Come to the Greenberg Room at noon today to join Arto Anttila in the Phonetics & Phonology Workshop. He will be speaking on “Quantity alternations in Dagaare” (abstract below).
In other P&P news, this month’s night of beers and P-interested conversation will be at Rose and Crown (just off of University and Emerson in downtown PA) at 8pm next Wednesday, May 23rd.
Dagaare (Gur, Niger-Congo) is a tone language and there is little direct evidence for stress. In this talk, I develop the view that a number of vowel shortening and lengthening processes in Dagaare are best understood in metrical terms as consequences of a word-initial bimoraic foot (Anttila and Bodomo 2009).
It seems that Paul Kiparsky has been everywhere this quarter, but this week he will be a little closer to home. He’ll be presenting tomorrow at Berkeley’s 31′s “East Coast” Indo-European Conference on “Sound change as constraint promotion: Gestural overlap, nasal assimilation, and syllable structure in Greek.”
[Note from the editor: We know others of you are giving talks that we'd love to hear about...]
- Olga Dmitrieva and Uriel Cohen Priva successfully presented their dissertation orals this past week.
- Roey Gafter has received a Graduate Research Opportunity and a Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity grant to support the upcoming fieldwork for his dissertation entitled “Mizrahi-ness, Yemenite-ness and authenticity: On ethnicity and class based linguistic variation in the greater Tel Aviv area”
- Kate Geenberg has received an NSF dissertation grant for her dissertation entitled “Variation and marginalization in rural California: What it means to be “NorCal Country”. She is currently doing her fieldwork in Trinity County, CA.
Sesquicongratulations all around!
The Linguistics Department is pleased to announce that Tyler Schnoebelen will be presenting his dissertation oral on Monday at 10:30am in Wallenberg (160)-323. Come hear his presentation, entitled “Emotions are relational: Positioning and the use of affective linguistic resources”.
(Abstract below, or watch a three-minute video summary: http://bit.ly/diss-pitch starting at 1:26:00)
Understanding expressions of emotion means understanding how people use collections of linguistic resources to position themselves, their audiences, and their topics relative to one another. Expressions of emotion are not just internal states made visible. They are positional: reflecting, creating, and changing relationships. I demonstrate how positioning works in three case studies.
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Vera writes:
There will be one last fieldwork meeting for the year next Tuesday, 5/22, 12-1 in the Greenberg room.
We’ll use this last meeting to have a casual discussion about next year’s field methods course. Please bring questions and any comments about things you’d like me and Rob to think about as we develop the course over the summer.
James Collins will be presenting in Tuesday’s SMircle meeting. Come to the Greenberg room at 4:45 to hear his talk, entitled “Accusative in an Ergative Language: The Samoan Case System”
Generative analyses within the Minimalist framework vary widely in how they account for case assignment in so-called ergative languages. Legate (2008) proposes that for a large class of ergative languages, what is taken to be Absolutive case is actually two cases with the same morphological form – Nominative case on sole arguments of intransitives and Accusative case on patients of transitives. Ergative case is inherent, assigned by a functional head (little v) in transitive clauses. I extend this analysis to Samoan and show that it correctly predicts a split in the distribution of the morphologically null case Read the rest of this entry »
Come to the Stanford CS Logic Lunch on May 23 at 12:15 in Gates 260 to hear Carl Hewitt give the following seminar:
“Mathematics self-proves its own Consistency
(contra Gödel et. al.) That mathematics is thought to be consistent justifies the use of Proof by Contradiction. In addition, Proof by Contradiction can be used to infer the consistency of mathematics by the following simple argument: The self-proof is a proof by contradiction. Suppose to obtain an inconsistency that mathematics is inconsistent. Then there is some proposition Φ such that ⊢Φ and ⊢ØΦ. Consequently, both Φ and ØΦ are theorems that can be used in the proof to produce an immediate contradiction. Therefore mathematics is consistent.
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