Stanford alum Rachel Nordlinger is a featured linguist in the Linguist List Fund Drive! She writes:
At high school my favourite subject was French. So, when I finished high school I decided I would do Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Melbourne, and major in French. I didn’t really know what I would do after that, but probably I’d “join the diplomatic corps” — whatever that meant. It sounded exciting, and if it meant I could keep doing French then that would be fine. In my second year of Uni, I needed to pick up another subject and found a subject called ‘Linguistics’ in the handbook. I could pick it up in second year, it had no exam, and it even sounded like it would be useful for learning French, so I enrolled.
That decision changed my life …
Read the full story here.
The work of Dan Jurafsky and researchers in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Education analyzing interactions from a speed dating corpus was recently featured in this Stanford Alumni article. Read all about it!
Calling all Stanford linguists! It is that time of year again! Last Friday, LINGUIST LIST kicked off their 2015 Fund Drive, and they need YOU to make a donation. This year, if you donate during Fund Drive, you can be entered to win many fantastic prizes generously donated by Linguist List Supporting Publishers. These prizes will be offered for the duration of Fund Drive this year, and there will be many competitions and drawings to come. So, stay tuned and don’t miss the opportunity to win these valuable linguistic materials.
Arto Anttila presented at UC Santa Cruz’s PHLUNCH last Friday on “Stress, Phrasing, and Auxiliary Contraction in English.”
Vera Gribanova was the invited speaker at this year’s LASC 2015 (Linguistics at Santa Cruz, March 15). Her talk was “Head Movement, Ellipsis, and Russian Polarity Focus.”
Kate Lindsey and Julia Fine presented “KinQuest: A New Tool for Eliciting and Comparing Kinship Terminologies” at the fourth annual International Conference for Language Documentation and Conservation at the University of Hawai’i in Manoa.
Eve Clark is presenting “Finding Common Ground: Three Approaches Highlighting the Importance of Interaction in Early Language Development” at SRCD 2015 (Society for Research in Child Development) this weekend.
Penny Eckert is giving a colloquium on “Variation, the Stylistic Landscape, and Social Change” at U Pittsburgh today, and on March 24 at Temple University.
SemFest is right around the corner! Next Friday (3/13) at 1PM in the Greenberg Room, we will gather to hear about exciting semantics work going on in the department! All are welcome!
SemFest 2015 – Schedule
1:00 – 1:30 Phil Crone and Michael C. Frank “Morphosyntactic and Referential Cues to the Identification of Generic Statements”
1:30 – 2:00 Michael Henry Tessler and Noah D. Goodman “A Computational Model of Generic Language”
2:00 – 2:30 Greg Scontras and Noah D. Goodman “The Role of Context in Plural Predication”
2:45 – 3:15 Ming Chew Teo “Contrastive lor in Singapore Colloquial English: Another discourse-semantic account”
3:15 – 3:45 Lelia Glass “An Analysis of the Negatively-Biased Mandarin Belief Verb yˇiwéi”
4:00 – 4:30 Dasha Popova “Evidential Uses of Komi-Zyrian Past Tense Morphemes”
4:30 – 5:00 “James Collins The Scope of Futures”
5:00 Social in the Department Lounge
Welcome to Rebekah Baglini! Rebekah, who is finishing her dissertation at the University of Chicago, will be joining the Department next fall as a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow. Rebekah has been awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford beginning in Autumn 2015.
Here is how she describes her research:
My work focuses on semantics and its interface with morphology and syntax, and relies heavily on typological considerations and data from less commonly studied languages. I have been conducting fieldwork on the Senegambian language Wolof since 2010.
You can find out more here!
Joshua Fishman, editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, author/editor of more than fifty books and over 1000 articles, has passed away.
Dr. Fishman was a regular visitor to Stanford (through the School of Education) until very recently. The Joshua A. Fishman and Gella Schweid Fishman Family Archive is housed at Stanford.
Fishman wrote many influential books, including the early works Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction (1970), and Readings in the Sociology of Language (1968). He was one of the big three founder-leaders of modern sociolinguistics (Fishman: Sociology of Language, Hymes: Ethnography of Speaking, Labov: Quantitative Sociolinguistics), and with his passing, only one remains (Labov). Many in the department were honored to know him as an author, teacher, colleague and friend.
[Thanks to John Rickford for the heartfelt eulogy from which this note is adapted.]
Jeremy Calder gave a talk on his QP2 work at CSU Bakersfield on March 4.
Tania Rojas-Esponda spoke on “Discourse particles and focus effects in a question-under-discussion framework” in the LingLangLunch talk series at Brown University on March 4.
Sven Lauer and Cleo Condoravdi presented “Hypothetical facts and hypothetical ideals in the temporal dimension” at the 37. Jahrestagung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft.
Tom Wasow is giving a plenary talk today at the 37. Jahrestagung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft at the University of Leipzig: “The non-categorical character of most linguistic generalizations”.
Chris Potts gave several recent talks:
- “Coordinating on context and construal”, Google, February 19.
- “Embedded implicatures as pragmatic inferences under compositional lexical uncertainty”, Psychology Department, UC Santa Cruz, February 18.
- “Embedded implicatures as pragmatic inferences under compositional lexical uncertainty”, Invited talk at the 41st Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 8.