The New Sesquipedalian

The Phonetics and Phonology Workshop will meet today at noon in the Greenberg Room to discuss plans for the quarter. Contact Ed King for more information on the Workshop and the plans for the quarter.

Come to the CCRMA at the Knoll today from 12-5pm for an open house. This is an excellent opportunity to see the wide range of interdisciplinary research and creative work being done in computer music, human-computer interaction, mobile music, digital signal processing, psychoacoustics, and more. Following the open house will be a reception from 5-7, DJ’d by CCRMA folks.

The Berkeley Syntax Circle will be meeting today from 3-4:30pm in 1303 Dwinelle, as Thera Crane (Berkeley) presents on “Resultatives, Progressives, Statives and Relevance: The Temporal Pragmatics of the -ite suffix in Totela”.

Come to the Greenberg Room at 3:30 for a colloquium talk given by Dorit Abusch (Cornell), followed by dinner. The talk is entitled “Applying Discourse Semantics and Pragmatics to Visual Narrative”, and the abstract is below.

Pictorial representation, and in particular sequential art (i.e. comics) can function as a counterpoint for natural language semantics and pragmatics, where information is conveyed in a very different way, but where nevertheless phenomena recur that are familiar from natural language. A pure case is provided by sequential art without speech bubbles, thought bubbles, or captions, what I call “silent comics”. This presentation will focus on issues of co-reference, temporal relations and implicature, bringing out analogies with language.
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Congratulations to Sven Lauer and Stephanie Shih for receiving Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowships for 2012-2013!

Congratulations are also in order for Ashwini Deo, who received her PhD from our department in 2006. She will be spending next year at UT Austin on a Harrington Fellowship.

The office hours for the Lab TA will be Wednesdays, noon to 1pm. Office hours will be held in the Lab, in Building 420 (Jordan Hall), Room 363. Feel free to stop by to get help with recording, borrowing equipment, setting up experiments, or any other questions you might have about lab equipment or software.

From Lauri Karttunen:

One of the many institutions dedicated to the cause of “Keep Austin Weird” is the Minor Mishap Marching Band, known for their impromptu performances in random locations in Austin, TX. The picture was taken by my daughter, Suvi Aika, on Mach 25. It shows a couple of Stanford faces well-known to the many readers of the Sesquipedalian. They have gone native, or were that already. Watch another performance in this video.

Back by popular demand, it’s Sociolunch! Come to the Greenberg Room (460-126) on Monday from 1:15 to 2:15 to discuss the Voices of California project.