The New York Times Sunday magazine this weekend newspapered a piece by Ben Zimmer about denominal verbs and their critics, citing Eve and Herb Clark‘s classic 1979 article in Language, “When Nouns Surface as Verbs.” Apparently athletes today have been utterancing “podium” as a verb, as in (1):
(1) I earnestly hope that I receive first, second, or third place in this race, so that I can podium.
Curiously, the article holds that longer nouns are harder to transition into verbs. The Sesquipedalian staff would like to kindly disagreement with that statement, although we might stop short of floccinaucinihilipilificationing it entirely.
Congrats, Eve and Herb! Read the full article here.
Vera Gribanova joins us from UC Santa Cruz for a colloquium this afternoon (that’s 3:15pm in the Greenberg Room, of course!). She will inform us about “Extracting Structure from Silence in Russian”
This talk brings novel evidence from Russian Verb-Stranding Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE) to bear on the question of whether Russian verbs — despite being morphophonological words — can be demonstrated to reflect a complex internal syntactic structure. Two independent strands of research — one on verb movement (Bailyn, 1995, inter alia) and one on superlexical prefixation (Svenonius 2004, 2008, Fowler 1994, Babko-Malaya 2003, inter alia) — suggest that Russian verbs in canonical clauses appear on the surface in a position between T (the syntactic expression of Tense) and VP, and that this position hosts aspectual morphology and semantics. If the verb originates as the head of VP, it follows that the inflected verb must be constructed from syntactically independent sub-parts (via head-movement or lexical sharing of some kind). This talk defends and explores three claims about VVPE which relate to these issues: first, that its properties are distinct from those of object drop in Russian; second, that there is a condition requiring that the stranded verb in VVPE be identical to the verb of the antecedent, a condition which flows from semantic licensing conditions on ellipsis; and finally, that the existence and form of this identity requirement, when probed carefully, are expected and understandable given the hypothesis that the verbal complex is constructed from syntactically independent sub-parts.
Hal Tily is returning from Japan next week to give a talk in SPLaT! (Stanford Psychology of LAnguage Tea!) on “The role of processing complexity in word order variation and change.” Come to the Greenberg Room on Thursday at 5:15 for tea and 5:30 for talking!
If you’re really into our Colloquia, then next week just might be the best week of your life. We’re pleased to welcome two speakers, giving talks on Tuesday and on Friday!
First, on Tuesday, Tyler Kendall visits us from Northwestern, to speak on a topic to be announced. Then on Friday comes Maziar Toosarvandani, all the way from UC Berkeley, to speak in the usual colloq timeslot on another unannounced topic. Get excited!
Who knew that Monty Python’s Flying Circus was running a psycholinguistics lab so many years ago! It seems they are investigating something to do with stylistic variation. Actually, I barely understand this video. Maybe some more experienced laboratory linguists can explain it.
The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of type O-, A-, and B-. For an appointment, visit http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.