The New Sesquipedalian

Join Paul Kiparsky and the Phonetics & Phonology Workshop today at noon in the Greenberg Room to hear him talk about “The Seto foot in speech and verse”.

Stephanie Shih and Tyler Schnoebelen are presenting today at the Bibliotech conference. Stephanie is presenting on “Rhythm in Language” and Tyler is presenting on “Emotions are Relational: Positioning and the Use of Affective Linguistic Resources”.

Paul Kiparsky was at the Workshop on Sound Change in Kloster Seeon, Bavaria, and he gave a talk on May 4th entitled “A Stratal OT Perspective on Sound Change“

On Tuesday at noon in the Greenberg Room, Cleo Condoravdi and Sven Lauer will present in the Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop: “The Construction of Meaning”. Their talk is called “Anankastic conditionals are just conditionals”.

Anankastic conditionals are conditionals of the form in (1) that express a necessary-means-of relation between the complement of the desire predicate in the antecedent and the complement of the modal in the consequent, Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Arto Anttila will give a talk at Berkeley called “Quantity alternations in Dagaare” (the talk is based on joint work with Adams Bodomo of the University of Hong Kong).

Bruno Estigarribia will give two talks today at OSUCHiLL 2012, called ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ Rioplatense Spanish clitic ‘tripling’ and ‘Idesubicada niko! Miramina lo que me dice!’ Guaraní-Spanish Jopara code-switching in the novel ‘Ramona Quebranto’.

On Wednesday, Paul Kiparsky spoke at the IV Seminario Internacional de Fonologia in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Remember Leda Bisol, who visited Stanford back in the 90s?  Our roving reporter catches up with her and Paul Kiparsky this week in Porto Alegre, Brasil. Both seem to be enjoying the IV Seminário Internacional de Fonologia.

On Monday at noon in the Linguistics Chair’s Office, Dan Lassiter will be speaking on “Quantificational and Modal Interveners in Degree Constructions”. This is  a dry run of his upcoming SALT talk. His abstract is below.

Szabolcsi & Zwarts (1993) and Heim (2001) independently note identical scopal restrictions on universal quantifiers in amount wh-questions and comparatives, respectively. Szabolcsi & Zwarts’ proposal accounts for the restrictions on quantifier scope in degree constructions, but — on the standard assumption that modals are quantifiers over possible worlds — wrongly predicts that modals should also be restricted. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Kiparsky gave a talk yesterday at the University of Illinois Department of Linguistics on Homeric and classical Greek pronouns in terms of his typology of anaphors, and he will give a lecture today on Grammar-driven Syntactic Change as part of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society.

Meghan Sumner is at MIT this weekend, where she gave a Ling-Lunch yesterday and will give a colloquium talk today, entitled “Effects of indexical variation on the perception and recognition of spoken words within and across accents”. Find out more at the MIT Linguistics Website.

Chris Potts will give the first plenary lecture, entitled “Relevance and Pragmatic Enrichment in a Task-Oriented Dialogue Corpus”, at WCCFL30 this afternoon. Later this weekend, Alex Djalali will give a talk on semantically conditioned case in Finnish, and Anna Chernilovskaya, Cleo Condoravdi, and Sven Lauer will present on “How to Express Yourself: On the Discourse Effect of Wh-Exclamatives.”

Judith Tonhauser also gave a talk at Santa Cruz last week.

Will Leben will give the keynote talk tomorrow, “The Linguistics of Branding”, at the SoCal Undergraduate Linguistics Conference.

Penny Eckert gave a talk on Tuesday entitled “Language, Style, and the Adolescent Social Order” at the Café Scientifique, hosted at SRI in Menlo Park.