A hearty Sesquipediwelcome to this year’s incoming first year PhD students! Here’s what they have to say for themselves:
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Sam Bowman
After a year on the road and four more completing a combined BA/MA at the University of Chicago, I’m happy to be returning home to the Bay Area. Lately, I’ve had my attention on finite-state Optimality Theory, vowel harmony, and automatic speech recognition. More generally, my interests include formal methods, AI and cognition, cities, typography, redwoods, and the so-called food movement. |
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Jeremy Calder
I’m originally from El Paso, Texas, and I received my undergraduate degree from New Mexico State University. I’m currently interested in exploring pronunciation conventions in various genres of popular music and how these conventions tie into genre identity. Side interests include text-setting in lyrical music, the phonetics/phonology of Nuxálk, and probably an obscene number of other things I’m neglecting to mention. Outside of linguistics, my main passion is (…you probably guessed it…) music. I compose dark electronica, and once every millennium or so, I emerge from my academic lair and perform live. |
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James Colllins
I was born in Sydney, Australia. I completed my undergraduate studies in Linguistics and Economics at the University of Sydney, where I worked this year as the TA for first-year linguistics. Part-time I also collaborate in the development and quality review of spell-checking software for Microsoft. My linguistic interests primarily concern the syntactic analysis of less studied languages, especially those of the Australasian region. I am also interested in the theoretical review of formal approaches to syntax. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy learning languages, films and travelling the world. |
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Janneke Van Hofwegen
I’m originally from the Bay Area, but moved away for college in Michigan and since have lived in Lithuania and North Carolina. In 2009, I completed an MA in English linguistics at North Carolina State University, and am presently working as a Research Associate/Instructor for NC State. I’m a sociolinguist primarily, with interests in ethnic varieties of English, language contact, language variation/change, and sociophonetics. My current research includes studying the longitudinal development of African American English (AAE) in African American children, as well as acoustic analyses of consonants in AAE and Chicano English. I have a dog, a husband, and two active, hilarious little boys at home. We love traveling, playing outside, and reading, among many other things. |
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Dasha Popova
I grew up in Moscow, and graduated from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. My linguistic interests revolve around Pragmatics and Semantics, but I am also interested in documenting endangered Finno-Ugric languages (So far I have worked on the Shoksha dialect of Mordovian languages, Komi-Zyryan and Khanty languages). Other things I enjoy include philosophy, literature, swimming, skiing, mountaineering, piano playing and singing. |
The Phonetics and Phonology Workshop will be starting in earnest at noon today in the Greenberg Room. The first meeting is for introductions and an interactive tour/demo of the linguistics lab by Lab TA Ed King. The Workshop will be meeting every Friday at noon; next week will feature Reiko Kataoka speaking about “Phonetic and Cognitive Bases of Sound Changes – Past, Present, and Future.” As always, abstracts and the most up-to-date information are available on the P-interest website!
Also, the following Wednesday (October 12) will be the first of a series of monthly P-interested bar nights (“P-int Nights”).
Vera Gribanova and Rob Podesva will be co-organizing a Fieldwork Lab, which will provide an informal space where people interested in undertaking fieldwork, across the subareas of linguistics, can learn from others who might already have some experience in the field.
The group will meet a few times a quarter, beginning today at 3:00 pm in the Greenberg Room. Dates for future meetings will be announced on the Sesquipedalian and via an email list. At this first organizational meeting, Vera and Rob will get your feedback on which topics you would like to address (e.g. entering a community, how to elicit data, recording equipment, data storage) and what types of activities you would like to participate in (e.g. informal discussion about common problems and challenges, presentations of fieldwork-based research, discussions of readings, demonstrations). Participants, including those who have recently returned from working on the Voiced of California project in Redding, will also share their summer fieldwork stories. See you at the meeting!
Our alums are criss-crossing the globe, in search of ever more exciting jobs…. Here’s just a few recent moves!
Inbal Arnon has moved back to Israel! She left Manchester (UK) to take up a post at the Dept. of Psychology at the University of Haifa.
Philip Hofmeister, fresh off his post-UCSD summer in Tuebingen was just appointed Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex (UK). But that gig won’t start until January, until which time he’s back in our department teaching a course on Language Processing, giving a couple of public lectures on experimental linguistics, doing guest lectures in various places, and running some new experiments. Hopefully, his life in Essex will be calmer than it is now…
Bruno Estigarribia and Patricia Amaral are now both Assistant Professors of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For Bruno, that’s just moving across campus…
And Lis Norcliffe isn’t even moving that far, but she’s moving up — she was just appointed co-coordinator of the project ”Categories Across Language and Cognition” in the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (NL). The website is here: http://www.mpi.nl/research/research-projects/categories
And speaking of moving up, Andrew Koontz-Garboden has been promoted to Senior Lecturer at Manchester!
Sesquicongratulations to all!
All are welcome to a special symposium at PARC this Wednesday:
From Quirky Case to Representing Space
(An AnnieFest)
This symposium is being held on the occasion of Annie Zaenen’s retirement from PARC to honor her significant contributions to theoretical and computational linguistics over a long and distinguished career. The symposium features speakers who have collaborated closely with Annie at different times and on different topics, representing the broad sweep of her theoretical and practical concerns. The talks and discussion will reflect on their collaborations with Annie and offer new perspectives on language issues of current interest.
The symposium takes place on Wednesday 5 October from 2-5pm at the Parc Auditorium, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto. Joan Bresnan (Stanford University and CSLI), Anette Frank (Heidelberg University), Joan M. Maling (Brandeis University and NSF), Geoffrey Nunberg (UC Berkeley), Livia Polyani (Microsoft), and Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI and Saarland University) will all speak.
No RSVP required!
Organizers:
Danny Bobrow (Parc)
Ron Kaplan (Microsoft)
Tracy King (eBay)
Valeria de Paiva (Rearden Commerce)
A whole bunch of Stanford linguists have been taking the world by storm over the last few months. Here’s just a sampler of what’s been going on:
Chigusa Kurumada and Florian Jaeger presented on “Animacy-based predictability effects on the case-marker omission in Japanese” at the workshop on Structural Alternations: Speaker and Hearer Perspectives at University of Groningen (NL), August 24.
Marie-Catherine De Marneffe, Chris Manning and Chris Potts represented Stanford at the ICSC 2011 Workshop on Semantic Annotation for Computational Linguistic Resources. Their presentation was about “Veridicality and Utterance Meaning.”
In June, Eve Clark presented a keynote talk on ‘Conversational partners and common ground: Variation and language acquisition’ at the conference “Variation in first and second language acquisition: comparative perspectives” in Paris.
Stanford people past and present convened at the the 2011 triennial meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) in Montréal, including:
At the same meeting, Nola Stephens presented a paper in the symposium on The importance of information structure for early language development, ‘Give him a hat: Givenness and pronominality in early child datives’
Inbal Arnon & Eve Clark presented a paper in the Symposium on Frequency effects, ‘More than words: how frame frequency and predictability affect children’s word production’
Eve Clark also co-organized a symposium on ‘Constructing verbs and their meanings’ (with Edy Veneziano, Université de Paris-Descartes). Among the papers presented in this symposium were ‘Inflections and constructions: Acquiring verbs in French’ (Veneziano & Clark) and ‘Building on adult verb uses’ (Clark & de Marneffe). Bruno Estigarribia was the discussant for the symposium.
…and Middy Tice and Patricia Amaral presented a poster on ‘ “It’s sort of a butterfly”: Children are sensitive to cues of attenuated category membership’
At the LSA Institute at University of Colorado at Boulder in July, there was lots of Stanford activity. Meghan Sumner co-organized a conference on ‘Testing Models of Phonetics and Phonology’ and gave a talk there entitled ‘Variation-driven Speech Perception’. She also taught a course, as did Penny Eckert, Dan Jurafsky, Lauri Karttunen, Beth Levin, Chris Potts, Ivan Sag, Annie Zaenen, and alumni Michael Barlow, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Bill Croft, Sharon Inkelas, Florian Jaeger, Graham Katz, Suzanne Kemmer, Roger Levy, Rob Malouf, Norma Mendoza-Denton, and Steve Wechsler. In addition, Ivan Sag, as the Edward Sapir Professor, gave a plenary lecture on ‘Sex, Lies, and the English Auxiliary System’. The Institute also included workshops on `Semantics of Textual Inference’, organized by Cleo Condoravdi and Annie Zaenen, on `The Grammar of Knowledge Asymmetries: “Conjunct/Disjunct” Alignment from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective’, co-organized by Lis Norcliffe, and on `Crowd-Sourcing Technologies’, organized by Rob Munro and Hal Tily. You had to be there!
Meanwhile, at the LFG Conference in Hong Kong, there were presentations by Stanford alums Rachel Nordlinger, Ash Asudeh, Mary Dalrymple, and Miriam Butt.
In September, the finest presentations at the Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue were:
- Middy Tice, Susan C. Bobb and Eve V. Clark. Timing in turn-taking: Children’s responses to their parents’ questions.
- Middy Tice and Tania Henetz. Eye gaze of 3rd party observers reflects turn-end boundary projection.
Paul Kiparsky spent the Summer Semester 2011 in Konstanz (Germany) as a Senior Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg, where he had a whole conference, the International Workshop ‘Dimensions of Grammar’, organized in his honor. The conference included a number of Stanford alums, including Ashwini Deo, Itamar Francez, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. Rounding it all off, Paul Kiparsky gave a talk about “Blocking vs. Morphological Movement.”
Tom Wasow gave a plenary (based on joint work with David Clausen) at the HPSG Conference in Seattle, where there were also presentations by Doug Ball, Emily Bender (and students), Jong-Bok Kim, Joanna Nykiel and Ivan Sag, and Peter Sells (who’s moved to the University of York (UK), in case you haven’t heard).
This September, Sven Lauer underwent a whirlwind European tour, appearing first in Utrecht for the Sinn und Bedeutung conference, where he talked about “The pragmatics of pragmatic slack”. Then at Frankfurt University he gave an invited talk on “Varieties of Compositionality and Loose Talk.” Then he traveled to Stuttgart for the Workshop on Aspect and Modality in Lexical Semantics, where he talked about sufficiency causatives in English, Japanese, and German.
Cleo Condoravdi also presented at Frankfurt University, on joint work with Sven, with the title “Towards a null theory of explicit performatives.” She also was an invited speaker at the CSSP in Paris last week, with the title “Imperatives: Meaning and Illocutionary Force”.
As part of their continuing dialect study of California, the Voices of California project spent 12 days in Redding in September, interviewing 113 adults from all walks of life. This year’s team included Eric Acton, Ellie Ash, Sam Bowman, Jeremy Calder, Annette D’Onofrio, Penny Eckert, Kate Geenberg, Jason Grafmiller, Ed King, Rob Podesva, John Rickford, Tyler Schnoebelen and Jessica Spencer. The group will offer a presentation on this work sometime in the fall quarter.
Penny Eckert gave a talk last week at NYU entitled “Developing Attitude”, and a workshop entitled “Methods in Third Wave Variation Studies”.
Have you been spreading the word about your linguistic discoveries at conferences across the world? If so, let us know!
