Please join the SMircle meeting this Monday at 4 PM in the Greenberg Room where Jessica Cleary-Kemp (UC Berkeley) will talk about her work on SVC constructions in Koro (Oceanic).
The Structure of SVCs in Koro (Oceanic)
Abstract: Despite the range of descriptive and formal work that has been carried out on serial verb constructions (SVCs) in the Austronesian family and beyond, their exact syntactic structure remains controversial. In this paper I present data from Koro, a previously undescribed Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, to give evidence for the underlying structure of certain multi-verb constructions in Oceanic. I argue that these constructions are qualitatively different from the types of structures originally identified as SVCs in the Niger-Congo languages of West Africa in terms of the structural relationship between the two verbs, the type of juncture between them (coordination, adjunction, or complementation), the level of juncture, and the size of the joined constituents. Specifically, I give evidence that core-layer SVCs in Koro comprise a reality status phrase right-adjoined to VP.
The Center for the Study of Language and Information will be holding a two-day workshop on Gradience in Grammar, featuring internationally known speakers from across the globe here to discuss the empirical techniques and linguistic models that gradience in grammar calls for. The workshop will be in the Barwise conference room (Cordura Hall 100), beginning at 9AM on Friday January 17. Speakers are:
Harald Baayen
Antal van den Bosch
Edward Gibson
T. Florian Jaeger
Maryellen MacDonald
Roger Levy
Amy Perfors
Steven Piantadosi
Please join us in the Greenberg Room Thursday (1/16) at 4:30 for a SPLaT talk by Gérard Huet.
From lexical trees to effective Eilenberg machines: the Zen toolkit for computational linguistics.
Abstract: The Zen toolkit is a library in the functional programming language OCaml, oriented towards computational linguistics tasks. Its main data structure is a generic notion of decorated lexical tree, spanning the spectrum between lexicon structures and finite machines transition graphs. Zipper technology allows fast update of such structures in an applicative manner, while the sharing functor yields their optimal compression. A notion of differential word permits crisp representation of morphology as an editing distance. A reactive engine drives non-deterministic search in a fair and efficient manner. These simple concepts generalize to a general notion of relational programming with effective Eilenberg machines. We shall demonstrate the effectiveness of this technology for Sanskrit segmentation.
Patrick Collier joins the department this quarter as a postdoc in Rob Podesva’s lab. He comes to us after finishing a Ph.D. at Georgetown University in 2013, after earning a B.A. from our own department in 2007. His main research areas are sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, stylistic variation, and Mandarin Chinese. You can read more about Patrick and his research here.
Please join us in extending Patrick a hearty welcome (back)!
Chris Manning has been elected a fellow of The Association for Computing Machinery “for contributions to natural language processing research and education.” You can read all about it here.
Congratulations, Chris!
Dan Jurafsky’s blog The Language of Food was featured recently in the NPR blog Code Switch in a post on the history of ketchup.
Seung Kyung Kim has been awarded the Graduate Research Opportunity (GRO) Award from the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Congratulations, Seung Kyung!
Please join us in the department lounge today at 4PM for a social. All are welcome!