The New Sesquipedalian

Kiparsky in P&P Workshop

Sesquipedalian — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:55:50 +0000

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”.

QP Fest… Today!

Sesquipedalian — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:50:35 +0000

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.

Look Who’s Talking

Sesquipedalian — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:45:49 +0000

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“

Symposium on Questions This Weekend

Sesquipedalian — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:40:38 +0000

There will be an informal cross-disciplinary symposium on questions at the Humanities Center, co-sponsored by CSLI and the Humanities Center. It will be this Friday and Saturday, beginning at 3:00 pm on Friday. Look at the schedule, for more info.

SymSys M.S. Presentations

Sesquipedalian — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:35:58 +0000

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.

It’s Time to Start Planning Next Year’s Colloquia!

Sesquipedalian — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:30:26 +0000

It’s never too early to start planning for next year. Please send your suggestions to Arto Anttila by Friday, May 18, if at all possible. Try to think of at least some names from the western part of North America, including people you know will be visiting the area.

Linguistic Levity

From the Sesquihumidor — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:25:41 +0000

The following questions were set in last year’s GED examination
These are genuine answers (from 16 year olds)………….and they WILL breed.

Q. Name the four seasons
A. Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar

Q. Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink
A. Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists

Q. How is dew formed
A. The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire

Q. What causes the tides in the oceans
A. The tides are a fight between the earth and the moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins the fight

Q. What guarantees may a mortgage company insist on
A. If you are buying a house they will insist that you are well endowed

Q. In a democratic society, how important are elections
A. Very important. Sex can only happen when a male gets an election

Q. What are steroids
A. Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs (Shoot yourself now , there is little hope)

Q.. What happens to your body as you age
A. When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental

Q. What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty
A. He says goodbye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery

Q. Name a major disease associated with cigarettes
A. Premature death

Q. What is artificial insemination
A. When the farmer does it to the bull instead of the cow

Q. How can you delay milk turning sour
A. Keep it in the cow (Simple, but brilliant)

Q. How are the main 20 parts of the body categorised (e.g. The abdomen)
A. The body is consisted into 3 parts – the brainium, the borax and the abdominal cavity. The brainium contains the brain, the borax contains the heart and lungs and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels: A, E, I,O,U..

Q. What is the fibula?
A. A small lie

Q. What does ‘varicose’ mean?
A. Nearby

Q. What is the most common form of birth control
A. Most people prevent contraception by wearing a condominium (That would work)

Q… Give the meaning of the term ‘Caesarean section’
A. The caesarean section is a district in Rome

Q. What is a seizure?
A. A Roman Emperor. (Julius Seizure, I came, I saw, I had a fit)

Q. What is a terminal illness
A. When you are sick at the airport. (Irrefutable)

Q. Give an example of a fungus. What is a characteristic feature?
A. Mushrooms. They always grow in damp places and they look like umbrellas

Q. Use the word ‘judicious’ in a sentence to show you understand its meaning
A. Hands that judicious can be soft as your face. (OMG)

Q. What does the word ‘benign’ mean?
A. Benign is what you will be after you be eight (brilliant)

Q. What is a turbine?
A.. Something an Arab or Shreik wears on his head