Presentations by undergraduate researchers will take place at noon on Tuesday October 12th in the Greenberg room.
First we’ll hear a talk from Josh Falk, advised by Arto Anttila, entitled “The Rhythm of English and Finnish Text”.
Following that, Kate Hayes will present her work, advised by Joan Bresnan, on “Dative Completion Trend Comparison: American and Australian Students”.
The Cognition and Language Workshop’s symposium Computational Models of the Mind: Comparing Connectionist and Bayesian Perspectives on Cognition and Language begins today.The program includes Stanford faculty Patrick Suppes, Noah Goodman, and Jay McClelland, as well as visting speakers Jeff Elman, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths, and Dave Plaut.
From Paul Kiparsky:
These cooler days before the rains come are a perfect time to savor the beautiful open spaces in the area. I’m organizing an expanded version of our traditional phonology hike this Saturday. In celebration of the upcoming birthday of Roman Jakobson, who, although not an ardent hiker, appreciated a good bottle, we will walk the Russian Ridge trail, with gorgeous views of the Ocean and the Bay, ending at Thomas Fogarty’s Winery, where we will sample their fine products. Refreshed, we will then return by a lower trail to our starting point. People are welcome to join us just for the wine tasting, in which case they might be willing to drive some of us back directly. The proposed starting time is noon, in front of the department. Let me know if you want to join, and whether you need a ride to the trailhead, or can offer one.
Michael Devitt (CUNY Graduate Center) is giving a colloquium in Philosophy today (3:15 pm – 5:15 pm, 90-92Q) titled ‘What’s wrong with linguistic contextualism?’
The paper argues that writings of linguistic contextualists (including Sperber and Wilson, Carston, Recanati) embody three important mistakes:
- The confusion of the metaphysics of meaning, focused on the speaker and concerned with what constitutes what is said, meant, etc., with the epistemology of interpretation, focussed on the hearer and concerned with how we tell what a speaker said, meant, etc..
- The acceptance of “Modified Occam’s Razor,” understood as advising against the positing of a new sense wherever the message can be derived by a pragmatic inference.
- The urging of “Truth-Conditional Pragmatics” according to which the meaning of the sentence in an utterance does not alone yield a truth-conditional content (even after disambiguation and reference fixing); it needs to be pragmatically supplemented and can be so in indefinitely many ways yielding indefinitely many truth conditions.
SPLaT! (Stanford Psychology of Language Tea!) met this past Thursday (October 7). The main agenda item was initial planning for the upcoming CUNY Conference. From Tom Wasow:
The annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing is one of the premier psycholinguistics conferences in the world. Despite its name, it is hosted by a different institution each year, and in 2011, it will be at Stanford. I have taken on primary responsibility for organizing it. The dates of the conference are March 24-26, which is during Stanford’s spring break. I’m expecting about 400 attendees, so I’ll need a lot of help to make it a truly successful conference. Check out the website of the conference if you want to know more about it.
The next SPLaT! meeting is on Thursday, October 14, 4:20 pm, in 160-322. Tyler Schnoebelen, Rob Munro, Robin Melnick (Stanford Linguistics) will give a talk called ‘On experiments with crowd-sourcing techniques’.
Sylvia Yuan (Berkeley) is giving the Psych Brownbag talk this coming week (October 13, 12:15-1:15 pm, Jordan Hall, rm 102). Her title is ‘From sentence to meaning: Use of sentence-structural cues in verb learning’.
The 2011 LSA Institute’s Student Fellowship Competition has now been announced. The competition will open in the first half of January 2011. Check out the announcement page for additional details.
Thanks Beth!