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Sesquipedalian #15, January 27, 1994

The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD		       Volume IV, Number 15
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						       January 27, 1994


	  Selection from Amy Tam's 'The Kitchen God's Wife'

But Pearl has a good job, a speech therapist for retarded children,
although she told me never to say that. A few years ago, she said, "We
don't call them retarded or handicapped children anymore. We
say 'children with disabilities.' We put the children first, the
disabilities second. And I don't just do speech therapy. I'm really
what's called a speech and language clinician. And I work only with
children who have moderate to severe communicative disorders. You
should never call them retarded."

I asked her to tell me what she did again and I wrote it down: "A
speech and language clinician for children with moderate to severe
communicative disorders." I practised saying this many, many times.
I still have those words in my purse. I still can't say them. So now
maybe Pearl thinks I'm retarded too.

Of course, Pearl's two daughters have no problems speaking English. When
the older one was only two years old, she ran up to me at the door,
shouting, "Ha-bu! Ha-bu! Ha-bu is here!" How clever, I was thinking.
She knows how to call her Grandmother in Shanghainese. And then my
granddaughter said in English: "What presents did you bring me? What
kind? How many? Where are they?"

"Isn't it amazing?" Pearl said. "She already speaks in complete
sentences. Most kids her age only use two-word phrases. She's
really smart." And I said, "What good is it to have her this kind
of smart? You should teach her not to ask too much, same way as
I taught you."

[contributed by Jim Scobbie]

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

Our speaker for this Friday's (Jan 28) Linguistics Colloquium is
Makoto Kanazawa, who presents his dissertation proposal.  The talk
will take place at 3:30pm, in Cordura 100, and will be followed by a
Happy Hour.

	       LEARNABLE CLASSES OF CATEGORIAL GRAMMARS
			   Makoto Kanazawa 
		         Stanford University
		       A Dissertation Proposal

   Its simplicity and the ubiquity of its central features (complex
syntactic categories, a universal set of schematic rules) in modern
grammatical frameworks make categorial grammar an interesting object
of mathematical study.  In this talk, I outline my work on the formal
(un)learnability of various classes of categorial grammars, within the
Gold paradigm of identification in the limit.  Both learning from
functor-argument structures and learning from plain strings are
considered, with a general observation on the connection between the
two.  Emphasis is on the former mode of learning, where unification
plays a central role.

NEXT WEEK: Mark Baker (McGill University/CASBS).

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

-- TEACHING OPPORTUNITIES IN LINGUISTICS: The University of the
Western Cape, near Cape Town, South Africa, is developing an exchange
program with Stanford and has expressed an interest in appointing a
Stanford doctoral student to teach courses in language acquisition and
instruction, and to participate in a curriculum design project in the
Applied Linguistics and Language Education master's program. The
exchange program is also flexible enough to enable to the fellowship
recipient to teach other courses, including courses of the recipient's
own design.  Stanford will provide round trip airfare, stipend (est.
$10,100 for a year), and up to $1,500 for certain designated expenses.
For further information, call the African Studies Center, 723-0295.

-- CHICANO/A FELLOWS PROGRAM GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPS 1994-1995: The
Chicano Fellows Program will offer two advanced graduate fellowships
for the 1994-95 academic year. The aim is to increase the number of
university and college professors prepared to offer Chicano-related
courses.  Under the supervision and mentorship of a visiting scholar
and the Program Director, the graduate fellows will serve as TA for
the course "Intro to Chicano/a Life and Culture", to be taught in
1994-95. In addition, Fellows are expected to organize an annual
program focusing on scholarly interests related to the experience of
Mexican origin peoples' of the US. The stipend to be offered for
1994-95 will be comperable to other Fellowships offered through the
school of Humanities and Sciences. Fellows will also have use of the
Chicano Fellows Program Office for the year and will receive nine
units of tuition each quarter.  Applications must include: (a) a
curriculum vitae; (b) a copy of the departmentally approved
dissertation proposal; (c) a brief outline of the dissertation project
(no more than 2,000 words); (d) a timetable for completion of the
degree; (f) a summary of previous teaching experience, including course
titles and descriptions of teaching duties; if available, faculty
and student teaching evaluations should be submitted; (g) a brief
explanation of what you hope to accomplish as a Chicano/a Fellow, i.e.
teaching, dissertation, career, development, community service (no
more than 2,000 words); (h) a research paper or publication; (i) two
letters by Stanford faculty members (preferably one from the
dissertation advisor) evaluating the applicant's academic achievements
and promise as a future instructor and scholar; and (j) a current
transcript.  Current members of the Chicano/a Fellows Program will
review the applications and make awards. Preference will be given to
applicants who have been advanced to candidacy. Announcement of the
awards will be made in April 1994.  The deadline for receipt of
applications is 5:00 p.m., February 15, 1994.  Applications should be
sent to the attention of Ramon Saldivar, Director, Chicano Fellows
Program, Building 590, room L, mail code 3044. Questions may be
directed to Ramon Saldivar, Director, at 725-1213 or Claudia Carrillo
at 723-3091. 

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

-- ACL-94: Student Sessions at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (27 June - 1 July 1994, New
Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA).  This is an
abbreviated version of the Call For Papers. The full text can be found
in the file 94student-call.ascii from the ACL LISTSERV.  The goal of
these sessions is to provide a forum for student ACL members to
present WORK IN PROGRESS and receive feedback from other members of
the computational linguistics community.  The sessions will be
workshop-style.  Papers should describe original, unpublished work in
progress that demonstrates insight, creativity, and promise.  Topics
of interest are the same as for the main conference.  All authors must
have ACL Student Membership (or be students even though paying the
regular member rate because they earn a regular income) at the time of
the conference.  For membership information, see the section on the
ACL LISTSERV below.  Papers submitted to the main conference cannot be
considered for the student sessions.  Students may, of course, submit
DIFFERENT papers to BOTH the main conference and the student sessions,
or papers on different aspects of a particular problem or project.
Student authors should submit papers limited to 3 pages (including an
abstract, references, figures, and appendices) as well as a title page
and identification page in the conventional double-column conference
format, with typeface no smaller than 10 pt.  To identify each paper,
a separate identification page should be supplied, containing the
paper's title, the name(s) of the author(s), complete addresses, the
short (5 line) summary, and the specification of the subject area(s).
Authors must submit their papers by BOTH hardcopy and email if
possible or by hardcopy only. Unlike the ACL main session, there is no
email only option, but we do encourage you to use the hardcopy and
email option.  Papers should be submitted to
	Beryl Hoffman,
	Computer and Information Sciences
	University of Pennsylvania
	200 South 33rd Street
	Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA;
	phone: +1-215-898-5868; fax: +1-215-898-0587
	email: hoffman@linc.cis.upenn.edu
SCHEDULE: Submissions in either format must be RECEIVED by 1 FEBRUARY
1994.  Late papers will not be considered.  Receipt of submissions will
be acknowledged by 5 FEBRUARY 1994.  Authors will be notified of
acceptance by 15 MARCH 1994.  Authors will then have time to revise
their papers, taking the reviews into account. Camera-ready copies of
final papers prepared in a double-column format, preferably using a
laser printer, must be received by 1 MAY 1994, along with a signed
copyright release statement.  ACL AND CONFERENCE INFORMATION:  For
other information on the conference and on the ACL more generally,
contact Judith Klavans (ACL), Columbia University, Computer Science,
New York, NY 10027, USA; +1-914-478-1802 phone/fax;
acl@cs.columbia.edu.  General information about the ACL and electronic
membership and order forms are also available from the ACL LISTSERV.
ACL LISTSERV: LISTSERV is a facility to allow access to an electronic
document archive by electronic mail. The ACL LISTSERV has been set up
at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. Requests from
the archive should be sent as e-mail messages to
	listserv@cs.columbia.edu
with an empty subject field and the message body containing the request
command. The most useful requests are ``help'' for general help on
using LISTSERV, ``index acl-l'' for the current contents of the ACL
archive and "get acl-l <file>" to get a particular file named <file>
>From the archive. For example, to get an ACL membership form, a message
with the following body should be sent:
	get acl-l 94membership.form
To get to required style file for LaTeX submissions:
        get acl-l latex-acl.sty
Answers to requests are returned by e-mail. Since the server may have
many requests for different archives to process, requests are queued
up and may take a while (say, overnight) to be fulfilled.
The ACL archive can also be accessed by anonymous FTP at cs.columbia.edu in
directory acl-l.

-- FSLM-V: FORMAL LINGUISTICS SOCIETY OF MID-AMERICA.  The University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host the fifth annual Formal
Linguistics Society of Mid-America conference at the Urbana, Illinois,
campus, from 20 to 22 May 1994.  The deadline for abstracts is January
31. Send them to
        FLSM5 Committee
        Department of Linguistics
        University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
        4088 Foreign Languages Building
        707 S. Mathews
        Urbana, IL 61801
Inquiries to: flsm5@cogsci.uiuc.edu

	         -\-\-\ BROWN BAG PRESENTATION /-/-/-

The associate director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning
at Harvard, Helen Ansell, will discuss Harvard's efforts to encourage,
standardize, and simplify the use of teaching portfolios by its
Ph.D.'s on the academic job market.  This presentation is titled,
'Developing Teaching Portfolios: The Harvard Approach,' and takes
place Monday, February 7, 12-1 in the Tresidder Oak Room East.
Sponsored by CTL.  For more information, call Tammy Ozuna (3-1326).
You are welcome to bring a lunch; light refreshment will be served.

		   -\-\-\ 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 Texas at Arlington, Program in Linguistics,
invites applications for a possible one-year replacement position as
Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics beginning September 1994.
The successful applicant would teach two graduate courses per
semester.  Fall semester the courses would be GB Syntax I and another
determined by the expertise of the successful applicant.  Spring
semester the courses would be GB Syntax II and Structure of a
non-Indo-European language (preferably a Native American Language).
Finalists will be notified in mid-late April 1994.  A letter of
application, CV, and the names, addresses and phone numbers of three
(3) recommenders should be sent to 
        Jerold A. Edmondson, Director
        Program in Linguistics, UTA
        Box 19559
        Arlington, TX  76019-0559
The due date for all materials is April 1, 1994.

-- CORNELL UNIVERSITY: The Department of Modern Languages and
Linguistics, Cornell University, invites applications for a visiting
appointment in formal semantics.  Candidates will be considered at the
Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor levels.  The
visiting position is for the 1994-95 academic year, during which time
it is likely that a search for a tenure-track or tenured semanticist
will be conducted.  Letters of application, together with a curriculum
vitae and a writing sample, should be sent by February 11, 1994 to
	Chair, Semantics Search Committee
	Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics
	203 Morrill Hall
	Cornell University
	Ithaca NY 14853-4701
Three letters of reference should also be sent to this address. EOE/AA

-- STANFORD UNIVERSITY: The Chicano Fellows Program invites
outstanding teacher/scholars, either at the rank of assistant or new
associate professor, to apply for a one-year appointment as a visiting
professor at Stanford University, effective September 1994, pending
funding approval by the Provost and Dean of Humanities and Sciences.
Applicants are welcome from any discipline in the humanities or social
science, especially sociology, anthropology, history, feminist and
cultural studies. The appointment will be made in the appropriate
department within the school of Humanities and Sciences.  The primary
aim of the Chicano Fellows Program is to prepare graduate students to
teach Chicano-related courses at the university and college level. A
secondary goal is to offer undergraduate courses on Mexican Americans
and the Mexican-origin population. The visiting professor plays a
crucial role in fulfilling both goals of the Chicano Fellows Program.
The Visiting Professor supervises and assists the graduate teaching
fellows in preparing and offering a course each might offer on the
subject of their respective dissertation topics. The visiting
professor may expect to help the director of the Chicano Fellows
Program supervise the preparation of the graduate teaching fellows'
courses, and to advise them on their dissertation. In addition to
mentoring the graduate teaching fellows, the visiting professor also
mentors undergraduate students with the aim of providing them an
"insider's view" of university teaching and research. Finally, the
visiting professor will teach two courses per academic year on issues
related to the Mexican-origin population.  Applicants may send letter
of application, curriculum vitae, and names of three references to
	Professor Ramon Saldivar, Director
	Chicano Fellows Program
	Building 590, Room L
	Stanford University
	Stanford, CA 94305-3044
For further information, call 415-725-1213 or 723-3091. Review of
applications will begin after March 15, 1994 and continue until
position is filled.  

(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 /-/-/-

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to name all the
republics of the former Soviet Union.  Yep, get out those
pocket-atlases.  First correct answer via e-mail wins this week's
insta-prize.


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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
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University or the Linguistics Department, or their employees.  The
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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.

The owls are not as they seem

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