The New Sesquipedalian

John Rickford accepted the UCSC Alumni Achievement Award at the UCSC Founders Day Awards ceremony, October 23. Here’s a shot of him with (left to right) Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar and President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, who received the Foundation Medal, and UCSC Vice Chancellor George Blumenthal, who presented the awards:

By the way: fellow new arrivals, did you know that John Rickford won the American Book Award in 2000 for Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, co-authored with Russell John Rickford? Wow!

At least two Stanford Linguistics faculty members have their own weblogs:

• Arnold Zwicky’s Blog
• The Language of Food

And three are on Language Log. We’ve added the links to out sidebar. Faculty, students:* if you’re blogging and we’ve missed your link, please drop us a note.

*Sesquipbloggers excluded. We’ve got your links all over the place.

Our visitor Petra Hendriks will be talking about “On the relation between grammar, acquisition and processing: A case study in pronoun interpretation” today at 1:15pm in the Greenberg Room. Here are some details:

The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in language acquisition is a well-known effect that has motivated widely distinct views on the relation between grammar and other linguistic resources necessary for sentence interpretation. In this talk I discuss a computational model that colleagues in Groningen and I recently developed within the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Van Rij et al., 2009; in press). This cognitive model is based on an optimality theoretic account that attributes the DPBE to children’s inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker’s perspective (Hendriks & Spenader, 2005/6). The cognitive model predicts that child hearers are unable to take into account the speaker’s perspective because their speed of linguistic processing is too limited to perform this second step in interpretation. We tested this hypothesis empirically in a psycholinguistic study, in which we slowed down the speech rate to give children more time for interpretation, and in a computational simulation study. The results of the two studies confirm the predictions of our model. Moreover, these studies show that embedding a theory of linguistic competence in a cognitive architecture allows for the generation of detailed and testable predictions with respect to linguistic performance.

Want to find out more about the Factorial Typology of Prosodic and Morphological Constraints and Classhood in English? Hideki Zamma will answer all your questions at the Phonetics and Phonology Workshop this Monday. Here’s the abstract:

Since Chomsky and Halle (1968), it has been widely assumed that English suffixes can be divided into two major categories (Siegel (1974), Allen (1978), Kiparsky (1982), Halle and Mohanan (1986), Halle and Vergnaud (1987), Benua (1997), etc.). The defining characteristics of classhood include, for example, (i) whether or not a suffix is stress-neutral and (ii) whether or not a suffix is capable of attaching to the root base. From time to time in the literature, however, it is pointed out that some suffixes have “dual membership” in both of the classes. In other words, the same suffix sometimes exhibits both stress-neutral and root-attaching behaviors (Aronoff (1976), Selkirk (1982), Fudge (1984), Szpyra (1989), Giegerich (1999), etc.). This fact has posed a serious problem to any theory of lexicon with dichotomy, because it suggests that some of the characteristics in suffixation might not be attributed to the difference between the two classes.

This paper proposes that a proper analysis of the problem at hand can be given within the framework of Partial Ordering Theory (Anttila and Cho (1998), Anttila (2002)). Assuming that various groupings in the lexicon can have different constraint rankings, the dual membership suffixes can be analyzed as having the same rankings as Class 1 and 2 at the same time. Moreover, a POT analysis predicts a different type of suffixes not observed to date. This kind of suffixes is actually borne out in an overwhelming investigation utilizing the SOED.

Based on a research on the same dictionary, it is also investigated how many suffixes (out of 120) actually belong to each class. Considering the distributional facts revealed from the investigation, it is further discussed if they can be theoretically predicted from POT.

You can stay up-to-date on the workshop by visiting their website every day.

The pragmatics group met on October 28, and now they’re back, just one week later, for another meeting — November 4, 5:30 pm, Cordura 210. The plan is to discuss Chapter 2, Section 3 of Franke’s thesis (pages 76-89). Questions left over from the sections discussed this week will also be under discussion.

Last week’s issue raised the question of what the ideal Pragmatics Group treat is. Curious about how that was resolved? Then see you on Wednesday.

The Ken Taylor Cognition and Language talk originally scheduled for November 2 has been moved to Monday, November 9, 4:15 pm. The tentative title, my current vote for the best title of the year, is On the jazz combo theory of meaning.

Speaker: Jenny Rose Finkel

Occasion: Thursday’s NLP Lunch

Title: Practice Job Talk

Abstract by Adam Vogel:

Although much attention has been payed to supervised talks, where all audience members are paying attention, in practice this can be expensive if not impossible to achieve. This motivates semi-supervised talks, wherein the speaker is given relatively few attentive listeners, combined with a larger number of partially listening, mostly laptop using, audience members. Through novel usage of humor, animated slide transitions, and stimulants, I will demonstrate an iterative bootstrapping method, based on spectral graph theory, which yields attention levels rivaling those of talks where everyone listens the whole time.

When Insults had Class

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, “If you were my husband I’d give you poison.” He said, “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.” “That depends, Sir,” said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”

“He had delusions of adequacy.” – Walter Kerr

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” – Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” – Moses Hadas

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” – Mark Twain

“He has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends.” – Oscar Wilde

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend…. if you have one.” – George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one.” – Winston Churchill, in response.

“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” – Stephen Bishop

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” – John Bright

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” – Irvin S. Cobb

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” – Samuel Johnson

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” – Paul Keating

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” – Forrest Tucker

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” – Mark Twain

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” – Mae West

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” – Oscar Wilde

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” – Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” – Billy Wilder

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” – Groucho Marx

(reviewing a play in which Katherine Hepburn appeared):
“Her emotions ran the gamut from A to B” – Dorothy Parker

The Stanford Blood Center is still reporting a shortage of type O-. 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.