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Sesquipedalian, Volume III, Number 27
The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume III, Number 27
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April 22, 1993
-/-/-/ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-/-/-
-- At the 74th annual meeting of the American Educational Research
Association, held April 12-16 in Atlanta, GA, Trisha Svaib presented
two papers entitled: '"Let Me Act": The Use of Enactment as a Display
of Literacy Depicting Literacy: Wordless Picture Books and Their Role
in Literacy Development.'
-- Jean Mark Gawron will read from his new science fiction novel,
'Dream of Glass' on Friday, April 23, 6 pm at Dark Carnival (2978
Ashby in Berkeley); Wednesday May 5, 7.30 pm at Kepler's in Menlo
Park, and Thursday, May 6, 7.30 pm at Green Apple Books (506 Clement,
San Francisco).
'In a San Francisco of the future, a young woman named
Augustine wounded at the end of a war and declared officially dead
when the synthetic memories implanted to aid her recovery qualify her
as an entirely new person. The novel follows her as she tries to
build a new identity and a new life in a facist theocracy where
information is God.'
-/-/-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
Henriette de Swart will be the speaker this Friday (April 23)
at the Stanford Linguistics Colloquium. The talk will be in
Cordura 100, at 3:30pm, and the usual Happy Hour will follow.
TOPICALIZATION, QUANTIFICATION AND TEMPORAL STRUCTURE
Henriette de Swart
Stanford University
In this talk I give an interpretation of time adverbials and
temporal clauses in a discourse theory without reference times.
This may sound like a contradiction: since Reichenbach (1947)
it has generally been assumed that these expressions give the
reference time of the sentence. I argue that discourse represen-
tation theories such as the ones developed by Kamp and Rohrer
(1983) for French and Hinrichs (1981, 1986) for English, which
incorporate this Reichenbachian view are inadequate because
they do not handle the difference in meaning between preposed
and postponed time adverbials in an appropriate way. In narrative
discourse, this is a pragmatic contrast which is related to
given/new information. Truth-conditional meaning effects arise
under quantification. The analysis I develop here builds on work
by Lascarides and Oberlander (1991) and Lascarides and Asher
(1991, 1992, 1993). The key to the interpretation of time
adverbials and temporal clauses then resides in recognizing the
non-anaphoric character of these expressions and determining the
constraints they impose on the relation between the time
adverbial/temporal clause and the main clause.
Next week: Whitney Tabor.
-/-/-/ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP /-/-/-
This week, Cheryl Zoll from U.C. Berkeley, will be presenting a talk
on Ghost Segments and Optimality. We'll meet at the regular time and
place: 7:30 p.m., Ventura 17.
GHOST SEGMENTS AND OPTIMALITY
Ghost segments are underlying consonants and vowels which surface only
in particular contexts. Their existence raises two issues addressed
in this paper:
(1) What property of ghosts distinguishes them from regular
consonants and vowels, causing them to alternate with zero?
(2) Under what conditions do they surface?
I will argue that ghost segments elude parsing because, like floating
features, they lack an underlying root node. This analysis not only
correctly predicts that there are no underlying long ghosts but also
accounts for the principled a symmetries in ghost inventories. This
type of degenerate segment can only surface when provided with an
epenthetic root node. Making special reference to Polish, I will show
that such epenthesis, conditioned by syllablle well-formedness
constraints, yields the attested pattern of its ghost yers (really!).
The implications of this analysis for some cases of syncope and
allomorphy will be discussed.
-/-/-/ UNITY AND DIVERSITY CONFERENCE /-/-/-
The Department of Linguistics, in association with the Department of
German Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the Institute for
International Studies, presents: 'Unity and Diversity,
(Pluri-)Nationalism and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking
Countries: an Issue or a Non-issue?' A symposium, April 29-30, 1993
in the German Studies Reading Room (Bldg. 240). On Thursday, April
29, Ruth Wodak will chair a panel from 10.00-12.00, and then speak at
14.00 on 'The Limits of Delimiting: Is there an Austrian German?' In
the same panel, Charles Ferguson presents 'Theoretical Models of
Language Diversity and the German-using World.' On Friday, April 30,
at 14.00 Britt-Louise Gunnarsson presents 'Fachsprachen: Diversity
Within and Unity Between Languages.' In the same panel, Joshua
Fishman presents 'Ethnolinguistic Democracy: Varieties, Degrees and
Limits.' Symposium organized by Michael Boehler, Ruth Wodak, and
Walter Lohnes. The support of the following is gratefully
acknowledged: Austrian Institute (New York), German Consulate General
(San Francisco), Goethe Institute (San Francisco), Swiss Consulate
General (San Francisco), and the School of Humanities and Sciences
(Stanford). For information please call 723-3266.
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-/-/-/ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /-/-/-
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