The New Sesquipedalian

Yuan Zhao filed her dissertation on Tuesday, and will be leaving soon to take up a postdoc at the University of Indiana. Sesquongratulations!

Beth Levin sent us this link to useful resources for grad students and their mentors. In addition, we recommend this Crooked Timber post collecting lots of resources on surviving grad school.

Alessandro Jaker will give his dissertation proposal talk today, 1:15 pm, in the Greenberg conference room. His title is Word Prosody and Level Ordering in Weledeh Dogrib. And join us at 4:00 pm for the department social.

Inbal Arnon successfully completed her dissertation oral this last Monday, 2 November on “Starting Big – The role of sequences in language learning and use”. Sesquigratulations! And starting in January, she’s leaving us to be a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.

Speaker: Jenny Rose Finkel

Occasion: Thursday’s NLP Lunch

Title: Practice Job Talk

Abstract by Adam Vogel:

Although much attention has been payed to supervised talks, where all audience members are paying attention, in practice this can be expensive if not impossible to achieve. This motivates semi-supervised talks, wherein the speaker is given relatively few attentive listeners, combined with a larger number of partially listening, mostly laptop using, audience members. Through novel usage of humor, animated slide transitions, and stimulants, I will demonstrate an iterative bootstrapping method, based on spectral graph theory, which yields attention levels rivaling those of talks where everyone listens the whole time.

The UCSC Linguistics organizers have posted the schedule for CUSP 2 (California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics …), which takes place November 21 in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge.

From these parts, we have Jessica Spencer (’A game-theoretic analysis of copula emergence in Saramaccan ‘), and Cleo Condoravdi & Sven Lauer (’Performing A Wish: Desiderative Assertions and Performativity’).

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.

Another item that should have made it into last week’s issue but didn’t: Lucas Champollion (Penn/PARC) and Scott Grimm (Stanford Linguistics) each had talks at Sinn und Bedeuting 14, which took place in Vienna, October 28-30. Lucas had two talks in fact, one a joint paper with former visting faculty member Uli Sauerland.

Nola Stephens will give her dissertation proposal, "Given-before new: The effect of discourse on argument structure in early child language", today (Oct 9), at 1:15 pm, in Margaret Jacks 106. This is a joint talk with the Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop: "The Construction of Meaning". All are welcome, and stick around for the department reception at 4:00 pm, in the kitchen area.

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe will give her dissertation proposal talk today at 1:15 pm, in Margaret Jacks 126. The title is ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Modeling readers’ inferences for natural language processing tasks’. And join us afterwards for the weekly social, 4:00 pm in the department lounge.