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Sesquipedalian, Volume III, Number 32
The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume III, Number 32
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May 27, 1993
Continuing in our series of the history of the world according to kids:
GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY
Compiled by Richard Lederer
Part Two
Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames.
King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harold mustarded his
troops before the Battle of Hastings, and Joan of Arc was cannonized
by Bernard Shaw. Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man
should be hanged twice for the same offense.
In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The
greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and
versus and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell
who shot an apple while standing on his son's head.
The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the
value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church
door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible
death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was an age of great
inventions and great discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir
Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes.
Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Meanwhile,
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.
The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII
found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen
Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When
Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted,
"hurrah." Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.
The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear.
Shakespear never made much money and is only famous because of his
plays. He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies,
comedies, and errors. In one of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet
rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy.
In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the king by
attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic
couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miguel Cervantes.
He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton
wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise
Regained.
During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus
was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the
Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa
Fe. Later, the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, and this was known as the
Pilgrim's Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were
greeted by the Indians, who came down the hill rolling their war hoops
before them. The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their backs.
Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses,
which proved very fatal for them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one
for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born.
Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.
(Next week: More on America, and the Enlightenment.)
-/-/-/ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-/-/-
-- Congratulations to Timothy Choy (Stanford Linguistics
Undergraduate), who has been awarded a Golden Grant for Extended
Research on 'Use of metaphor in Spanish spoken in Salamanca and in
English spoken at Stanford' (adviser Elizabeth Traugott).
-/-/-/ CALL FOR PAPERS /-/-/-
-- THE NINTH AMSTERDAM COLLOQUIUM (14th-17th December 1993): The ninth
edition of the Amsterdam Colloquium will be held from Tuesday 14th
until Friday 17th of December 1993 at the University of Amsterdam. The
Amsterdam Colloquia are organized every two years under the auspices
of the ILLC (`Institute for Logic, Language and Computation'), in
which the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Mathematics and
Computer Science and the Department of Computational Linguistics of
the University of Amsterdam cooperate to stimulate and coordinate
interdisciplinary research. The Amsterdam Colloquia aim at bringing
together scholars from these disciplines who share an interest in
semantics. The organizing committee of the Ninth Amsterdam Colloquium
consists of Paul Dekker, Herman Hendriks and Martin Stokhof. Financial
support is provided by the ILLC, the Department of Philosophy, the
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, the Faculty of
Humanities, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW), and the
European Foundation for Logic, Language and Computation (FoLLI).
People who want to contribute a paper are requested to send in six
copies of an extended abstract of two to three pages (1000 words). The
abstract must include a short, 10 line, summary clearly indicating
subject matter and conclusions. The deadline for submissions is
September 1st, 1993. Abstracts postmarked later than August 31 cannot
be accepted. Contributors will be notified of acceptance by October
15. In November, the program, whih includes the summaries of the
accepted papers, will be distributed among the participants. The
accepted papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings, due
March 1994. The deadline for sending in final versions of the papers
is February 1st. For further information, contact:
Organizing Committee Ninth Amsterdam Colloquium
ILLC/Department of Philosophy
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 15
1012 CP Amsterdam
The Netherlands
tel: +31 20 5254541
fax: +31 20 5254503
email: ac9@illc.uva.nl
-/-/-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
Ivan Sag will be the speaker this Friday (May 25) at the Stanford
Linguistics Colloquium. The talk will be held in Cordura 100, at
3:30pm, and will be followed by a Happy Hour.
A MINIMALIST THEORY OF `EXTRACTION' CONSTRUCTIONS
Ivan Sag
Stanford University
In this paper, I present an analysis of extraction constructions
that makes no appeal to empty categories, movement operations,
functional categories or function composition. This analysis,
couched within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar,
includes constraints on feature structures and a multiple inheritance
hierarchy of clausal constructions. Inter alia, I will deal with
left-right extraction asymmetries, idiosyncratic lexical extraction
signatures, the nested dependency condition, and `pied piping'.
-/-/-/ LOGIC, LANGUAGE AND COMPUTATION /-/-/-
The Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford
University, will host the Second Workshop on Logic, Language, and
Computation on June 4--6. The workshop will take place in the large
conference room in Cordura Hall (Cordura 100). Registration is free
and open. This meeting is a follow-up to a similar one held last year
on interfaces between logic and language. This year, a somewhat
broader focus has been chosen, which includes various connections with
computer science. The organizers of the workshop are Johan van
Benthem, Stanley Peters, Henriette de Swart, Chris Pinon, and Makoto
Kanazawa (kanazawa@csli.stanford.edu).
Schedule for the Second LLC Workshop
June 4--6, 1993
Friday June 4
Morning I Computational Semantics
8.45 OPENING
9 Len Schubert and Chung Hee Hwang (Rochester)
Episodic Logic: A Representation that Meets the
Interlocking Needs of LF-Computation, Deindexing, and
Inference in Language Understanding
9.45 Mary Dalrymple (Xerox), John Lamping (Xerox), Fernando
Pereira (AT&T Bell Labs), and Vijay Saraswat (Xerox)
A Deductive Account of Quantification in LFG
10.30 COFFEE BREAK
10.45 Megumi Kameyama (SRI)
Indefeasible Semantics and Defeasible Inferences
11.30 Hinrich Schuetze (Stanford)
A Quantitative Approach to Computational Semantics
12.15 LUNCH BREAK
Afternoon II Process Logics and Natural Language Inference
1.45 Grigori Mints (Stanford) and Johan van Benthem
(Amsterdam & Stanford)
Dynamic Logic and Proof Theory
2.30 Jan van Eijck (CWI & Utrecht)
Presuppositions and Dynamic Logic
3.15 COFFEE BREAK
3.30 Hans Juergen Ohlbach (Max-Planck-Institut fuer
Informatik, Saarbruecken)
Translation Methods for Logics with Possible Worlds
Semantics
4.15 Max Kanovich (Russian Humanitarian State University)
The Expressive Power of Modalized Implicational Logics
Saturday June 5
Morning III Categorial Grammar and Unification Formalisms
9 Ivan Sag (Stanford)
Filling the Gaps in Logic-Based Grammars
9.45 Michael Moortgat (Utrecht)
The Phylogeny of Lambek Calculus
10.30 COFFEE BREAK
10.45 Makoto Kanazawa (Stanford)
Identification in the Limit of Categorial Grammars
11.30 Chris Manning (Stanford)
LFG, HPSG and CG: Acronyms and Logics
12.15 LUNCH BREAK
Afternoon IV Context Dependence
1.45 David Israel (SRI) and John Perry (Stanford)
Saying That and the Role of Reflexive Contents
2.30 Cleo Condoravdi (CSLI) and Mark Gawron (SRI)
The Context-Dependency of Implicit Arguments
3.15 COFFEE BREAK
3.30 Kees van Deemter (Philips & CSLI)
A Note on Vagueness and Context-Dependency
4.15 Yoav Shoham (Stanford)
Belief as Defeasible Knowledge Versus Knowledge as
Justified, True Belief: a Logical Account
Evening PARTY
Sunday June 6
Morning IV Quantifiers and Operators
9 Gila Sher (San Diego)
A General Schema for Polyadic Quantifiers
9.40 Friederike Moltmann (UCLA)
New Evidence for Resumptive Quantifiers
10.20 Henriette de Swart (Stanford)
(In)definites and Genericity
11 BRUNCH BREAK
11.30 Eric Jackson (Stanford)
Donkey Sentences and Uniqueness Presuppositions
12.10 Dorit Ben-Shalom (UCLA)
Semantic Trees
12.50 COFFEE BREAK
1.05 Michael Johnston (Santa Cruz)
`Because' Clauses and Negative Polarity Licensing
1.45 Filippo Beghelli, Dorit Ben-Shalom, and Anna Szabolcsi
(UCLA)
SVO Sentences: Branching Without Branching
2.25 END
-/-/-/ HISTORICAL WORKSHOP /-/-/-
REMINDER: There is a historical workshop tonight (Thursday) by Andrew
Garrett:
Esau's In-Laws and Related Linguistic Topics
Andrew Garrett
University of Texas at Austin
7:30 PM, May 27
Ventura 17
The work (in progress) to be discussed concerns relativization and
relative clause diachrony in the Anatolian branch of Indo-European:
in effect, that is, between Proto-Indo-European and Hittite (and
within the latter); between second and first millennium (Hieroglyphic)
Luvian; and possibly, as a sort of coda, between common Luvo-Lycian
and Lycian itself insofar as its exiguous testimony rewards such work.
Among the problems raised in principle are: how does a language with
(hypotactic) correlative clauses come to have embedded relative clauses,
and is this connected with the change from verb-final to verb-medial
word order?
Upcoming Workshop:
June 3 Martha Swearingen "The Past Marker in Palenquero"
7:30 PM, Ventura 17
-/-/-/ TRUE LINGUISTS /-/-/-
Time once again for 'Ask the Sesquipedalian'
'DEAR EDITORS: If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on
the floor butter side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or
other high and towering place, it will land on its feet. But what if
you attach a buttered piece of bread, butter side up, to a cat's back
and toss them both out the window? Will the cat land on its feet? Or
will the butter splat on the ground? --Concerned in Physics'
Dear Concerned, Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself
you should be able to deduce the result. The laws of butterology
demand that the butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict
laws of feline aerodynamics demand that the cat land on its fuzzy
legs. If the combined construct were to land, nature would have no
way to resolve this paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.
The implications of this physical principle should certainly
not be lost on you: you have just discovered the secret of
antigravity. A buttered cat will, when released, quickly move to a
height where the forces of cat-twisting and butter-attraction are in
equilibrium. This equilibrium point can be modified by adding some
butter, providing lift, or scraping some off, allowing descent.
Most civilizations in the universe already use this principle
to drive their ships while in a planetary system. The loud humming
heard by most UFO sighters is, in fact, the purring of several hundred
tabbies. The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats manage to
eat the bread off their backs they will instantly plummet. Of course
the cats will land on their feet, but this usually doesn't do them
much good since right after they make their graceful landing several
tons of red-hot starship and cursing aliens crash on top of them.
-/-/-/ 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.)
-- A two-year post-doctoral position has become available in the
Computational Linguistics Program at Carnegie Mellon University. The
position will involve teaching courses in computational linguistics as
well as research and would begin mid-August this year. Decisions are
likely to be made within two-three weeks so candidates should send a
cover letter and CV as quickly as possible to
Computational Linguistics Program
Department of Philosophy
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
(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.)
-/-/-/ LANGUAGE AND POWER CONFERENCE /-/-/-
This quarter's Language and Power class, taught by Prof. Ruth Wodak,
is pleased to invite you to a one-day conference where our research will
be presented. It will take place this Saturday, May 29, from 12:00-
7:00 in Cordura 100 (CSLI). Each presentation will be twenty minutes
long, and will have ten minutes for discussion. We hope to see you
there.
POWER IN INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS
12:00-12:30 Allan Taylor: "The Notion of `Frame' in Medical Discourse"
12:30-1:00 Wako Takayama: "Multinationals: Language and Power Dynamics
within Bilingual Business Contexts"
1:00 - 1:30 Juli Espinoza: "The Difference is Gender?: Power
Differences in Business School Classrooms"
1:30 - 1:45 BREAK
RECONCEPTUALIZING POWER THROUGH CULTURE
1:45 - 2:15 Renya Ramirez: "Power and Discourse in an American Indian
Graduation Ceremony in Fresno, California"
2:15 - 2:45 Renee Blake: "Rapping about the Sociology of Language:
Habitus, Capital, and Power"
2:45 - 3:00 BREAK
3:00 - 3:30 Norma Mendoza-Denton: "Language Attitudes and Media
Portrayals of Popular African French in the Ivory Coast"
3:30 - 4:00 Edna MacLean: "Power in Inupiaq Story Structure"
4:00 - 4:15 BREAK
THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE
4:15 - 4:45 Julie Solomon: "Interurban electric or streetcars,
trolleys, and buses: The (in)comprehensibility and (mis)comprehension
of legal texts (or `How the vehicle codes can drive you crazy')"
4:45 - 5:15 Jennifer Arnold: "Constructing the Official Story: Avenues
of Acquiring Political and Symbolic Power for Unempowered Guides"
5:15 - 5:45 Marylin Schlitz: "Scientific Understanding and the
Construction of Truth: A Discourse-Centered Analysis of the
Skeptic/Proponent Debate in Experimental Parapsychology
5:45 - 6:00 BREAK
6:00 - 6:30 Yuri Kuwahara: Title TBA
6:30 - 7:00 Carolyn Laub: Title TBA
-/-/-/ INSTA-PRIZE /-/-/-
>From the 'Istanbul, not Constantinople' File: What is the name of the
bridge that connects the European part of Istanbul to the Asian part?
First correct answer to arrive in my mailbox wins this week's gala 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'.
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Void where prohibited
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