
philosophers, and psychologists who would like to ultimately form an
interdisciplinary group in cognitive science.  Applicants should
submit a curriculum vitae, three references, and copies of recent
work, by Jan. 30, 1994, to:
        Professor Mark R. Baltin
        Chair
        Department of Linguistics
        New York University
        719 Broadway, Rm. #505
        New York, New York 10003
        email: baltin@acfcluster.nyu.edu

-- INDIANA UNIVERSITY: The Department Linguistics, Indiana University,
seeks to appoint a tenure-track assistant professor in theoretical
syntax, starting August, 1994. Familiarity with more than one
theoretical framework, clear promise of distinction in theoretical
research, and excellence in teaching are required. A Ph.D. in hand by
June, 1994 is a must and some publications are preferred.  Please send
a letter of interest, a curriculum vitae, a concise description of
one's research program, three letters of recommendation, and a maximum
of two samples of written work to
	Syntax Search Committee
	Department of Linguistics
	Indiana University
	Bloomington, IN 47405
     Applications received by January 21, 1994 are assured of
consideration.  Note that interviews may be conducted at the LSA
meeting in Boston. Indiana University is an equal
opportunity/affirmative action employer.

-- YALE UNIVERSITY: The Department of Linguistics invites applications
for a senior professor and department chair.  Applicants should have
solid teaching experience at all levels and substantial publications
in one or more areas of theoretical linguistics, including connections
with other fields.  Prior administrative experience is helpful.
Applicants are requested to forward a detailed CV, including a
complete bibliography, before January 31, 1994, to
	Search Committee
	Department of Linguistics
	Yale University
	Box 208236
	New Haven CT 06520-8236
Yale University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.
Women and minority candidates are especially encouraged to apply.

-- UC BERKELEY: Pending budgetary resources, the Department of East
Asian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, has two
openings for a full-time lecturer in Japanese, effective July 1, 1994,
for one year, with the possibility of extension.  The minimum salary
is $30,540; salary commensurate with experience.  Responsibilities
include: teaching or co-teaching several sections of first, second, or
third year Japanese, or a combination thereof, as well as supervision
of Graduate Student Instructors and compiling teaching materials.
Requirements: Native or near-native fluency in Japanese.  The
successful candidate will be expected to have a good command of the
English language.  Training in the methodology of teaching Japanese as
a second language and an MA degree required.  Send application with CV
and three letters of recommendation by February 28, 1994, to
	Professor Pang Hsin Ting
	Chair, East Asian Languages
	104 Durant Hall, Box JLP
	University of California
	Berkeley CA 94720

(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 /-/-/-

DOUBLE OPTION: Your choice this week, be the first to answer -either-
of these two questions to claim this week's insta-prize:

-- All of my pets are snakes except two, all of them are cats except
two, and all of them are lizards except two.  How many pets do I have?
OR,
-- Which of your San Jose Sharks has the most number of penalty
minutes heading into tonight's game at the Boston Bruins?

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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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