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Sesquipedalian, Volume III, Number 25
The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume III, Number 25
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April 8, 1993
/-/-/-/ CONGRATULATIONS -/-/-/
BONNIE MCELHINNEY has accepted a Fulbright at the University of
Helsinki starting in the Fall; she will return in January 1994 to take
up a two-year Mellon postdoc in the Dept. of Anthropology at
Washington University
JOHN MCWHORTER has an assistant professorship in the Dept of Modern
Languages and Literatures at Cornell University
CHRIS PINON has an IREX Research Grant to do research on aspect at the
University of Warsaw in 1993-94
GILLIAN RAMCHAND has a lecturerership (sic!) in Linguistics at the
University of Oxford for 1993-94.
This is wonderful news. Congratulations to Bonnie, John, Chris,
and Gillian, and to the places they are going.
May there be more good news to tell as the days go by!
-/-/-/ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-/-/-
Charles Ferguson, Joshua Fishman, Britt-Louise Gunnarson, and Ruth
Wodak are all giving talks at the Symposium on Unity and Diversity
(Pluri-)Nationalism and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking
Countries: an Issue or a Non-issue? Time and place: April 29-30,
German Studies Reading Room (Building 240).
The titles of their talks are as follows:
Charles Ferguson - Theoretical Models of Language Diversity and
German-using World (April 29, 2:00-5:30)
Joshua Fishman - Ethnolinguistic Demography: Varieties, Degrees and
Limits (April 30, 2:00-5:30)
Britt-Louise Gunnarson - Fachsprachen: Diversity Within and Unity
Between Languages (April 30, 2:00-5:30)
Ruth Wodak - The Limits of Delimiting: Is there an Austrian
German? (April 29, 2:00-5:30)
-/-/-/ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP /-/-/-
Thursday, 4/8, 7:30 p.m., Ventura 17
Gary Lutes will kick off the quarter with a talk about:
The Representation of Scandinavian Accent
Scandinavian accent (Swedish and Norwegian "pitch accent" and Danish
stod) has been the focus of much investigation by both historical and
synchronic linguists over the past century, and yet the field has only
grown more confusing and prohibitive. This, I believe, is due to the
lack of a basic and explicit phonological characterization of the
Scandinavian accent contrast (Accent 1 v. Accent 2) which can offer
coherence to the phenomenon, either synchronically, diachronically, or
cross-dialectally.
I have attempted to shed light on the situation by beginning with an
underlying representation of the accent contrast in which a syllable
may be "accented" via association with a lexical H tone. This most
basic autosegmental apparatus then immediately accounts for the
restricted accent distribution with respect to monosyllables and
oxytones, which may only bear Accent 1. I then show how this
representation lends itself not only to a perspicuous accounting of
regular accent assignment in the lexicon but also to a comprehensive
description of the postlexical phonetic realizations of the accents
in their notorious diversity across the Scandinavian dialects. The
approach taken also suggests the origin of Accent 2 in bimoraic
non-initial syllables of the post-syncope period (i.e., prior to the
Old Scandinavian period c. 1150).
Upcoming Talks:
4/15 Chris Golston
4/22 Cheryl Zoll, UCB
5/6 Sharon Inkelas and Orhan Orgun, UCB
5/20 Shelley Waksler, SFSU
-/-/-/ SEMANTICS TALK /-/-/-
Friday, April 9, 1:30pm
Ventura 17
Organized by the CSLI project on indexicality
Implicit arguments of relational nouns
Chris Barker
Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University
barker@ling.ohio-state.edu
Members of a certain large class of nouns are irreducibly relational
in meaning: in order for a person to qualify as an enemy, there must
be someone they are the enemy of. There is good reason to believe
that the notional second argument of these nouns should be represented
in the normal compositional semantics (rather than, say, being treated
as dependent on context as indexicals or deictics). For one thing,
these arguments can often be rendered explicit as syntactic arguments,
as in `an enemy of John' or in one reading of `John's enemy')--though
not always: *`John's stranger', *`a stranger of John'. Furthermore,
the second argument can be partially characterized semantically by
means of the thematic proto-roles Part and Whole. Somewhat
surprisingly, it even seems necessary to allow these implicit
arguments to be optionally bound even by nominal quantifiers. For
instance, one reading of `Most enemies are strangers' requires
simultaneous quantification over pairs of indices:
MOSTx,y(ENEMY(x, y), STRANGER(x, y)).
-/-/-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
This Friday, 4/9, Jennifer Cole will present her Dissertation
Proposal on "Reduplication on Phonological Domains".
The talk will begin at 3:30 p.m. in the Cordura Conference Room.
Happy Hour will follow.
Reduplication on Phonological Domains
Jennifer Fitzpatrick Cole
Dissertation Proposal
The role played by prosody in shape-invariant morphology has been
well established in recent years. Prosody characterizes the
shape of both the input and the output of processes such as the
root-and-pattern morphology and broken plurals of Arabic,
reduplication, hypocoristics, and language games. The Prosodic
Morphology Hypothesis of McCarthy & Prince (1990) contends that
the templates of shape-invariant morphology are defined in terms
of prosodic metrical units (mora, syllable, foot, prosodic word, etc.)
In this talk I focus on reduplication and argue that it operates
on phonological domains, particularly the domains of the Prosodic
Hierarchy (Selkirk 1978 et seq; Nespor & Vogel 1986; Inkelas 1989),
including phonological stem, word, and phrase. These domains are
defined in terms of two sorts of information: morphological and
syntactic information (through mapping algorithms and
subcategorization frames) on the one hand, and metrical information
(through extrametricality and prosodic circumscription) on the
other. As such, phonological domains are constrained by, but not
necessarily isomorphic to, either morphological/syntactic
constituents or metrical constituents.
-/-/-/ SOCIORAP /-/-/-
HUBERT DEVONISH
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
Visiting Scholar in the Linguistics Dept., Stanford Univeristy
will be speaking on
TECHNOLOGY AND THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGE QUESTION
Language is the means by which technology develops and spreads within
and across human societies. Much of the modern conflict of the status
and roles of vernacular languages is underlyingly a struggle for
access to and control of technoogy.
Technological advances, e.g., writing, printing, telephones, tape
recorders, etc., have massively increased the power and scope of human
language beyond the face-to-face communication situation. These have
produced a range of new domains within which speakers of vernacular
languages in the modern world could assert their ethnic and natonal identities.
The presentation will look at both of the above issues and, with
reference particularly to Jamaica, analyse the role which they are
playing in the emergence of nation-states in the modern world.
WHEN: Monday, April 12th, 7:30 pm
WHERE: Greenberg Room, Linguistics Dept.
-/-/-/ PREPROFESSIONAL WORKSHOP /-/-/-
Dan Flickinger, Hewlett-Packard, (Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford)
will talk about being a linguist in the computer world.
Thursday, April 15th, in 200-217, from noon to 1.
-/-/-/ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS /-/-/-
Stanford Humanities Center
Announcement of
Graduate Student Fellowships
1993-94
PRE-DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS
These fellowships are intended for Stanford doctoral students of
unusual promise and achievement who are normally in their third or
fourth year of graduate work and have completed their formal course
work. The Center will provide a supplement of $1250 to the student's
current sources of financial support to be used for research-related
expenses such as books or travel. Fellows have offices at the Center
and are expected to be in residence at Stanford throughout the
academic year and to take full part in the intellectual and social
life of the Center. At the same time, they are expected to continue
their program of doctoral studies and fulfill all their departmental
requirements, including teaching.
DISSERTATION RESIDENT FELLOWSHIPS
These newly-inaugurated fellowships will be awared to a small number
of humanities dissertation fellows who are writing their theses and
can bring support from other granting agencies such as Whiting,
Compton, Ford, Mellon, Lewis, Newcombe, etc., or who are otherwise
self-supporting. Applicants need not belong to humanities
departments as traditionally defined, but their research should be
concerned with questions of value and employ cultural, historical,
linguistic, literary, or philosophical approaches.
The Center will provide a supplement of $1250 to the student's current
sources of financial support to be used for research-related expenses
such as books or travel. Dissertation Resident Fellows will have
offices at the Center and will be expected to be in residence at
Stanford throughout the academic year and to take full part in the
intellectual and social life of the Center.
Application forms may be picked up at the Humanities Center in
Mariposa House. For further information please contact Susan Sebbard
at 723-3053.
-/-/-/ 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.)
SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES
(University of London)
LECTURESHIP IN LINGUISTICS
Applications are invited for a lectureship in Linguistics in the
Department of Linguistics. The appointment will be effective from
October 1st 1993.
The department has a requirement for a specialist in formal syntax
and/or semantics who will combine research with tuition across the
spectrum of undergraduate and graduate teaching and supervision.
Ideally, candidates should have a PhD as well as teaching experience.
The Lecturer salary scale is $13,400 - $24,736 plus $2,134 London Allowance.
Application forms and further particulars may be obtained from the
Personnel Office, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh
Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG (Tel: 071-637 2388 ext 2234).
Please telephone between 2 pm and 5 pm. Further information may also
be obtained from the Secretary of the Linguistics Department
071-323-6332. Overseas candidates may apply directly by letter
supported by a full curriculum vitae, at least two representative
publications, and the names and addresses of three referees.
Closing date: 1 May, 1993
The School is an equal opportunities employer. [note that the salary
is in pounds stlg (the pound sign may get converted to a dollar sign
on your system]
SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY
The Linguistics Program anticipates temporary part-time positions in
the following areas:
1) Linguistics and second language teaching, and
2) teaching English as a second language
Minimum qualifications: M.A. in TES(O)L or M.A. in Applied
Linguistics; two years of classroom experience teaching English as a
second language; experience in teaching at the college level;
familiarity with current trends in the theory and methodology of
second language teaching with particular emphasis on ESL/EFL. Also
desirable is familiarity with the sociocultural and political context
of second language learning at the levels of elementary, secondary,
and adult education.
For further information, contact Dr. Shirley Silver, Program
Coordinator (707) 664-2419
School of Social Sciences
1801 E. Cotati Avenue
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
Deadline for Postmark of Applications for Fall 1993 is April 16, 1993.
(Applications will be accepted until July 12, 1993 for any positions
that remain unfilled)
Deadline for Postmark of Applications for Spring 1994 is October 15,
1993. (Applications will be accepted until November 12, 1993 for any
positions that remain unfilled)
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-/-/-/ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /-/-/-
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