The New Sesquipedalian

The LSA Sociolinguistic Archives workshop, held in conjunction with the Portland LSA Meeting also included the following Stanford-related presentations (inadvertently omitted from last week’s ‘Quip) :

• John Rickford: Situation: The Neglected Variable in Sociolinguistic Corpora and Theory.
• Rene’e Blake (NYU): Interrogating African American
• Carmen Fought (Pitzer College): Coding for Latin@-American Ethnic Identities

At the 15th World Sanskrit Conference at New Delhi (5th to 10th January, 2012):

• Gerald Penn (U. Toronto) & Paul Kiparsky: On Panini and the Generative Capacity of Contextualized Replacement System

And over in Chapel Hill, where we now have two alums – Jennifer Arnold and Bruno Estigarribia, as well as former Stanford postdoc Patricia Amaral, they have a “Psychology of Language at UNC” talk series, which brings together language people from a number of departments. They recently hosted a talk by another of our alums:

• Steve Wechsler (U. Texas, Austin): Why are ‘you’ and ‘I’ so special?

Upcoming at the Conference on Metrics, Music, and Mind: Linguistic, Metrical, and Cognitive Implications in Sung Verse (23-25 Feb 2012 at Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy):

Starr, Rebecca and Stephanie Shih. Moraicity in Translated versus Native Japanese Text- setting.

Upcoming at BLS 38 (Feb. 11-12):

Looks like we missed some news items last week! First off, in addition to Aya Inamori and Cybelle Smith, Linguistics undergrad Rachel Cristy was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa this year! Sesquipedicongratulations!

Also, we forgot to mention that alum Ashwini Deo was also presenting at SALT.

Nostræ culpæ! However, you can help us avoid these oversights by sending us all the news you ever find out about any topic whatsoever! We’d be especially interested in what you’ll be up to this summer….

Apparently, some gremlins broke into the Sesquipediheadquarters (SQHQ) last month and sabotaged some of our articles before we posted them, resulting in the following inaccuracies:

• “And this Monday 30 November she [Eve Clark] gave a similar talk to SLing, the undergraduate club.”
  In fact, Eve’s talk to the SLing club has been delayed until April, but she did give a talk at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail on 8 December 2009 on  “L’acquisition de la référence et du sens chez l’enfant.”
• Lucas Champollion‘s talk in Amsterdam was in fact entitled “Cumulative readings of ‘every’ do not provide evidence for events and thematic roles”.

We would like to analogize for a strange linguistic mistake we made in last week’s newsletter. It seems that we printed ‘adjoins’ instead of the phonologically similar ‘adjourns’ in reference to a party, and caught the intention of our own Arnold Zwicky, who wrote us up on his blog. Accordingly, the entire staff will undergo thorough mental examination and thought-reform in order to correct any possible further mistakes in our lexicons.

Read all about it here!