Guess what's just been published by MIT Press?
The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky, Edited by Kristin Hanson and Sharon Inkelas. Check it out (or even order it) HERE!

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe is giving a talk on Nov. 10 at Yahoo. It's on "Finding contradiction in texts".

Meanwhile, Beth Levin is giving three talks in Spain at the University of Alicante:

• "Manner/Result Complementarity in Verb Meanings", Departamento de Filología Española, Lingüística General y Teoría de la Literatura (Nov. 11)
• "Facets of Objecthood", Departamento de Filología Española, Lingüística General y Teoría de la Literatura (Nov. 12)
• "The Anatomy of Verb Meaning", Setmana Cultural de la Tardor (Nov. 13)

Folks heading East:

At the NYU Conference on Semantic Knowledge Discovery, Organization and Use (Nov 14-15), one can find the following talk:

• Nathanael Chambers (CSD) and Dan Jurafsky. Enriching Narrative Event Chains

And this is followed by a presentation at the TAC workshop (Nov 17-19) at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland:

• "Deciding Entailment and Contradiction with Stochastic and Edit Distance-based Alignment"
  Sebastian Padó, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Bill MacCartney (CSD), Anna N. Rafferty (CSD), Eric Yeh (CSD), and Christopher D. Manning

Don't forget that upcoming at WECOL at UC Davis (Nov. 21-23), we have a bunch of Stanford-related talks:

• The pragmatics of the choice between raised and non-raised complement structures in Korean: A corpus study.
  Hanjung Lee (Sungkyunkwan U), Goeun Chae
• Specificity and generalization in learning novel contrasts.
  Meghan Sumner
• Frequency-based expectations and context influence bridge quality.
  Anubha Kothari
• Floating quantifiers in Korean: movement or non-movement?
  Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung-Hee U)
• Narrative skills in boys with fragile X syndrome and Down syndrome
  Bruno Estigarribia (UNC), Cheryl Malkin, Gary Martin, Amy Spencer, Joanne Roberts, John Sideris
• Productive morphosyntax in populations with intellectual disability
  Bruno Estigarribia (UNC), Joanne Roberts, Johanna Price, Kellin McKinney, John Sideris

(You didn't think this feature was going to go away immediately after the election, did you? Ha!)

Alas, folks, they got the wrong Palin. Check it all out HERE.

True PalinDrome: Wasilla's all I saw.

And for all you opera buffs [Stanley - don't miss this!]:
Hockey Mama for Obama (Don't Speak for me, Sarah Palin)

THIS is truly choice, if you haven't heard it. Two radio comedians from Montreal call Sarah Palin, pretending to be Nicolas Sarkozy, say all kinds of off-beat things and she entirely bites. They finally have to tell her she was "pranked". In a print story, they say that of all the many celebrities they have fooled, only Palin and Britney Spears had to be told they had been fooled. Some of the quotes that you might miss on the recording:

"I wanted to see how (Palin) was on an intellectual level," Audette said, comparing the latest prank to the duo's crank call with pop idol Britney Spears. "You can see that she's, well, not really brilliant."

Schadenfreude can be beautiful.

And for Palin jokes that we can no longer bring you every week, please keep checking HERE.

Finnish Humor

Finnish drinking game

There are two versions of this game for Finns; regular and advanced.


• Regular: Three Finnish guys go into the sauna, each with half a litre of Kossu (Finland's famous Koskenkorva vodka). They each drink the vodka, and then one guy goes outside. The other two have to guess who went outside....
• Advanced: TWO Finnish guys go into the sauna, each with a litre of Kossu. They each drink the vodka, and then one guy goes outside. The other guy has to guess who went outside....

For events farther in the future consult the Upcoming Events Page.

FRIDAY, 7 NOVEMBER

• No SocioTea

  We're all at NWAV!

• Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar

  Michael Spivey (Cognitive Science, UC Merced)
  "Continuous Temporal Dynamics in Real-time Cognition"
  
  11:00am, Tolman 5101, UC Berkeley

• Speech Lunch

  12pm, Linguistics Lab

• Department Social

  Gourmet delights by the Social Committee
  
  4:00pm, in the Department Kitchen

MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER

• Berkeley QP Fest

  1:10-5:30pm, 370 Dwinelle, UC Berkeley

TUESDAY, 11 NOVEMBER

• Discussion of sociolinguistics curriculum

  Lunch provided (RSVP to Lauren (dialect@stanford.edu))
  
  12:00 in MJH, Room 126

WEDNESDAY, 12 NOVEMBER

• Formal Pragmatics Reading Group

  No meeting this week.

• Psychology Developmental Brownbag

  Adriana Weisleder (Stanford Psychology)
  "Real-time processing of postnominal adjectives by Latino children learning Spanish"
  
  12:15pm, 420-102

THURSDAY, 13 NOVEMBER

• CCRMA Hearing Seminar

  Mark Every
  "Grouping in Polyphonic Music"
  
  11:30am, CCRMA Hearing Seminar Room, The Knoll

• UCSC Linguistics Colloquium

  Sam Cumming (UCLA)
  Creatures of Darkness
  
  4:00pm, Silverman Conference Room, Stevenson College, UCSC

• Phonology Workshop

  Paul Kiparsky
  Bidirectional OT in phonology: chain shifts and anti-neutralization effects
  
  5:00pm, MJH 126

FRIDAY, 14 NOVEMBER

• SocioTea

  10:00am, MJH 126

• Speech Lunch

  12:00pm, Linguistics Lab

• Informal Formal Semantics Reading Group

  Cleo Condoravdi
  
  3:30pm, MJH Chair's Office

• Department Social

  Gourmet delights by the Social Committee
  
  4:00pm, in the Department Kitchen

UPCOMING EVENTS (always under construction)

LINGUISTIC DEPARTMENT EVENTS PAGE

Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.

WHAT'S HAPPENING AT UC SANTA CRUZ?

WHAT'S GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY?

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of types O, A, B-, and AB-. For an appointment, visit http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. The Blood Center is also raising money for a new bloodmobile.

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.