The New Sesquipedalian

Join us in the kitchen today at 4pm for a cinnamon-themed social.

There won’t be a colloq today, and the p-interest talk by Allan Schwade (UCSC) has been postponed until next Friday, 5/31.

Sven Lauer will be giving his oral dissertation presentation on Tuesday 5/28 from 12:30-1:45 in the Greenberg Room. Come hear his talk, “Towards a dynamic pragmatics”!

This dissertation explores the interplay of conventional and interactional factors in the interpretation of natural language utterances. Pragmatic inferences, understood as inferences about why a speaker made the utterance choices he did, are modeled as contextual entailments in a dynamic system in which information states are updated with information about utterance events (in contrast to dynamic semantics, where information states are updated with the content of linguistic expressions).
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Friday 5/31 through Sunday 6/2, CSLI will host the second annual Workshop on Logic, Rationality, and Intelligent Interaction. This workshop will continue a long-standing tradition of annual outreach meetings aimed at fostering discussion across disciplines and universities, with the added goal of involving both junior and senior participants.The content of the workshop will be drawn from the disciplines of logic, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics and economics, with the intention of exploring the contacts between them.

Our own Tania Rojas-Esponda will be presenting in next week’s workshop. For more details look at this website.

James Collins presented at the annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association this past Friday the 17th with a talk “Pseudo noun incorporation in discourse: the view from Tongan and Samoan”.

• The best paper award at The 22nd World Wide Web Conference went to
  Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Robert West, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts for their paper ‘No country for old members: user lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities’.
• Beth Levin has been awarded a 2013 H&S Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Education. This award recognizes faculty for their dedication and commitment to outstanding teaching.

Have you been noticing an ever-increasing lack of possessive apostrophes? According to as reputable a source as Wall Street Journal, there is a War on Apostrophes. Read about it here.