Paul D’Antilio writes:
Hi Everyone,
Yuan and I want to let everyone know that baby Sophia was born Tuesday afternoon. She’s 6lbs, 19 inches and beautiful (of course I’m a little biased) We just got back from the hospital last night. Mom and daughter are doing great and wanted to say “hi” and share a picture.
We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in the weeks and months ahead,
Paul, Yuan and Sophia
Uriel Cohen Priva will appear in a Linguistics Colloquium today, 23 April, at 3:30pm in the Greenberg Room. This is his dissertation proposal talk and the topic “Sign and Signal: Deriving Linguistic Generalizations from Information Utility.” Here’s what we have in store:
Building on previous work in information theoretic linguistics, I propose a novel concept which is shown to affect all aspects of the grammar: performance, competence, and change. I define information utility as the amount of information contributed by each sign (phone, word, etc.), both as a specific event in a communication signal and as its aggregate in the language as a whole.
The first set of studies shows that in English and German, phone deletion and reduction are not affected only by their information contribution in the context in which they appear, but also by their overall information utility – useful phones are less likely to delete or reduce, showing that speakers match effort with utility. The second study extends this notion to syntax, and demonstrates that verb duration is influenced by upcoming nominal complements in a manner that follows from information utility but cannot be explained by previous accounts. Finally, I present a third set of studies, which makes use of a new methodology – typing time corpora. I show that in spite of the absence of a communication channel, information utility has similar effects on typing time as well, highlighting the speaker-centric nature of the phenomena.
Petra Hendriks will appear in the Psychology Developmental Brownbag series with a talk on “Perspective taking and grammar: Children’s errors with pronouns.” The talk is at 12:15pm in Jordan Hall, Room 102, on Wednesday, 28 April. Here’s the abstract:
At the age of 5, many English- and Dutch-speaking children still make errors when interpreting pronouns in sentences such as “The boy is washing him”, allowing the pronoun to co-refer with the subject of the sentence. This is surprising because these children’s production of pronouns generally is adult-like from an early age on. In previous work (Hendriks & Spenader, 2006; Hendriks et al., 2010), I have argued that this ‘late’ delay in comprehension as well as other attested delays in either comprehension or production may provide evidence that the constraints the grammar imposes on language do not have the same effect in comprehension and production, and that perspective taking is a necessary aspect of adult linguistic competence. This talk will be concerned with the implications of this theoretical point of view for language acquisition, especially regarding the role of processing efficiency and working memory capacity.
There are a number of Stanford linguists on the program for SALT 20, Vancouver, April 29 – May 1. Two of the four invited speakers are Stanford-affiliated:
In addition, Judith Tonhauser (2006 PhD; now assistant professor at OSU) is giving a joint talk with Craige Roberts, Mandy Simons, and former Stanford faculty member David Beaver. And Ashwini Deo (2006 Phd; now assistant professor at Yale) has a joint poster with Mokshay Madiman. In addition, Judith and David are two of the co-organizers for the PEPA 2 workshop on projective meanings, taking place on April 28 at UBC.
Our teams of investigative sesquipedijournalists have uncovered a number of photos from the Metrics Fest earlier this month. Looks like it was a lot of fun, and productive too… here’s the multimedia:
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| Matt Adams fielding a question |
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| Kristin Hanson and Bruce Hayes on the move |
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| Paul Kiparsky |
Thanks Stephanie and Matt!
Being Creative with Troublesome Kin!
You are working on your family genealogy and for sake of example, let’s say that your great-great uncle, Remus Starr, a fellow lacking in character, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889.
A cousin has supplied you with the only known photograph of Remus, showing him standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture are the words:
“Remus Starr: Horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison, 1885. Escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged, 1889.”
Pretty grim situation, right? But let’s revise things a bit. We simply crop the picture, scan in an enlarged image and edit it with image processing software so that all that is seen is a head shot.
Next, we rewrite the text:
“Remus Starr was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad.
Beginning in 1885, he devoted several years of his life to service at a government facility, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.”
Stop Redundancy!
The Committee for the Reduction of Redundancy and the Antiproliferation of Repetition has decided not to meet until they have their first meeting and thus will not be meeting until the first time.
Their Pre-meeting Statement wanted to make this clear before they had their first meeting, so that it would not be unor confusing.
So their first meeting will actually be their first meeting and they will not have a meeting before the first meeting.
This should avoid having people show up for their first meeting before it is held, since to do so would be confusing to those who did so and this is what they want to avoid by reducing the confusion and lessening the repetition.
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.
