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Sesquipedalian #14, January 20, 1994

The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD		       Volume IV, Number 14
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						       January 20, 1994


			    THE DONUT FURNACE
		    (from one of our MIT deep-agents)

(Some of you may not know that "10-250" is one of MIT's main lecture halls.
And "2.40" is MIT's introductory thermodynamics course.)

	Feel free to forward this to any 2.40 types you feel might be
interested.  I'm such a nerd and love it so....
	Thursday, there was some conference for campus police officers
in 10-250.  I made the mistake of walking by this ill-fated room and
discovered (quite to my surprise, of course) the largest array of
donuts I have ever seen in my life.  They had six full-sized folding
tables absolutely FILLED with donuts.
	If we consider 3m^2 of space per table and six tables, that's
18m^2 of space for donuts.  A donut on its side is approximately 3cm x
15cm or .0045m^2.  This makes 4000 donuts!  10-250 seats a maximum of
300 people, which gives us an incredible 13.3 cream-filled
chocolate-glazed confectionaries per police officer!
	At a conservative 350 calories/donut, that means that each CP
consumed 4600 calories at the conference yesterday, which happens to
be just about double the entire reccomended caloric intake of a
sedentary middle-aged male.
	Let's model 10-250 as a closed system.  Consider it a
triangular prism formed by cutting a 5m X 30m x 35m rectangular solid
across its diagonal, resulting in an enclosed volume of 2625m^2.
Through PV=mRT we find that the mass of air enclosed in this room is
m=PV/RT (Rair=287, T=300K, P=10e5 Pa), or 305 kg of air.
	If 25% of the donuts' energy is converted to heat by the body
(the remainder going to the production of fat and the recombination of
chemical bonds after digestion), we see that (.25 x 4000 donuts x 350
kcal/donut x 4.16 kJ/kcal) 364000 kJ of energy is released into the
room.  Now, if we use U=mc(T2-T1), we can find the final temperature
of the room.  U=364,000 kJ, m= 305 kJ, T1 = 300 K, c(air)= .716 kJ/kg-K 
The final temperature in the room would end up being 1395 K or
1122 degrees C.  This is just about the melting point of copper...
	This suggests that 10-250 is NOT an open system or that less
than 25% of the donuts' energy actually gets converted to heat.
	Now, what exactly is the implication of 364 MJ?  It may seem
like a lot of energy (and it is) but what exactly is it in terms of
power?  As the egalitarian's credo tells us, power is more important
than work, and the demands of this problem also state that
instantaneous output is more important than the integrated function.
	I think the conference was eight hours long.  Instantaneous
power outuput is measured in Kilowatts, which is a J/sec.  Eight hours
is (8 hours x 60 min/hr x 60 sec/min) 28800 sec, giving us a power
output of 12.64 kW total.  We previously assumed 300 people in the
room, or 42 Watts/cop.
	Thus, each cop is putting out about 2/3 as much heat as a
standard incandescent light bulb.  This is completely reasonable.
	I feel as if I have just hit upon some great truth of humanity
here, but I'm not sure what it is.

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

We are happy to open the Linguistics Colloquium Series 1994 on Friday,
21 January, 3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100.

     Optimality in Prosodic Morphology: The Emergence of the Unmarked
			      John McCarthy
		  University of Massachusetts at Amherst
		       mccarthy%coins@cs.umass.edu

The talk will be followed by a happy hour. It is a part of the
Trilateral Phonology Workshop, see special announcements.

                      SPECIAL LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
			   on Monday, 24 January
	   	     6:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
       Acceptability Judgements in the Teaching and Doing of Syntax
			    James D. McCawley
		          University of Chicago

The talk is preceded by a reception at 5:15 in Cordura Hall and
followed by a dinner with the speaker. Says a faculty member: "Going
to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Jim McCawley is an unusual
opportunity for a linguistics student (or anybody). Jim is an
international expert on Oriental cuisine of all kinds." There is a
limited amount of money available for subsidizing student dinners.

Abstracts follow.
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     OPTIMALITY IN PROSODIC MORPHOLOGY: THE EMERGENCE OF THE UNMARKED
			      John McCarthy
		  University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) offers a new perspective
on the markedness of linguistic structures.  In Optimality Theory,
forms are marked with respect to some constraint C if they violate it.
But whether or not C is categorically true in a particular language is
a separate matter from the statement of C itself; it depends instead
on how C is *ranked* with respect to other constraints in that
language.
	An essential consequence of this conception of markedness
within OT is that there is no parametrization of constraints.  Thus,
even if C is crucially dominated in some language, it is not literally
"turned off"; rather, it is still fully present in the grammar of that
language, though low-ranking.  This is no mere technical trick -- the
effects of C can still be observed under conditions where the
dominating constraint is without force.  Thus, in the language as a
whole, C is roundly violated, but in a particular domain it is obeyed
exactly.  In that particular domain, the structure unmarked with
respect to C emerges, and the structure marked with respect to C is
suppressed.  This *emergence of the unmarked* is especially
conspicuous in the prosodic morphology of reduplication (McCarthy and
Prince 1993), and that empirical domain is the focus of this talk.
	An important feature of this account is the idea that the
various constraints provided by Universal Grammar characterize
*different* dimensions of (un)markedness.  Optimality is computed with
respect to many dimensions, not just one; the contributions made by
the various dimensions of markedness are mediated by constraint
ranking.  In the empirical material at hand, the dimensions of
evaluation include at least the following:
 *Phonological harmony ~= segmental or prosodic "unmarkedness", itself
  			consisting of various dimensions, some conflicting.
 *Faithfulness ~= "identity between input and output".
 *Alignment ~= coincidence of edges of morphological and phonological
  			constituents.
 *Template Satisfaction ~= meeting shape or constituency requirements imposed
  			on the reduplicated string.
 *Exactness of Copying ~= identity between the reduplicated string and the
  			base to which it is attached.
These dimensions of markedness may very well compete with one another; hence,
optimality (with respect to a constraint hierarchy) is not perfection.

This is joint work with Alan Prince, Rutgers University.

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    ACCEPTABILITY JUDGEMENTS IN THE TEACHING AND DOING OF SYNTAX
			James D. McCawley
		      University of Chicago

This talk reports on my use of judgements elicited from native
speakers in courses on English, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese syntax
since the mid 1980s.  When done right, eliciting and tabulating
acceptability judgements from the native speakers present can be of
value both to the instructor in a syntax course and to his students,
and can yield data that are relevant not only to the questions
typically discussed in syntax courses but also to many comparably
important questions (particularly those relating to individual
variation) that are usually ignored in syntax courses.
(Doing it right means: (i) Operating in terms of degrees of
acceptability such as the 4-way distinction used in my classes, (ii)
Providing relevant details of interpretation and context, (iii)
Controlling for factors that might affect acceptability and
encouraging students to suggest such factors and alternative examples
that will control for the factors, (iv) Including examples that
provide an appropriate baseline against which to evaluate judgements
of the examples at issue, (v) Getting _both_ shows of hands and
written responses; the shows of hands serve to establish conventions
within the class with respect to, for example, how good something
should be to count as ``pretty good,'' (vi) Counting the responses:
you need to compare numbers to make solid arguments.)
			Pedagogical benefits:
1. The instructor and the authors under discussion cease to be oracles
with regard to acceptability judgements: the judgements now come from
the students attending the class.
2a. The instructor and the students have to deal on an everyday basis
with data that often illustrate fairly clear distinctions but are not
as clean as linguists implicitly claim; when really sharp distinctions
emerge, their sharpness is noteworthy.
 b. When the native speakers in the class generally rate one type of
example more acceptable than another, the class has reason to take the
difference seriously, even if none of the native speakers has much
confidence in his own responses.  The instructor is in the same
position: the responses that he elicits from the class give him
grounds for taking some differences in acceptability as solid and
others as not, even if his own gut feelings are not clear enough to
make such a distinction.
3. The instructor and the suudents are forced to recognize individual
variation and to deal with it responsibly.
	  Uses of tabulations of judgements in research:
	1. Establishing that there _is_ substantial variation in a
class of examples, which raises the questions of what exactly is
responsible for the variation (e.g. have some speakers learned a
restriction that others haven't?) and of how the differences between
the speakers arose (e.g. is a rule that, by hypothesis, some of the
speakers have and others don't, one that could most plausibly be
acquired on the basis of a type of data that many speakers might fail
to encounter, or on the basis of an inference that not all speakers
could be expected to draw?).  Such data are used in McCawley 1992a as
a premise in an argument that syntactic boundaries do not respect word
boundaries in combinations such as `someone who wants to meet you'
(with the relative clause modifying the N' -`one') and that those who
accept relative clauses as modifiers of interrogative pronouns (e.g.
`Who that you know do you want to invite?') have developed a ``patch''
(Morgan 1972).  Data about the relative acceptability of `Mary seems
to have already left when John arrived' and `...seems to have already
left...' support the `have'-deletion rule proposed in the McCawley
1971 account of the former and the hypothesis about the acquisition of
that rule given in McCawley 1992b.
	2. Testing whether some class of examples are _as_ good or
_as_ bad as a suggested account implies they should be.  Example:
Howard and Niyekawa-Howard's (1976) account of the unacceptability of
Japanese direct passives with a reflexive referring to the underlying
subject is that they are derived by deletion from a structure
containing two reflexives with different antecedents, and such
structures are excluded in Japanese.  However, the Ss in question are
systematically lower in acceptability than corresponding examples with
noncoreferential reflexives, and if anything they should be higher in
acceptability, since their violation of the reflexive constraint is
less blatant.

 	           -\-\-\ PHONOLOGY WEEKEND /-/-/-

The Tri-Lateral Phonology Weekend (TREND) will be happening this
weekend, on Friday at CSLI and on Saturday at UCSC.

Friday (Cordura 100, CSLI, Stanford)
9:00-10:00	Coffee
10:00-10:30	Jaye Padgett, UCSC
		On the Bases of Interaction
10:30-11:00	Chris Golston, UCB
		Prosodic Metrics
11:00-11:15	break
11:15-11:45	Gary Lutes, Stanford	 
		Lithuanian Nominal Accent
11:45-12:15	Sharon Inkelas, Orhan Orgun, Cheryl Zoll, UCB
		Lexical exceptions: prespecification or subgrammar?
12:15-14:00	Lunch
14:00-14:30	Lionel Wee, UCB	
		Identifying the Reduplicant
14:30-15:00	Erin Duncan, UCSC  
		Word Shape and Optionality in Jilotepequeno Pocomam
15:00-15:30	Break
15:30		John McCarthy, U. Mass.
		Prosodic Morphology in Optimality Theory: 
			the Emergence of the Unmarked

Friday after the talk there will be a Happy Hour at Cordura, followed
by a dinner and party at Bill Poser's house in the evening.

Saturday the Phonology Weekend continues at the Cowell College
Conference Room, UCSC (see last week's Quip for schedule), concluding
with a phonology hike (whatever that is) at 2:00.  

               -\-\-\ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS /-/-/-

-- MONBUSHO SCHOLARSHIP: The Monbusho (Japanese Ministry of Education)
is offering one-year scholarships in Japan to currently enrolled
undergraduate students in their junior or senior year.  Applicants
must be US nationals, over 18 and under 30 years of age, and
specializing in a field related to the Japanese language or Japanese
culture (either as a major or minor).  Applicants must also have a
good knowledge of the Japanese language.  A Japanese language exam and
interview are required of all applicants.  The language exam and
interviews will be held on April 30, 1994.  Completed applications
must be submitted postmarked no later than April 20, 1994.
Application forms are available from:
	Japan Information Center
	Consulate General of Japan
	50 Fremont Street, Suite 2200
	San Francisco CA 94105
	phone: 415/777-3533

		   -\-\-\ 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.)

-- HARVARD: The Harvard Graduate School of Education is seeking for
its Human Development and Psychology Area, a broad interdisiplinary
department focused on the study of infant, child, and adolescent
development, a junior faculty member for a multi-year appointment
(without tenure) who can do research and teach in the area of language
diversity.  Primary responsibilities will include conducting research,
supervising doctoral student research, teaching courses for masters
and doctoral students, and service to the School and the University,
normally in the form of committee membership.  The perrson to be
appointed would be expected to design and teach such courses as:
language and culture, development of the language skills or later
childhood and adolescence (e.g., narrative, argument, explanation,
peer conversation, discussion), discourse analysis and/or
sociolinguistic approaches to language analysis (oral and written).
Interests in language or literacy problems, minority language speakers
and bilingualism, and language-literacy relations and reading/writing
connections would also be valued.  We are seeking someone whose own
research relates to language use in classrooms, to the acquisition of
academic language skills or to the teaching of language arts,
literature, writing, and reading.  We are especially seeking
candidates who, through teaching and research, have demonstrated
knowledge about and commitment to the educational and professional
development of diverse populations.  Please submit the following
material in application: C.V. which makes clear your relevant
experience; 1 or 2 of your articles with a statement of why you have
chosen them; and up to 3 letters of recommendation.  Teaching
evaluations are welcome.  Complete applications will be processed as
they are received; all applications and materials must be received by
no later than March 15, 1994.  Please send to:
        Professor Catherine E. Snow
        c/o Gail Keeley
        Office of Academic Services
        Harvard Graduate School of Education
        122 Longfellow Hall
        Cambridge, MA 02138
        (617) 496-1817
Applications from women and minority candidates are especially 
welcomed.  Harvard University is an affirmative action/equal
opportunity employer.

-- SOROS FOUNDATION: In line with Hungarian-born financier George
Soros' belief that 'it is not enough to destroy a closed society in
order to bring about an open society,' the Soros Foundation sees
English language teaching as a priority in Eastern Europe.  This year,
the Soros network's Professional English Teaching Program will place
50 instructors in schools in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia,
Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and
the Ukraine.  Candidates with master's degrees in Applied Linguistics,
prior teaching experience, and TESOL, ESL, or EFL Certification are
preferred.  The Foundation covers round trip airfare, western health
insurance, and a $3,000 hard currency stipend.  The local school pays
in the local currency a salary equivalent to one-and-a-half times that
of a regular teacher, and also provides an apartment with free
utilities.  Interested professionals must complete the application
form and submit requested support materials.  Evaluation of
applications begins February 1 and will continue until satisfactory
applicants for all positions have been selected.  For further
information and application packets, address inquiries to
	Professor Robert B. Hausmann
	Soros Foundation EFL Internship Program
	Linguistics Program
	University of Montana
	Missoula MT 59812-3949
	phone: 406/243-4751

-- CSU HAYWARD: Assistant/Associate Professor of Teacher Education.
Qualifications: Earned doctorate in bilingual education (first and
second language acquisition and development), TESOL, linguistics
(emphasis on first and second language acquisition and development) or
a closely related field. Expertise in at least one Asian language,
preferably a Southeast Asian language, and ability to present content
in that language. Successful teaching experience at elementary or
secondary levels, in public school settings, with students developing
English proficiency. Familiar with models and strategies for teaching
English through the content areas and specially designed academic
instruction in English.  Responsibilities: Develop and teach courses
in the department's Cross Cultural Language and Academic Development
Program (CLAD) as well as Bilingual CLAD Program. Participate with
faculty who are refining the delivery of their courses in CLAD/BCLAD.
Supervise student teachers in the CLAD/BCLAD programs at the
elementary and secondary levels.  Assume roles and responsibilities as
a member of the Department of Teacher Education.  Review of
applications will begin February 21, 1994 and will continue until
filled. Please refer to position #94-95 TED-TT-Bilingual when
applying. This tenure track position will begin Fall, 1994. Salary is
competitive and commensurate with experience and qualifications.  Send
letter of application, vita and three recent letters of recommendation to
	Chair, Search Committee
	Department of Teacher Education
	California State University, Hayward
	Hayward, CA 94542-3007
CSUH wishes to encourage applications from minorities, women, and
persons with disabilities.

(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 /-/-/-

ETYMOLOGY CORNER: What oath is the English curse, 'Zounds!' derived
from?  First correct answer via e-mail wins...


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  		   -\-\-\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /-/-/-

So you may delete your copy after you've read it (or better yet,
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'.

Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
their employees, makes any warranty, whatsoever, implied, or assumes
any legal liability or responsibility regarding any information
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infringe privately owned rights.  No specific reference constitutes or
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of Stanford University or the Linguistics Department, or their
employees, and shall not be used for advertising or product
endorsement purposes.

Any similarity to actual linguists, living or dead, is purely coincidental

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