The New Sesquipedalian

Come to the Greenberg Room at noon to Skype-watch a talk by Stephanie Shih. Stephanie is giving a talk at UC Santa Cruz’s Phlunch on her joint work with our alum Rebecca Starr. Please note the unusual time.

Sociorap is today in the Greeberg Room at 3:45. Come by to hear Kim Potowski (U of Illinois at Chicago) give a talk entitled ‘Spanish dialect contact in Chicago: Phonetic realizations by Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and “MexiRicans”’.

The talk will be followed by the Social in the Department lounge.

Studies of Spanish dialect contact in the U.S. are becoming increasingly important as the origins of its Spanish-speaking populations become more diverse. In addition to “traditional” dialect contact, in which monodialectal members of different groups come into contact with each other in a number of social spheres, an increasingly common situation is that of intrafamilial dialect contact (Potowski 2011) experienced by mixed ethnicity Latinos – that is, individuals raised by parents who each speak a different dialect of Spanish. For example, Potowski (2008) found that among 18 “MexiRicans” in Chicago, 75% of them were informally rated as sounding more like their mother’s dialect group than their father’s.
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Who’s representing Stanford Linguistics this week? Look no further!

• Stephanie Shih is presenting at UC Sant Cruz’s Phlunch today! Watch her via Skype with the P-interest group at noon in Greenberg.
• Vera Gribanova gave a talk yesterday at U of Chicago.

The first SPLaT (Stanford Psychology of Language Tea) of winter quarter is happening this week on Thursday, Jan 31st. Greg Scontras (Harvard) will be presenting at 4:30, with snacks and tea starting at 4:15.

Collective Predication: The View from Plural Comparison

Joint work with Peter Graff (MIT) and Noah D. Goodman (Stanford)

The truth conditions of statements involving the comparison of pluralities, e.g., “the red boxes are bigger than the blue boxes,” have proven difficult to capture within the framework of formal semantics. Speakers have reliable judgments when comparing pluralities, however the semantics of these constructions cannot follow straightforwardly from the semantics generally assumed for comparatives (e.g., von Stechow, 1984; Heim, 1985; Kennedy, 1997) or for plurals (e.g., Link, 1983; Landman, 1989; Schwarzschild, 1996). Read the rest of this entry »

Friends, may we introduce you to the linguistically informed llama:

In his natural habitat at: lingllama.tumblr.com