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Sesquipedalian, Volume III, Number 16
The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume III, Number 16
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February 4, 1993
PROBLEMS IN COMMUNICATION
The following useful phrases in English are taken from a notorious
Portuguese-English phrasebook which the author, unable to find a
Portuguese-English dictionary, compiled using Portuguese-German,
German-French, and then French-English dictionaries (courtesy of an
'informed source' Spanish & Portuguese Department):
Flat, hard eggs and pig strips for to eat
Do to disturb us not
How to the port of aeroplanes?
Dress your hairs
Do you cut the hairs?
Do you taxi to the port of aeroplanes?
PROVERBS:
The stone as roll do not heap up of grass
To hatch and the chickens not count
The dog then bark not bite
A bird with hand is better than two bushes
A horse he is given without into the teeth is looked
Dialogue 7: For to ride a taxi
'You man! The driver of taxis. Stop before me that may enter. Your
ignorance to cause my wetness! No coins for your pocket, man. To my
place does she travel...?'
AN ANECDOTE:
A fellow there was, with thirst, crawling at the desert, who did meet
on the man of selling. Try to him a tie to sell. This fellow does
refuse and to crawling he goes. At a time that is later a man of
selling that appears to him a tie to sell. He says "No." To crawling
he does return. A place of drinking he does find where he cannot for
his tie of lacking.
-/-/-/ CALL FOR PAPERS /-/-/-
In last week's issue, the upcoming Conference on Grammatical Inference
was mistakenly reported as the 'Conference on Grammatical
Interference.' The editors apologize for this error; it was one of
pure negligence, which arose from careless transcription, and we
assure the public that those responsible have been shot.
Here is the corrected Call for Papers:
-- CONFERENCE ON GRAMMATICAL INFERENCE (Theory, applications and
alternatives): 22-23 April 1993 at the University of Essex, Colchester
UK. Relevent research areas: Computational linguistics, machine
learning, pattern recognition, neural networks, AI. Grammatical
inference is an immensely important research area that has suffered
from the lack of a focused research community. The purpose of this
two-day colloquium is to bring together researchers who are working on
grammatical inference and closely related problems such as sequence
learning and prediction. Oral and poster papers are requested in
theory, algorithms, applications, alternatives, competition,
demonstration, etc. There will be open forum discussions of planning
the next Grammatical Inference Conference, and the setting up of a
Grammatical Inference Journal (possibly an electronic one). Papers
will be published in book form following the conference. Authors from
distant lands who are unwilling to travel to Essex for the conference
are encouraged to submit a self-explanatory poster-paper that will be
displayed at the conference. Prospective authors should submit a
2-page abstract by the end of February to
Dr. Simon Lucas
Department of Electronic Systems Engineering
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom
phone: 0206.872935
fax: 0206.872900
email: sml@uk.ac.essex
-- Athapaskan Language Conference (June 3-4, 1993, Institute of
American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM): Papers are invited from all areas
of Athapaskan Language Study including Literacy, Bilingual Education,
Sociolinguistics, Language Preservation, Historical Linguistics,
Syntax, Morphology, Pragmatics, Phonology, Semantics. Submit 3 copies
of a 1-page abstract by April 5 to
Peggy Speas
Department of Linguistics
South college
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
The Hosts for the Conference, the Institute for American Indian Arts,
has reserved a block of 40 dorm rooms, 25 singles and 15 doubles @
$17.00 per night(single). Nearest International Airport is in
Albuquerque, NM. Reserve car rentals early, as Santa Fe gets crowded
in tourist season! For information on logistics, contact:
Gloria Emerson, IAIA (505) 988-6431
For information on program, contact:
Peggy Speas, U Mass (413) 545-6835
email: speas@cs.umass.edu
-- THE GRADUATE STUDENT MEDIEVALIST: Pedagogy, Politics &
Professionalism Conference (April 10, 1993, UC Berkeley): This one-day
conference is being organized by Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley,
an interdisciplinary organization committed to the fostering of
critical and friendly conversation on all aspects of medieval studies
at the graduate level. The conference centers on the future and
present position of medieval studies and new medieval scholars in the
academy. Please send abstracts of 15-20 minute papers and/or panel
proposals to
Afrodesia McCannon
UC Berkeley Department of Comparative Literature
4408 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley CA 94720
Sponsored by Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley, the Doreen B. Townsend
Center for the Humanities, and the Graduate Assembly
-/-/-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
Trisha Svaib will present her dissertation proposal at this week's
Linguistic Colloquium at the usual time and place with a Happy Hour to
follow: Friday, Cordura 100 at 3:30 p.m.
"Twice Upon a Time...":
A Deaf Child's Use of Lexical and Structural Repetition for Narrative Cohesion
Trisha Svaib, Stanford University
A Dissertation Proposal
Within a conversation, what speakers say needs to make sense,
both within and across turns. To do this, speakers need to connect
their current utterances with those that have gone before. By making
such connections, speakers create cohesion within the discourse, and
the discourse then becomes coherent and understandable. All texts
make use of cohesive devices, although the degree to which they are
employed varies from genre to genre. One genre in which cohesion is
especially important is that of narrative. A well- formed narrative
requires that certain basic elements be present within a story (e.g.,
the setting, the cast of characters, an initiating event, etc.) and
that these elements be presented in a particular order, with
sufficient detail, such that the story can be easily understood. The
effectiveness of a narrative is based on how carefully crafted and
well-expressed it is.
Learning to produce well-formed narratives requires that speakers
make use of a variety of linguistic features, and that they use such
features in discourse specific ways. Story-telling can therefore be
used as a measure of a person's command over language. As such, the
ability to tell stories has been of great interest to researchers,
particularly those who study child language acquisition. Researchers
have examined children's understanding and production of story
structures, and their use of cohesive devices such as reference and
conjunction. In studying children's linguistic abilities, one group
of children that has fared rather badly by comparison with others has
been deaf children. Traditionally, deaf children have been shown to
be linguistically delayed, at least with respect to their command of
English, and not surprisingly, their ability to tell stories has also
been shown to lag behind their same-age, hearing counterparts.
However, not all deaf children are linguistically delayed, and so it
is useful to examine the abilities of deaf children who appear to be
performing at or near their age-level, in order to obtain a more
accurate picture of what deaf children are capable of with respect to
telling stories, as well as their general linguistic abilities. Such
research can then serve as a benchmark for other studies of deaf
children.
With this in mind, I present a case study of a 6-year-old,
profoundly deaf child of hearing parents, providing a detailed
analysis of her narrative ability, both spontaneous and elicited, over
the time span of a year and a half. In particular, I focus on how the
child maintains cohesion within her narratives by examining the
general features of her stories, and more specifically by examining
her use of lexical and structural repetition--a type of cohesion that
is prevalent in her narratives, but that has received little attention
in the research literature. I provide a detailed analysis of the
forms and functions of repetition within the child's narratives, and
discuss some of the implications that the ability to produce
well-formed narratives can have for later literacy development and
school success.
-/-/-/ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP /-/-/-
*** PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP DOUBLEHEADER: ***
Paul Smolensky, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
Doug Pulleyblank, Univ. of British Columbia
Phonology Workshop is pleased to present another Doubleheader! An
evening of phonology and pizza at a special time and place:
-=> Thursday, Feb. 11, 6:30 p.m., Cordura 100 <=-
Paul Smolensky will kick off the event by presenting his joint work
with Alan Prince on Optimality Theory. After a break for pizza,
drinks, and discussion, we'll continue with a related talk by Doug
Pulleyblank on Tradeoffs in ATR Harmony. All are invited to
participate; however, we request that those who wish to share in pizza
and drinks donate $3-$5 to help defray our costs.
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Typological Explanation through Optimality Theory
Alan Prince Paul Smolensky
Department of Linguistics & Department of Computer Science &
Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science Institute of Cognitive Science
Rutgers University University of Colorado at Boulder
(Presented by Smolensky)
We have developed a grammatical framework, Optimality Theory, in
which a grammar assigns to an input that structural description which
is optimal, as measured by a set of well-formedness constraints.
These constraints are highly conflicting, and frequently violated in
surface forms. Conflicts between constraints are resolved in the
determination of optimality by a ranking of constraints in a dominance
hierarchy, each constraint having absolute priority over lower-ranked
constraints. Universal Grammar provides (many of) the constraints,
but their rankings in dominance hierarchies is language-particular.
The theory can be viewed as a formalization of a kind of markedness
theory, one in which the markedness conditions, ranked, simply ARE the
grammar.
Typology within Optimality Theory consists primarily in deducing
the consequences of ranking a common set of universal constraints in
all possible dominance hierarchies. The same set of constraints when
differently ranked give rise to very different surface patterns. Yet
the space of possible patterns is strongly delimited by the universal
constraint set; e.g., strong implicational universals can usually be
deduced.
The talk will present this formal approach to typological
explanation, and its application to syllable structure and its
relation to inventories of segments licensed by structural positions.
One result is that the universal markedness of coda position logically
entails that codas are weak licensers.
I will also discuss the relation of Optimality Theory to
connectionism, as mediated by Harmonic Grammar, a grammatical
formalism which is derived from general principles of connectionist
computation.
now showing with
TRADE-OFF IN ATR HARMONY SYSTEMS
Diana Archangeli & Douglas Pulleyblank
University of Arizona University of British Columbia
Phonological rules define systematic relations between
phonological representations, with definable relations requiring at
least three types of information. First, certain types of formal
relations are permissible while others are not; second, certain types
of substantive feature combinations are licit while other feature
combinations are not; third, relations may be defined at one
morpho-syntactic level and not another.
Without limits on the way these three components combine in
the definition of different rules, even a restrictive theory of formal
rules and cooccurrence conditions risks losing all of its explanatory
power. For example, if the individual rules themselves are
well-formed, is there any imaginable set of rules that could not
combine to form a grammar? Could three or five or seven rules be
posited in a single language's grammar, each affecting a single
feature? Does any principle even prevent the positing of identical
rules more than once in a grammar? -- posited more than once to obtain
particular ordering relationships for example.
This paper examines this question in several cases of harmony
involving tongue root advancement/retraction, "ATR" harmony systems.
We argue that the interaction of formal and substantive factors in
Maasai, Pulaar and Kinande show evidence of optimization in the sense
of recent work by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky. Specifically, we
suggest that formal properties of harmonic systems are ranked such
that certain rule-governed relations are defined as more highly valued
than others. In addition, the substantive combinations of features
produced by rules are similarly ranked, with certain feature
combinations defined in a principled fashion as optimal, others as
nonoptimal. Viewed in this way, rules in ATR systems that we have
examined can be shown to exhibit a trade-off relation between formal
and substantive rankings: as the formal value of a rule deteriorates,
only offsetting such a value with substantive goodness can license
rule application.
-/-/-/ SOCIOLINGUISTICS RAP /-/-/-
>From now on, regular SocioRap sessions will be held every other Monday
from 12-1 in the Greenberg Room, Bldg. 100, Main Quad, Stanford. Next
Monday, February 8, Ruth Wodak (Visiting Professor, University of
Vienna) will speak on:
'The Waldheim affair: The linguistic study of antisemitic discourse'
Drinks will be provided.
(SocioRap Committee)
-/-/-/ HISTORICAL WORKSHOP /-/-/-
TODAY (February 4):
"That" and ZERO in the history of English complementation
Matti Rissanen
Department of English, University of Helsinki
7:30 PM Ventura 17
The talk will be about "that" and ZERO in English complementation: the
environments that conditioned the spread of ZERO in written English;
the increase in the use of ZERO from the end of the 14th century and
the decrease after the end of the 17th.
Rissanen and Ossi Ihalainen directed the project which produced the
Helsinki Corpus--an on-line collection of texts which spans the
history of English and is subclassified into a variety of genres.
Rissanen has also done extensive work on the history of English
syntax.
Several of us will be having dinner with the speaker before his talk.
If you would like to join us please come to the Greenberg Room at
5:45pm.
Future workshops:
Feb 18 Britt-Louise Gunnarsson (Joint workshop with sociolinguistics)
March 11 George and Mary Huttar (Joint workshop with sociolinguistics)
-/-/-/ WORD OF THE WEEK /-/-/-
Leading linguists agree that the word 'crucial' is overused,
especially in academic environments. So this week instead of giving
you a word for recommended usage, we're asking everyone to AVOID using
the word 'crucial' whenever and wherever possible. Anyone using it
may be reported to this office, and the circumstances evaluated for
punitive action.
-/-/-/ TRUE LINGUISTS /-/-/-
>From the 'Great moments in phonology' file, one of our faculty (whose
name has been removed for the sake of decency) announces in class:
'You can do many more things with your tongue than with your lips.'
A foreign student remarks on THE SAME FACULTY MEMBER:
'I had never understood the difference between "wow" and "geez,"
before [this professor] produced the following minimal pair:
"You read this article and you go 'wow!'
Then you read the footnotes and you go 'geez!'"'
-/-/-/ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS /-/-/-
(NOTE ON REDUNDANCY: For fuller listings of these and other jobs,
don't forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the
file 'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
-- UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS/AMHERST: Call for vitae from minority
linguists. The Department of Linguistics is desirous of identifying
minority linguists who might be interested in being considered for
appointment to faculty positions. We would therefore be pleased to
receive the CV of any minority linguist who currently holds or is
close to receiving their Ph.D., so that we will be able to give the
fullest consideration to such persons to meet department needs as they
develop. Vitae from all persons in all fields of linguistics are
welcome, without regard to senority. Vita should be sent to
Prof. Barbara Partee, Chair
Department of Linguistics
University of Massachusetts/Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
-- UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA/TWIN CITIES: Tenure-track position as
assistant professor or associate professor in speech communication.
A.B.D. would be appointed as teaching specialist. Nine-month
appointment beginning September 16, 1993. Ph.D. or Ed.D. in speech
communication or speech education by starting date, or A.B.D. to be
completed within one year of starting date; teaching experience at the
college or university level; academic coursework or related experience
with language maintenance, bidialectism, non-standard dialects,
sociolinguistics, and related linguistic concepts. Emphasis on
teaching, research, and service in one's field. The ability to
sustain an active program of significant research and to function as
an effective teacher is necessary. Send letter of application that
specifically details your background in the minimum and desired
qualifications, current CV, and post-baccalaureate transcripts to
Speech Communication Search Committee GC#187
General College
240 Appleby Hall
University of Minnesota
128 Pleasant Street SE
Minneapolis MN 55455
fax: 612/626-7848
Deadline: February 12, 1993 at 4:00 PM. No applicant will be
considered unless ALL preliminary application materials have been
RECEIVED by this deadline. Postmarks are NOT sufficient. EOE
(NOTE ON REDUNDANCY: For fuller listings of these and other jobs,
don't forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the
file 'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
-/-/-/ INSTA-PRIZE /-/-/-
A mother, A little cloud, An encounter, A painful case-- what do they
all have in common?
Get your correct answer in first to claim this week's exciting prize.
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-/-/-/ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /-/-/-
So you may delete your copy after you've read it (or better yet,
before you've read it), the Sesquipedalian Weekly Herald is stored
online both at Stanford (in directory /user/linguistics/Sesquip), and
at Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.) The most current issue of
the Herald can be found by typing 'help quip'.
Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
their employees, makes any warranty, whatsoever, implied, or assumes
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This journal printed on 100% recycled electrons
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