The New Sesquipedalian

Our very own alum Ashwini Deo will be giving a colloquium today at 3:30pm in the Greenberg Room. Come on out to hear her talk “The Semantic and Pragmatic Underpinnings of Grammaticalization Paths: the progressive and the imperfective”. Afterwards there will be a social, so stick around for drinks, snacks, dinner, and progressively imperfect conversation!

In this talk I offer an analysis of a robustly attested semantic change in which progressive markers “spontaneously” emerge in languages, get entrenched in the grammatical system, and diachronically grammaticalize into imperfective markers. Read the rest of this entry »

Our intrepid field reporter Sesqui was present at IvanFest last week, and found the following links to prove just how wonderful a time it was:

• Some pictures and a video: http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Bilder/ivanfest/
• The infamous HPSG man, performed by The Dead Tongues: http://youtu.be/M1tUW_LNnfo

(Thanks to Stefan Müller)

Please join us in congratulating…

• Marie de Marneffe (2012 PhD, now Assistant Professor at OSU), Marta Recasens (Stanford post-doc, now at Google), and Chris Potts, who won the NAACL 2013 best short paper award for ‘The life and death of discourse entities: identifying singleton mentions’.
• Dan Jurafsky for this mention in Stanford News on work with Dan McFarland (Education). Direct any questions on dating to him!

• Stephanie Shih and Arto Anttila are giving talks at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Grammatical Word this weekend at UC Davis.
• Paul Kiparsky gave talks on May 5 and May 6 at the 4th International Theoretical Phonology Conference in Taipei, and will give a talk on May 15 at the
  Kashmir International Conference on Linguistics in Muzaffarabad (Azad Kashmir, Pakistan).
• Last week’s SALT conference at UC Santa Cruz featured a plenary talk by Cleo Condoravdi, as well as a join talk by alumni Ashwini Deo, Itamar Francez, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden, and a coauthored talk by our colleagues over in Psych, Dan Lassiter and Noah Goodman.
• Alum Ashwini Deo gave a talk on Thursday at CSLI in addition to her colloquium today.

We extend our heartiest congratulations (and think you should too) to the following people:

• Matt Adams, who received a DAAD — Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst – research fellowship. He’ll be conducting research next year at the University of Düsseldorf, working with Ingo Plag
• Alum John Beavers received a teaching award, and has also been promoted to associate professor. Read more here!
• Alum Lauren Hall-Lew also received a teaching honor, an award from the Edinburgh University Students Association.