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Sesquipedalian, Volume III, Number 20
The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume III, Number 20
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March 4, 1993
SLOW WEEK
The editors of the Sesquipedalian insist that they are on vacation
this week. As a result you will find nothing humorous in this issue
at all. If anything below is found to be funny, your money will be
refunded.
-/-/-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
A reminder that this week's linguistics colloquium will be on Friday,
at 15:30 in Cordura 100, CSLI. No Happy Hour (alas!), but a dinner
with the speaker will follow.
THE SEMANTICS OF COMPLEX CONDITIONALS
Kai von Fintel
UMass at Amherst
Within the framework of a quantificational theory of conditionals, I
will explore the compositional semantics of complex conditional
constructions (conditionals with 'unless', 'only if', 'even if').
Their semantic properties are shown to follow from a combination of
the thesis that conditionals restrict quantifiers and the meaning of
exceptive and focus-sensitive operators. Anaphoric processes between
the antecedent and the consequent, such as donkey-anaphora and tense
dependencies, are related to the quantificational structure of these
constructions.
-/-/-/ SOCIOLINGUISTICS EVENTS /-/-/-
Winter 1993 meeting of the
BAY AREA SOCIOLINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION
Set aside Saturday afternoon, March 6, starting at 2 pm, for two talks
on discourse analysis by Professor RUTH WODAK of the University of
Vienna and Stanford University, and by Professor LIVIA POLANYI, of Rice
University and the Institute for Research on Learning. The meeting will
be held in Cordura Hall on the Stanford University Campus, and will be
preceded/followed/accompanied by snacks and some time to make and renew
sociolinguistic acquaintances. Some refreshments will be provided by
the local arrangements committee; please help us by bringing some food
or drink if possible.
JEWS, TURKS, ... AND CYCLISTS ---
NEORACIST DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRIA.
Ruth Wodak
This paper focusses on the discourse of neo-racism towards
foreigners in Austria between 1989 and 91. It summarizes the
preliminary results of an ongoing interdisciplinary project and
offers iullustrative examples of official discourse (politicians,
news broadcasts in TV and radio), newspaper texts, and anonymous
conversations on the street recorded during the Waldheim
campaign, 1987, and the Vienna municipal election, 1991. The
study suggests that the neo-racist discourse occasioned by the
population migrations after the collapse of Communist Eastern
Europe not only targets the specific Eastern European ethnic
outgroups, but is elastic enough to combine these prejudices with
those againsts other existing traditional and functionally
determined outgroups. In the example cited prejudices (realized
as stories) against Jews, Turks and bicycle riders merge into a
generic neoracist discourse.
Professor Ruth Wodak has an endowed chair in Linguistics at the
University of Vienna, Austria. Her books and edited collections include
Language Behavior in Therapy Group (U.C. Press), Language Power and
Ideology (Benjamins), ``Wir sind alle un schuldige Ta"ter!''
Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegs Antisemitismus (Suhrkamp), Die
Sprachen der Vergangenheiten (Suhrkamp in press), Hilflose Na"he (Verlag
der o"sterreichischen akademie der wissenschaften). She is also on the
editoral boards of Discourse and Society, and Folia Linguistica. This
year she is a Visiting Professor at Stanford University.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS:
AN AMERICAN'S PERSPECTIVE
Livia Polanyi
Livia Polanyi is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Rice
University in Houston, Texas. Her area of specialization is Discourse
Analysis. Before joining the faculty at Rice, Dr. Polanyi taught at the
University of Amsterdam and was a Senior Scientist in the Artificial
Intelligence Department at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA
where she worked on discourse understanding as part of the Natural
Language group there. She is the author of Telling the American Story
(Ablex 1985, MIT Press 1990) and has published widely in journals in a
number of fields on topics relating to conversational storytelling and
formal modeling of discourse. Her most recent work has been on the
gendered discourse of economics. Professor Polanyi is on the Editorial
Board of TEXT and The Journal of Narrative and Life History. She is
spending this academic year on leave from Rice at the Institute for
Research on Learning in Palo Alto.
For further information, send email to veatch@bhasha.stanford.edu or
call Tom Veatch at (415) 725-1553 or the Stanford Linguistics
Department at (415) 723-4284.
-- Friday, March 5th 8.30 am-3.30 pm. Students from John Rickford's
African American Vernacular English class (Ling 73) will be making
presentations. Kimball Hall Lounge, Escondido Road.
-/-/-/ SOCIOLINGUISTICS RAP /-/-/-
STANFORD SOCIORAP REMINDERS FOR THE WEEK OF MARCH 7-13
Monday, March 8th, 12-1 pm:
Bldg. 90, Rm. 91A
PRAYAG TRIPATHI, a Professor of English at the Institute of Language
Studies in Addis Abbaba, Ethiopia and Visiting Scholar at Stanford in
Comparative Literature [NOT Modern Thought and Literature, as
previously announced] will speak on "English from the 'Outer Circle.'"
The term 'Outer Circle' refers to English as it is used in much of the
Third World, and by non-native speakers more generally.
Thursday, March 11th, 1-2:30
Bldg. 550 (Material Sciences and Engineering), Rm. 550A:
GEORGE AND MARY HUTTAR of the University of Texas at Arlington and the
Summer Institute of Linguistics will be speaking on a Suriname
creole. [more details TBA]
Thursday, March 11th, 7:30 pm
Ventura 17 (csli)
GEORGE HUTTAR of the University of Texas at Arlington and the Summer
Institute of Linguistics will speak on "Semantic Restructuring and Diachronic
Layering in Creolization." This is a joint socio-historical workshop.
-/-/-/ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS /-/-/-
-- IDSIA SUMMER PROGRAM: The 1993 Summer Program for Graduate Students
at the Instituto Dalle Molle (Lugano, Switzerland) invites a small
number of well-qualified graduate students for a period of three
months (ideally June-August) during which they undertake some
agreed-upon project-related activity. In return for this they receive
a modest salary that is sufficient to cover living expenses, travel
and accomodation. IDSIA is a small (c. 15 people) government-funded
AI research institute situated in Lugano, a lakeside city in the
Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. The institute is well equipped and
is currently involved in a number of research activities in the
following areas of research:
1. AI & Medicine: Development of tools to assist with medical
research, particularly in the domain of cancer. Application of AI
techniques and statistical methods to the problem of analysing large
quantities of medical data.
2. AI teaching environments: enhancements to the Portable AI Lab, an
integrated environment of AI tools and techniques in a wide variety of
application domains. Projects include design/implementation of new
modules (classifier systems, neural networks, search and planning);
user interface; help subsystem; bibliographic information subsystems.
3. Planning and learning movements in complex physical environments:
This project concerns the integration of learning mechanisms and robot
motion planning with a strong emphasis on the application of the
results in a real enviroment. Research is based on a general motion
planner based on an artificial potential field. The goal is to
improve the planner's ability to move robots of different shapes in
different environments by learning new strategies both for local and
global decisions.
4. Development of tools to assist handicapped users: either in
operating computers or in using computers to supplement their
available resources for communication. The project involves in the
first instance the prediction of words and/or phrases given a current
context and a word or sequence fragment, and also the implementation
of a Macintosh based graphic interface.
5. Computational linguistics: this project concerns both the design
and implementation of a linguist's workbench based on constraint-based
propagation techniques such as underly current linguistic theories,
notably HPSG. Two areas of particular interest are graphical tools in
the interface to a linguistic development environment, and
relationships between existing linguistic formalisms.
To apply, interested candidates should send, preferably by
e-mail, a full curriculum vitae that includes the names of two
referees and an indication of availability during the summer months.
It would be helpful to know for which of the above projects the
candidate has most interest. Send to
Michael Rosner, IDSIA
Corso Elvezia 36
6900 Lugano, SWITZERLAND
phone: +4191 22 88 81
fax: +4191 23 89 94
email: mike@idsia.ch
-- RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITIONS AT OXFORD: We are seeking two research
assistants to work on an experimental project concerned with lexical
segmentation in infants during their second and third years. The
project is funded by the SERC and will involve the use of paradigms
such as preferential looking and habituation. One position, which can
be taken up at the postdoctoral or predoctoral level, is scheduled to
start during the summer of 93 and is available for two years.
Applicants should have some background in language studies and have
worked with infants. Experience with the experimental paradigms
involved in the research would be an advantage. Computational
experience is also desirable. The second position, which is at the
predoctoral level, is scheduled to start in January 1994 and is
available for one year. For further information, potential applicants
should contact Kim Plunkett or Peter Bryant at
Department of Experimental Psychology
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3UD
phone: 0865-271398
email: plunkett@psy.oxford.ac.uk
phone: 0865-271377
email: pebryant@vax.oxford.ac.uk
-/-/-/ JOB ANNOUNCEMENT /-/-/-
State University of New York at Buffalo
CENTER FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Spoken Language Research Group
Announcing a post-doctoral fellowship opportunity available through an
N.I.D.C.D. training grant on the "Development of Spoken Language Capa-
cities".
The training grant provides support for individuals who have interests
in the development of speech perception and production. The training
program is interdisciplinary and involves the participation of faculty
from the Departments of Psychology, Linguistics, Communicative Disord-
ers & Sciences, and Pediatrics & Neurology.
Trainees are expected to participate in interdisciplinary seminars and
to conduct original experimental research related to these topics in
the laboratories of participating faculty members.
Inquiries and materials (3 letters of recommendation, vita, and
relevant publications) should be directed to:
Dr. Peter W. Jusczyk
Department of Psychology
Park Hall
SUNY Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260
(e-mail address: PSYPWJ@UBVMS.BITNET or psypwj@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu).
No person, in whatever relationship with the State University of New
York at Buffalo, shall be subject to discrimination on the basis of
age, creed, color, handicap, national origin, race, religion, sex,
marital, or veteran status. SUNY is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative
Action Employer.
All applicants must be either US citizens or permanent residents of
the USA.
Fullest consideration will be given to applications received by May 1,
1993.
-/-/-/ INSTA-PRIZE /-/-/-
At last we return to the realm of great literature for this week's
question:
Who did T'Pring pick as her champion in the Star Trek Episode, 'Amok Time?'
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