The New Sesquipedalian

Just a friendly reminder, the first annual CREAL conference is going on today in Levinthal Hall.

Wendell Kimper from UCSC will be joining the Phonetics and Phonology group today and giving a talk on “Non-locality in Vowel Harmony: Taking the Listener’s Perspective.” His abstract is included below. The group meets from 12-1:15 in the Greenberg Room and will be taking Wendell out to lunch afterwards for those interested.

Languages with transparent vowel harmony present a problem for the principle of strict locality, which maintains that only adjacent elements interact. Attempts to resolve this conflict have traditionally focused on eliminating non-local interactions, in part because an articulatorily grounded theory of harmony necessarily requires strict locality. In this talk, I present evidence from two phoneme recall experiments showing that (a) harmony is perceptually advantageous, and (b) this advantage obtains even non-locally, but (c) the benefit degrades across increasing distance. I argue that a listener-oriented approach to harmony makes it possible to admit explicitly non-local interactions without abandoning phonetic grounding.

Come to 200-002 between 1:30 and 5:15 today for the SymSys Symposium “How the Brain Makes Meaning”.

How do we go beyond the information given to attribute unseen properties to things? For example, when you see a bird on a branch, how do you know that it might fly away? Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations are in order for Gabby Magana, who received a Dean’s Award of Merit, celebrating her many valuable contributions to the Department of Linguistics and the Symbolic Systems Program over the past 6 years. Way to go, Gabby!

Also, Roey Gafter just received grants from both the Graduate Research Opportunity Fund and the Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Fund. Good job, Roey!

On Saturday, Judith Tonhauser (PhD 2006) will give a talk at the SULA Conference entitled “Reportative Evidentiality in Paraguayan Guaraní”.

Matt Adams and Vera Gribanova will be presenting at the McGill ETI 1 workshops on May 6-8.

Matthew Jockers (English) will be giving a SymSys Forum on Monday at 12:15 in the Greenberg Room. His talk is entitled “A Voice in the Archive: Macroanalysis and the 19th-Century Irish Novel in English”.

Dr. Jockers leverages text and data mining techniques to discuss how and why the 19th-century Irish novel (in English) is distinct from the British and American novel of the same period. Read the rest of this entry »

Bas van Fraassen (Princeton) will be coming to talk with the Truth, Objectivity, and Constructivism workshop on Monday at 5:00pm in 160-328. He will be talking about his 2008 book, Scientific Representation. He will introduce the main themes of the book before we open it up for discussion (which will end at 7). Join us for what is anticipated to be a lively interaction!