The New Sesquipedalian

• Arto Anttila will be talking on “The Role of Prosody in the English Dative Alternation” at a colloquium at UCLA today.
• On Thursday, alum Devyani Sharma gave the annual lecture for the Queen Mary University of London’s School of Languages, Linguistics, and Film, on the topic: ‘Sounds of the Five Rivers: The persistence of Punjabi style in West London English’. By all accounts it was an excellent talk!

• Bruno Estigarribia
  Genetic, cognitive, and environmental predictors of morphosyntax
• Theres Grueter, M. Crago
  The roles of L1 transfer and processing limitations in the L2 acquisition of French object clitic constructions: Evidence from Chinese- and Spanish-speaking learners
• Anne Fernald (Psychology)
  “Developing Fluency in Understanding: How it Matters” (Keynote Address)

And the posters!

• Nola Stephens, Eve Clark
  Given before new: Effects of discourse status on child syntactic choices
• Patricia Amaral
  Almost means ‘less than’: Preschoolers’ comprehension of scalar adverbs

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.

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.

The National Research Council is holding  a workshop in Menlo Park October 15 and 16 on the Role of Language in School Learning.  It brings together about 35 linguists, psychologists and educators from all over the country, including Bill Labov, Lisa Green, Otto Santa Ana, Robert Bayley, Guadalupe Valdes, Ann Charity Hudley, Kenji Hakuta and others.  Our own John Rickford is presenting a paper with Walt Wolfram on “Explicit Formal Instruction in Oral English as a Second Dialect,” and more than a dozen of the participants are expected to join the Linguistics Happy Hour at 4 pm after the workshop adjoins at 3.  Tom Wasow has given the first years extra funds to bump up the refreshments in quantity and quality, so come and meet some of the NRC folk and enjoy the fare!

Some Stanford students and Stanford alumni will be tearing apart NWAV in Ottawa next week.

• Rebecca Greene
  Wedge-raising and fronting in the Inland South
• Katherine Geenberg
  “He’s so smart!”: Testing listener perceptions of phrase-final pauses and speaker style in university discourse
• Roey Gafter, Dan Jurafsky & Meghan Sumner
  Where accommodation to non-native speakers doesn’t happen
• Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (The Ohio State University)
  Intersecting variables in evaluations of men’s

Furthermore, the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2009 & The Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages will host first year Isla Flores-Bayer and her associate Chiyo Nishida, speaking on “Localizing the loss and attrition of the subjunctive through generations: The case of Central Texas adult bilinguals.”

Joan Bresnan will be giving a Colloquium talk at UCLA today on “Predicting Syntax: Do we have probabilistic knowledge of grammar?” She’ll be back on Monday.

Unfortunately, we missed this last week, but we want to get the event and the abstract into our databases, so …

Adam Hodges, our visting faculty sociolinguist for the fall and winter, presented ‘Discourse, Intertextuality and the ‘War on Terror’ Narrative‘ at the Sociorap meeting this Thursday (Oct 8).

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…And among those welcomed were this year’s visitors. Sesquiwelcome to all!

	Su-Chiao Chen I have been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for 2009-2010 on a research project “The acculturation of Chinese Americans: A sociolinguistic study”. I am currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. My research interest is to investigate language use and ethnic identity in culturally and linguistically diverse settings, combining methods and perspectives from sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. I am particularly interested in language planning and language change for both indigenous and immigrant language groups. After receiving my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, I joined the academia and am now a professor of the Department of Foreign Languages at National Chiayi University in Taiwan.
	Petra Hendriks I’m here for the entire academic year as a visiting scholar. In normal life I’m a professor in semantics and cognition at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I’m also the principal investigator of an NWO funded project (3 PhD students, 2 postdoc researchers and 2 part-time senior researchers) on production/comprehension asymmetries in grammar, language acquisition and sentence processing. During my ‘second life’ here at the Linguistics Department at Stanford I hope to talk to many of you about your research. My own research interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics, the acquisition of sentence meaning, and the relation between language and other cognitive processes, but in general everything that can help me answer the question what people are doing when they try to understand an utterance has my warm interest. Actually, I sort of promised NWO to write a book about this topic during this year. I am very grateful to Joan Bresnan for being my sponsor for this visit and am looking forward to talking to all of you.
	Hideki Zamma I am an associate professor of English linguistics at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, who, as often the case with Japanese academics, has not finished Ph.D thesis. Luckily enough, I could get a funding from the Fulbright program to be a visiting student in Stanford for seven months. My thesis is about English metrics with a special interest in English suffixes, and I am trying to theorize the numerical facts in terms of interactions of Optimality Theoretic constraints. In my spare time, I like listening to music, skiing, and talking on Skype with my son in Japan.