Don’t forget to come to the Greenberg room at 3PM on Friday September 20 for a welcome and introductions to new grad students and visitors, followed by a beginning-of-the-year party in the linguistics courtyard from 3:30-5:00.
The annual conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics is going on this week in Atlanta. Stanford attendees include:
We neglected to announce the Stanford speakers at last month’s Manchester Phonology Meeting. Apologies!
Ling and Psych will be co-hosting the semi-regular Stanford Psychology of Language Tea (SPLaT) this Valentine’s Day. This week’s SPLaT will be on Thursday, 14 February, with snacks starting at 4:15 and the talk at 4:30. Ling department visitor Tom Juzek (Oxford) will present on “Comparing Textual and Auditive Stimuli for Eliciting Acceptability Judgments”.
In experimental syntax, grammatical acceptability is mainly measured in experiments using textual stimuli (which reflects the field’s bias towards written syntax). In this paper, we explore how, if at all, subjects’ acceptability ratings are affected if auditive stimuli are used instead. We have thus designed an experiment that compares the two modes of presentation (textual vs auditive stimuli). In this experiment, subjects rated different syntactic constructions, which included classic syntactic constructions (gapped dunno constructions and fronting constructions), as well as constructions which only occur in either written or spoken language (gerund constructions and alternative if constructions, respectively). As this project is work in progress, the results are still pending and will be added soon.
| Tom Juzek is visiting the department this academic year. Tom is a PhD student from Oxford and his work focuses on experimental syntax, particularly methodology: His last project compared different normalisation methods for measuring grammatical acceptability. Tom is looking forward to getting to know many Stanford linguists and their research. |  |
A warm welcome to Tatiana Chernigovskaya, a Russian linguist, from St. Petersburg State University. She will be visiting Stanford next week, Mon to Wed. If any linguistic students or faculty would like to meet with her, please contact Tim Stearns directly, at stearns@stanford.edu. Her major research interests include: A. The cerebral basis for linguistic and cognitive functions; B. Theory of Mind; C. Artificial intelligence; D. Language evolution and acquisition; E. Mental lexicon organization; F. Language acquisition and pathology. For further info, take a look at her C.V.
Marta Recasens joined Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow in September 2011. She graduated in English Philology from the University of Barcelona in 2006, and completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the same university in 2010. Her thesis examined coreference resolution from different perspectives: theoretical foundations, corpus annotation, resolution systems, and system evaluation. She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics, and her research areas include corpus-based and computational approaches to semantics and pragmatics, reference, discourse structure, conceptual blending, and in general the relationship between language and the world. She is currently working on overcoming the limitations of coreference resolution systems in linking lexically different phrases that corefer in a specific context.
| Ingrid Lossius Falkum is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN) at the University of Oslo. Her primary research interests lie in semantics and pragmatics, in particular issues in lexical semantics and pragmatics. She has a PhD in linguistics from University College London (January 2011), where she worked with a group of pragmatists involved in the development of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory. Her thesis was an investigation into the semantics and pragmatics of polysemy.
Ingrid’s current research focuses on metonymy (e.g., the well-known example ‘The ham sandwich wants his check’). The broad aim of this research project is to investigate how we understand such metonymies when |
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| Susanna Rodriguez writes: I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Filología Española, Lingüística General y Teoría de la Literatura at the University of Alicante (Spain). In 2006 I obtained my Ph-D in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Alicante. I have been visiting scholar at the Ohio State University, USA (2001, 2002, 2003) and at the University of Mar del Plata, Argentina (2010).
My research interests focus on the relationships between Pragmatics and Semantics, and how they reflect into Grammar. I am currently interested in the behaviour of incorporated negation in cases of verbalization, and in the pragmatic values of verbal categories in Spanish (mood, tense, and aspect). I am also dealing with other fields of Pragmatics, such as ironic and humorous meaning in different types of discourse. |
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