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”.

Come to the Greenberg Room today from 1:15-5:00 to see Linguistics grad students showcase their recent work. Friday Social to follow! Find out who’s talking here.

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“

Come to the Greenberg Room on Monday between 12:15 and 1:05 to hear Stacey Svetlichnaya and Jan Overgoor give their M.S. project presentations.

Stacey Svetlichnaya “In the Words of the Beholder: Linguistic Predictors of Court Trial Verdicts”

Did you “hear someone fire a shot” or just “hear a shot being fired”? Did you “think” about your options, or were you “seized” by fear? Would you describe this experience eloquently, or would you use expletives? How one tells a story might be as important to its interpretation as the factual content. In a court of law, this interpretation is ultimately a binary verdict of innocence or guilt—to what extent does the language of the trial influence the verdict? Training on transcripts of over 48,000 cases from London’s central criminal court (1830-1913), a maximum entropy classifier predicts the outcome with 75% accuracy. Innocent verdicts correlate with witness use of exclusive and tentative terms, longer witness utterances, and more cognitive verbs and causative terms across speaker roles. Guilt corresponds to higher frequencies of first and third person pronouns, more swearing across speakers, and the prisoner’s use of passive voice, atypical vocabulary, and religious references. Computational methods, caveats, and tips on convincing listeners of your trustworthiness will be presented in more detail.

Jan Overgoor “An Investigation of Trust in the CouchSurfing Community”

Couchsurfing.org maintains an online community of people who offer each other free hospitality. The site provides a massive and multi-faceted dataset featuring user data, a multi-layered social network of public and private reviews, and linguistic data from hospitality requests and user reviews. This is a great data set to investigate the “sentiment is social’’ hypothesis: that taking into account social contextual variables like sex, age and country of origin matters when doing sentiment analysis. I show that doing so boosts performance on the task the task of classifying the trust value that underlies positive references.

Come to the Greenberg Room on Monday at 12:15 to hear Alex Stiller present “Ad-hoc Scalar Implicatures in 3-year-olds” and Neekaan Oshidary present “High School on Facebook: An Ethnography of Social Media & New Technology at a Local High School.” Their abstracts are below.

“Ad-hoc Scalar Implicatures in 3-year-olds” Alex Stiller
Everyday conversation is full of pragmatic implicatures. Yet young children perform poorly on tests of pragmatic implicatures, especially scalar implicatures using “some” and “all”, until quite late in development. 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.

Cleo Condoravdi is giving a colloquium talk today at UCLA, presenting joint work with Sven Lauer:  ”Towards a Null Theory of Explicit Performatives”.

Olga Dmitrieva is giving a talk at the Manchester Phonology Conference in late May.

Rob Podesva is giving at least one talk, and possibly more at U Victoria late next week.

Meghan Sumner is giving talks at MIT the second week of April.

WCCFL is just after that, and Chris Potts and Alex Djalali will give talks there.

Jason Grafmiller will be presenting next week at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, on the status of agentivity in object-experiencer verbs.

Ivan Sag couldn’t make it to the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference in New York this week, but managed to give his talk on “Flexible Processing and the Design of Grammar” via Skype.

Also at CUNY:

Incremental development of incremental processing: Anticipatory interpretation of novel sentential combinations in adults and children. ▪ Arielle Borovsky (UCSD & Stanford Psychology), Kim Sweeney (UCSD), Anne Fernald (Stanford Psychology), & Jeff Elman (UCSD).

Communicative efficiency and grammatical encoding in speech: Predicting case-marker omission in Japanese. Chigusa Kurumada & T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester)

The parsing of Spanish object clitics by 4-year-olds. Theres Grüter (University of Hawai’i at Mānoa), Nereyda Hurtado, & Anne Fernald (Stanford Psychology)

Expecting the unexpected: How discourse expectations can reverse predictability effects in reading time . Richard Futrell (Stanford University) & Hannah Rohde (University of Edinburgh)

Optional to and prosody Thomas Wasow, Rebecca Greene (Stanford University), & Roger Levy (University of California, San Diego)