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Sesquipedalian, Volume III, Number 23
The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume III, Number 23
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March 25, 1993
SPRING BREAK ISSUE
With spring break, not much is going on around the department these
days. For those of you who are travelling, we'll leave you with a few
useful phrases in Malay, and we'll be back next week with the usual
gruff.
v
Ada dia makan mestad. Tahu?
(He does eat mustard. Do you understand?)
v v
Ada Tuanku terima keropok?
(Did your majesty receive the fish wafer?)
v
Dalam, atas siling, ada banyak binatang kechil.
(Inside, on the ceiling, there are many small insects.)
v v
Chakap daripada hidong, Dollah Punya yang lebeh besar sakali.
(Talking of noses, Dollah's is the longest by far.)
v
Apa lagi! Tentu-lah burok kalau sa-kira-nya gunting rambut diri.
(What else! Of course it will be ugly if you cut your own hair.)
v
Ingat-ingat apa-apa saya kata darihal belachan.
(Take heed of all I say about prawn paste.)
-/-/-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
There will be no regular colloquium next Friday due to WCCFL in Santa
Cruz. Monday, March 29, at 3.30 pm in Cordura 100, Lyn Walker presents:
A MODEL OF INFORMATIONAL REDUNDANCY IN DIALOGUE
Marilyn Walker
University of Pennsylvania
Contrary to the assumptions of the Gricean program, it appears
that some entailments are reinforcable without anomalous redundancy.
In this talk, I will present an analysis of the communicative function
of informationally redundant utterances (IRUs) in dialogue. An IRU is
an utterance whose propositional content was already added to the
representation of the dialogue by the IRU's antecedent, a previous
utterance that realizes the same propositional content as the IRU.
The communicative functions of IRUs can be broadly classified as
relating to (1) Attitude: IRUs that indicate whether the hearer
accepts or rejects an assertion; (2) Consequence: IRUs that make it
easier for the hearer to make an inference or that demonstrate that an
inference was made; (3) Attention: IRUs that manipulate the locus of
attention of the discourse participants.
In the first part of the talk, I present the results from a
distributional analysis of IRUs in a large corpus of naturally
occurring problem solving dialogues (using Varbrul). Relevant factors
include (1) the way in which an IRU is performed, i.e., whether it is
realized with narrow or broad focus and whether its boundary tone is a
final high, mid or low; (2) the location of the IRU with respect to
its antecedent; (3) whether the antecedent was said by another speaker
or by the speaker of the IRU; and (4) whether the IRU includes the
information focus of its antecedent. This analysis provides support
for the hypothesized communicative functions and provides insights on
the process of context incrementation in dialogue. I present aspects
of a formal model of dialogue context incrementation that is supported
by the results of the distributional analysis.
However, the relationship between IRUs and limited inferential and
attentional capacity is difficult to support by a distributional
analysis alone. Time permitting, I will briefly present the results
of a number of computational modeling experiments, showing that
communication strategies that incorporate IRUs improve performance
when conversants are modeled as having limited attention and limited
inferential capacity.
-- Then on Wednesday, March 31, at 7.30 pm, in Cordura 100, Andrew
Garrett presents:
VARIATION AND EXPLANATION IN SYNTACTIC CHANGE
Andrew Garrett
UT Austin
In this paper I argue by example, and on methodological grounds,
against one recent approach to the "transition problem" (Weinreich,
Labov & Herzog 1968) in the area of syntactic change. Proceeding
>From the assumption that "language change is ... a fact of language
use and so must be studied with tools appropriate to that domain",
work in this framework has, inter alia, pursued the hypothesis that
grammatical (sub)systems replace one another over time via gradual
change in "the nature and weight of ... probabilistic factors"
determining their synchronic distribution (Kroch 1989). I will assess
this model based in part on some data relevant to the Greek loss of
pronominal Wackernagel's Law cliticization, a change which has been
investigated only statistically since Wackernagel's own work (1892).
For example, Taylor (1992) has recently analyzed the loss as an effect
of probabilistic competition between syntactic systems: one system
yields Wackernagel's Law cliticization and another, which gradually
replaced it, yields VP-internal cliticization. I will discuss some
early Greek data which suggests, to the contrary, that the loss of
Wackernagel's Law may have been grammatically incremental and
contextually determined.
-/-/-/ TRUE LINGUISTS /-/-/-
KID'S GREATEST HITS: The following are some incontrovertibles of
science and history taken from actual essays, exams, and classroom
discussions (Most from 5th and 6th graders):
Beethoven was deaf. Beethoven was so deaf he wrote loud music. He
would often take long walks in the forest when everybody was calling
for him. The first thing Beethoven wrote was his Ninth Symphony.
In some rocks you can find the fossil footprints of fishes.
The pyramids were built in the shape of a huge triangular cube.
It is so hot in some parts of the world that the people there have to
live other places.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife left him and he wrote
Paradise Regained.
Cyanide is so poisonous that one drop of it on a dog's tongue will
kill the strongest man.
When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with
atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with
explosions.
(Collected by S. Riehemann & K. Wohlmut)
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