The New Sesquipedalian

Maziar Toosarvandani is visiting from Berkeley and will be presenting to us today at 3:30 in the Greenberg Room. The topic is “Multifunctional Nominalization in Northern Paiute.” Here’s the abstract!

Northern Paiute (an endangered Uto-Aztecan language of the western United States) has a verbal suffix “-na” with a seeming profusion of functions. The verbs of headed relative clauses, for instance, bear “-na”, as do the complements of perception verbs and temporal adverbial clauses expressing approximate temporal coincidence. This contrasts strikingly with English, which has different embedded clause types for each of these functions. Headed relative clauses are finite clauses containing a wh-phrase or headed by “that”; perception verbs take gerund or bare infinitival complements; and, temporal coincidence is conveyed by finite “when”-clauses.
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Here’s a talk from Stanford’s Department of Philosophy and Literature on “Storytelling and Intimation: A Somewhat Gricean Account.” Classics professor G. R. F. Ferrari travels all the way from exotic Berkeley to fill us in! The talk is next Wednesday (24 February) at 5:15pm in Building 260, Room 113. Sounds fun! See you there!

Adam Hodges gave a SLing Faculty talk (that is, to the undergraduate SLing club) on Wednesday: The Dialogic Emergence of Meaning in Political Discourse.

The next speaker in the series is Rob Munro on Wednesday, Feb 24th, at 3:35PM, who will inform his audience on “How to Save the World with Linguistics.”

Annie Zaenen has organized a major symposium at today’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled “Language Processing for Science and Society.”

Spoken language was the first and remains the most pervasive communication and information technology. The invention of writing has quite some time ago extended our ability to communicate to those distant from us in time and space. The recent arrival of computers now provides us with new ways to access and share information encoded in speech or written language. The result is that we are confronted daily with more information than we can focus on or assimilate. Keyword search has provided a simple and surprisingly successful way to access this fire hose of information, but it is a blunt instrument. Currently, researchers are developing algorithms that enable computers to home in better on the information that users really want to find. To illustrate these recent developments, we discuss three aspects. The first contribution concentrates on developments that have a broad application to society as a whole. The two others focus on developments that at least for the moment are more relevant to the scientific community, namely, how language technology can extract information from scientific literature and how computers can be made not only to read texts but also reason about them.

Among the speakers is our own Christopher Manning, who will give a presentation on “Getting Computers to Understand What They Read.”

Nola Stephens will speak this Wednesday in the session on “Information Structure in Language Acquisition” at the annual meeting of the DGfS in Berlin. The topic is “The effects of givenness on young children’s locative and dative.” Ausgezeichnet!

Can Linguistics jargon be put to effective use in making romantic advances on people? Stephanie Shih thinks so, and she produced the following pastries at last week’s social as proof:

If no one else, Sesquipedalian Staff is certainly convinced.

Today, a joke from Mongolia!

Chipaya Pitka hoyor dainaas butsaj irjee. Chipaya gertsen-tul emnelegt khevtejee.
Chipaya Pitka both war-ABL back came. Chipaya injured-because hospital-LOC lay.

Pitka naiziigaa ooriin tseregnuudteegei khamt iregjee.
Pitka friend-3SG own soldiers-ACC with visited.

Oron deeren suugaad naiztaigaa yarib.
Bed-ACC on sat friend-DAT talked

Yarij baih hoorondon, Chipaya gent chichirt, nuuren ulaarch,
Talking during while, Chipaya suddenly vibrated, face-3SG-DAT reddened,

Pitka-gaas uzeg tsaas nekhej, Pitkad yum bichij ogov.
Pitka-ABL pen-ACC paper-ACC asked, Pitka-BEN thing write give

Naiziigaa khundelsen tul, Pitka daraan unshkhaar shiidev. Kharamsaltain, Chipaya ter yed aemsgaa khaav.
Friend-3SG-ACC respected because, Pitka later read decided. Unfortunately, Chipaya at that moment died.

Pitka naiziikhaa suulchiin ygiig tseregnuuddee unshaj ogkhoor shiideed, gadaa garch ireed,
Pitka friends-3SG last words soldiers-BEN read out.loud decided, outside came arrived,

yilsaar, tsaasa neev. Tsaana n:
tearfully, paper-ACC opened. Paper on:

̈”Teneg mini, amisgaliin.sistemees bosooch!”
You idiot, respirator-GEN get.up!

Thanks, Baljinnyam!

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of type O-. 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.