Allan Schwade, a student at Santa Cruz, will be giving today’s p-interest talk, on “The non-grammatical gender of words”. The talk will take place at 12:15 in the Greenberg Room.
The non-grammatical gender of words
Allan Schwade (UC Santa Cruz)
Walker and Hay (2011) demonstrated that English listeners are faster and more accurate at identifying auditorily presented words in a lexical decision task when words associated with a certain age-group were spoken by speakers from that age-group, supporting exemplar models that claim tokens are tagged for attributes of the talker (Johnson, 1997; Pierrehumbert, 2001). The study to be presented expands on the work of Walker and Hay by showing that English speakers’ reaction times for orthographically-presented words associated with a non-grammatical gender are primed by images of men and women, albeit in unexpected ways. The results raise interesting questions regarding the ability of people to report the sociological attributes associated with words, and the robustness of sociological priming effects across different modalities.
The 2nd CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Intelligent Interaction is taking place this weekend (Friday through Sunday), and includes a talk by Tania Rojas-Esponda titled “Are Questions (Under Discussion) the Answer?”
Next week’s SymSys Forum will feature M.S. project presentations by Ben Holguin and Kathryn Papadopoulos (M.S. Candidates in SymSys). The talks will take place on Monday, June 3rd, from 12:15-1:05 pm in the Greenberg Room (Building 460, Room 126)
(a) “Empty Names and Unreal Objects” (Ben Holguin, advised by Ken Taylor, Philosophy)
It is difficult to defend all of the following intuitive theses: (i) that the content of a name is its referent; (ii) that sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character’ are true; and (iii) that there are no fictional or mythological objects. If there is no Sherlock Holmes, then how do we make claims about him? I argue against approaches to this problem that seek to reconcile all three theses. I then argue against (iii)–the claim that that there are no fictional or mythological objects–in favor of an ontology that countenances fiction and myth. I conclude with a discussion of an objection to my view that makes use of semantic data regarding the ordinary usage of negative existentials.
(b) “From supporting the scale to scaling the support: Defining the new role of peers in online courses” (Kathryn Papadopoulos, advised by Scott Klemmer, Computer Science)
For the past year, I have immersed myself in the world of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), serving as a teaching assistant and enrolling in over a dozen classes. My experience has led me to discover and reflect on the ways we can support this scale of students by understanding how the scale can and has been supporting itself. This presentation will focus on three examples: social media, peer assessment, and Community TAs. Social media is a student-initiated form of interaction generated to satisfy needs not being met in the course platform. Peer assessment allows open-ended assignments to transcend the size of the class, relying on fellow students to grade each other. Community TAs, students who excelled in a previous offering, sustain 24/7 forum monitoring and instructor support. These three examples will highlight the ways we can continue to leverage the massive number of global students to support learning goals and create successful online learning communities.
James Collins will be presenting at next week’s SMircle on “The Morphosyntax of Ergativity in Samoan”, a practice talk for a presentation at UC Santa Cruz’s S-Circle. The talk will take place on Tuesday, June 4th, at 2pm in the Greenberg Room.
The Morphosyntax of Ergativity in Samoan
Contemporary theories of ergativity vary considerably in terms of how they characterise the assignment of morphological case to subjects and objects. This talk uses data from the Polynesian language Samoan to tease apart implications of some of these theories. In particular, I present new evidence that Samoan falls within Legate’s (2008) proposed sub-class of ergative languages which distinguish both nominative and accusative cases. Morphological syncretism between nominative and accusative case derives the appearance of absolutive case. This correctly predicts the absence of absolutive case on intransitive subjects in nominalised clauses, differing morphological forms of subject and object pronouns, as well as putative “dropping” of ergative case, as originally observed by Ochs (1982). I then map out a mechanism governing the assignment of morphological case in which Samoan demonstrates an ordinary nominative-accusative system with the additional property of allowing KPs headed by the ergative case marker in the subject position of transitive clauses.
Legate, J. 2008. Morphological and Abstract Case. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 55-101.
Ochs, E. 1982. Ergativity and Word Order in Samoan Child Language. Language 58: 646-671.
Stanford will be hosting a collaborative Bay Area CogSci event next week, merging with the annual Stanford-Berkeley Cog-Neuro meeting. The event will be held from 10am to 4pm on Friday, June 7th, in Room 50 in Jordan (Bldg 420). You can RSVP for the event at the evite page.
Please join the department next Friday for our annual end-of-year party. We’ll celebrate the start of summer on Friday, June 7 from
3:30pm-5:00pm in the courtyard behind Margaret Jacks.
This week’s Stanford talks from around the globe:
Please join us in congratulating Sven Lauer who recently passed the oral defense of his dissertation, “Towards a dynamic pragmatics”.