The New Sesquipedalian

Do you like phonology? Do you like weird vowels? Today in the Greenberg Room at 12:15, Matt Faytak (Berkeley) will be presenting his analysis of the Kom vowel system, and it is decidedly… exotic (abstract below). Come on by to hear more!

In other soundie news, this month’s P-int Night will be next week on Wednesday 1/16 at Rose and Crown just off University Ave. 7 PM. Be there!

Vowels are attested with a wide range of secondary articulations not involving the tongue body, such as nasalization or pharyngealization. The Grassfields Bantu language Kom (ISO 639-3 bkm, Bantoid, Cameroon) appears to distinguish between vowels with and without an additional coronal and labiodental constriction; similar vowels are attested in other languages of the region (Fransen 1995, Connell 2007).
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Come to the Greenberg room today at 3:30! As part of the Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop’s “The Construction of Meaning” series, our very own Jason Grafmiller will be giving a talk, “Modeling verb meaning with corpus data: A usage-based investigation of argument realization in English psych-verbs”

Quantitative analysis of the semantic properties of argument realization in English Object-Experiencer (ObjExp) verbs (e.g. amuse, amaze, frighten, fascinate) reveals a strong correlation between active/passive uses of different verbs and the degree of potency, or causal force, of the verb’s stimulus argument. Verbs frequently associated with highly potent stimuli occur more often in the active, while those more commonly associated with abstract stimuli occur more often in the passive. Furthermore, differences in potency reflect variation along other dimensions of transitivity, most notably eventivity-stativity (Hopper & Thompson 1980).
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After Jason’s talk (or approximately 4:15) in the lounge, you will find the first social of the New Year! Come by for drink (both alcoholic and non), cheer, snack, and a chance to hear about everyone’s winter break. See you there!

Everyone is invited to the first Smircle (Syntax and Morphology Circle) meeting of the quarter, to take place Tuesday at 2pm in the Greenberg room. It’s a short planning meeting to discuss ideas for the Winter sessions; come discuss what Syntax- and Morphology-related topics you’d like to read/hear/talk about this quarter. There will also be tea and light snacks!

This is a busy week for Stanford linguists, even after considering all of our folks giving LSA talks and posters.

• Paul Kiparsky gave a talk at the Workshop on the Foundations of Historical Linguistics at the LSA
• Asya Pereltsvaig missed the fun at LSA in order to give a panel talk at the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages conference titled “On Paucal Numerals and Adjectivals in Russian”
• Jason Grafmiller will give a talk at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics titled “Modeling verb meaning with corpus data: A usage-based investigation of argument realization in English psych-verbs”
• Jessica Spencer and Joan Bresnan will travel to New Zealand to give a talk at Variation and Language Processing 2 titled “Variation in English auxiliary contraction”

Stanford linguists have been especially noteworthy lately. Congratulations to:

• Paul Kiparsky, who was awarded the 2012 Language Research Prize by the Swedish Academy
• Chris Manning, who was elected vice-president of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Alum Ashwini Deo, who is co-PI on an NSF grant titled INSPIRE: The underpinnings of Semantic change: A Linguistic, Cognitive, and Information-Theoretic Investigation
• Herbert Clark, of Psychology and Professor-by-courtesy in Linguistics, who was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctorat honoris causa) at the University of Neuchâtel on November 3, 2012. (In Germany, he now has the truly frightening title Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Herbert H. Clark.)

How badly does English orthography need a facelift? This article describes somebody whose life work is adding a single letter to the alphabet.