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Sesquipedalian, Volume III, Number 33
The SESQUIPEDALIAN WEEKLY HERALD Volume III, Number 33
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/
June 3, 1993
To conclude our coverage of the history of the world, and indeed our
reporting for this year, here is the long-awaited final installment:
GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY
Compiled by Richard Lederer
Part Three
One of the causes of the revolutionary wars was the English
put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels
through the post without stamps. During the war, the Red Coats and
Paul Revere were throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were
barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the war
and no longer had to pay for taxis.
Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the
Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin
were two singers of the Declaration of Independance. Franklin had
gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of
bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing two cats
backwards and declared, 'A horse divided against itself cannot stand.'
He died in 1790 and is still dead.
George Washington married Martha Curtis and in due time became
the Father of Our Country. Then the Constitution of the United States
was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the
people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms. Abraham Lincoln became
America's greatest president. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and
he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When
Lincoln was president, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, 'In
onion there is strength.' Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg
Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of
an envelope. He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation
Proclamation. But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch the
ex-negroes and other innocent victims. It claimed it represented law
and odor. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theatre
and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture
show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly
insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.
Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time.
Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy.
Gravity was invented by Sir Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in
the Autumn, when the apples are falling off trees.
Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was
Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He
was very large. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Beethoven wrote
music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music.
He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for
him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was
accomplished before it happened. The Maseillaise was the theme song
for the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon. During
the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in
their shoes. Then the Spanish gorillas came down from the hills and
nipped at Napoleon's flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder
problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to
inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't
bear children.
The sun never set on the British Empire because the British
Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West. Queen Victoria
was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. Her
reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplary of a
great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her
reign.
-/-/-/ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-/-/-
John Rickford is presenting a paper at the Stanford Center in Berlin
this weekend for the Berlin Symposium 'Migration in Europe: Challenges
and Opportunities.' Ruth Wodak was also to present but was unable to
attend due to illness.
-/-/-/ CALL FOR PAPERS /-/-/-
-- NELS XXIV (November 19-21, 1993): Abstracts are invited for
twenty-minute talks in all areas of theoretical linguistics.
Abstracts should be one page of no more than 500 words (with an
additional page of examples and references if necessary). Word limit
will be strictly enforced. Send nine anonymous copies of the abstract
and one copy with the name of author(s) and institution(s). Include a
TYPEWRITTEN 3x5 card with the following information: name of
author(s), title of paper, address and affilation, phone number,
student/nonstudent, and e-mail address (if available). Send to
NELS 24
Department of Linguistics
South College
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003
phone: 413/545-0885
email: NELS24@linguist.umass.edu
Please no e-mail submissionss of abstract and only one abstract per
person (including co-authoring). Abstracts must be received by
Monday, August 16, 1993. If you would like acknowledgement of receipt
of your abstract please include a self-addressed stamped envelope or
e-mail address.
-/-/-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-/-/-
The last Stanford linguistics colloquium of the academic year will take
place this Friday, 4 June, at 15:30. NOTE THE ROOM CHANGE: this colloquium
will be held in VENTURA 17 at CSLI. An attractive Happy Hour will follow
the colloquium in or by Cordura. The abstract of talk is given below.
HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Livia Polanyi
IRL and Department of Linguistics, Rice University
In this talk, I will argue that the analytic machinery of the
Linguistics Discourse Model (LDM), a comprehensive theory of discourse
syntactic and semantic structure under development for the past ten
years, provides principled solutions to otherwise intractable problems
elsewhere in the grammar. The LDM parses discourse on a left-to-right
unit by unit basis, incrementally assigning a structural description
in the form of an Open Right Tree. This s.d. can be used to account
for the distribution of syntactic constructions and particles as well
as for the precise formulation of discourse constraints on the domain
of applicability of phonological rules. I will present LDM analyses of
(1) The distribution of a ``mystery'' particle, LA, in Mocho (joint
work with Laura Martin)
(2) The discourse domain of flapping in American English (joint work
with Irene Vogel)
Should time permit, LDM accounts of two other phenomena will also be
presented:
(3) A re-analysis of English VP-preposing which builds on recent work
of Gregory Ward and Larry Horn.
(4) The distribution of topicalization in Yiddish discourse extending
Prince (1989)
I will conclude by arguing that discourse level phenomona, far from
being ``mere performance'' or arising from non-linguistic phenomena
such as the structure of the domain of talk or the desire of speakers
to be understood by their interlocutors, must be accounted for in
terms of a competence model of discourse structure which is properly
part of core grammar.
-/-/-/ 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
-/-/-/ SOCIOLINGUISITCS RAP /-/-/-
There will be one more sociolinguistics rap session event this
quarter; tonight (Thursday) at 7.30 in Ventura 17:
The Past Marker in Palenquero
Martha Swearingen
Department of Linguistics, Stanford Univeristy
The use of the particle -ba as a past marker in Palenquero, a Spanish
creole, with Portuguese and Bantu influences, differs considerably from
that of the Spanish imperfect suffix -ba. It has been noted by
Hispanic dialectologists and creole scholars alike but not examined in
any detail. Unlike Spanish -ba, the Palenquero -ba occurs in various
positions, for e.g.
(1) After temporal markers
Palenquero: Kumo ase-ba nyama ese impeto?
(WH-ADV + HAB-PST + VERB + DEM + NOUN)
Spanish: Como se llamaba ese inspector?
'What was that inspector's name?'
(2) After object pronouns
Pal: jende ase-ba enterra-lo-ba ai suelo?
(NOUN + HAB-PST + VERB-OBJ.PR-PST + THERE + NOUN)
Sp: (toda la gente ...) la enterraban en el suelo?
'Did they used to bury the people in the ground?'
I will discuss my preliminary findings regarding the semantic and
syntactic changes which the marker appears to have undergone.
-/-/-/ TRUE LINGUISTS /-/-/-
This is the last Sesquipedalian of the year, and while that may come
as a relief to most of you, the editor wishes to thank the department
for all the support, appreciation, and above all, tolerance,
throughout this inaugural year. Barring major protest, we will be
back again next year but in the meantime, to tide you over we'd like
to leave you with a few more random quotes (allegedly) from our
faculty:
'Of course you can say that, but it's just chalk on the blackboard.'
'We need to get through the garbage before we get to the interesting
material.'
'I like question marks because you don't have to take a stand.'
'The difference between lowering and copying isn't something you'd
want to face the firing squad over. It's basically a matter of
execution.'
'I want to be bound. I need to be bound. Please bind me.'
'More good is bad because better is good.'
'As long as I'm in truth mode I might as well tell you about this...'
'MSC-- the Morphological Stuttering Constraint.'
'If Chomsky were consistent then linguistic theory would not be as we
know it.'
'I'll put brackets around this to make it look more formal.'
-/-/-/ TEXT SOFTWARE INITIATIVE /-/-/-
(An international effort to promote the development and use of free
text software): The widespread availability of large amounts of
electronic text and linguistic data in recent years has dramatically
increased the need for generally available, flexible text software.
Commercial software for text analysis and manipulation covers only a
fraction of research needs, and it is often expensive and hard to
adapt or extend to fit a particular research problem. Software
developed by individual researchers and labs is often experimental and
hard to get, hard to install, under-documented, and sometimes
unreliable. Above all, most of this software is incompatible. As a
result, it is not at all uncommon for researchers to develop
tailor-made systems that replicate much of the functionality of other
systems and in turn create programs that cannot be re-used by others,
and so on in an endless software waste cycle. The reusability of data
is a much-discussed topic these days; similarly, we need "software
reusability", to avoid the re-inventing of the wheel characteristic of
much language-analytic research in the past three decades. The Text
Software Initiative (TSI) is committed to solving this problem by
working to
o establish and publish guidelines and standards for the
development of text software;
o promulgate and coordinate the development of free TSI-
conformant software.
The scope of the TSI covers all areas of analysis and manipulation
of all kinds of texts (written or spoken, mono-lingual or multi-
lingual parallel, etc.), including markup of physical and logical
text features, linguistic analysis and annotation, browsing and
retrieval, statistical analysis, and other text-related tasks in
research in computational linguistics, humanities computing,
terminology and lexicography, speech, etc.
The TSI software development effort is distributed, that is, anyone
can contribute on a voluntary basis. This means that tools will be
developed according to the contributors' priorities; however, the
TSI is ultimately working towards the development of a comprehensive
text handling system.
To ensure software compatibility and reusability and enable
distributed development, the TSI is committed to:
o design and publish program interface conventions
o determine and publish guidelines for programming style and
documentation
o stress separation of code and linguistic data to ensure
(natural) language independence
o emphasize breaking high-level text-handling tasks into
more primitive, reusable functions
o provide a library of primitive text-handling tools
o maintain a task list and set priorities
o circulate information such as progress reports, revisions to
the standard, availability of new software, etc.
o set up a mechanism for testing and evaluation
o maintain mailing lists for comments, bug reports,
suggestions, etc.
The TSI works in relation with other standardization groups, notably
the Text Encoding Initiative and the Expert Advisory Group on
Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES).
All TSI software is free in the sense defined in the Free Software
Foundation's General Public License, which guarantees the freedom to
copy, redistribute, and modify software, and protects this freedom
by requiring those who pass on the software to include the rights to
further redistribute it and see and change the code.
Distribution of TSI software is accomplished in relation with other
dissemination groups such as the Free Software Foundation, RELATOR,
and the Linguistic Data Consortium. The TSI does not provide
technical support, but organizes a network of voluntary consultants
and support people.
-/-/-/ 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.)
-- The Linguistics Department at the University of Colorado/Boulder
has an opening for a one-year replacement position beginning August,
teaching two courses per semester. Possible graduate course
assignments include Semantics & Pragmatics, Survey of Linguistics for
Cognitive Science, or Intro to Formal Syntax; undergraduate
assignments may include Language & Gender, Language & Thought, or
Language in U.S. Society. Some relevant teaching experience is
expected.
Preferred research areas: functional syntax/discourse analysis.
Computational/cognitive science orientation a plus. The Ph.D. must be
in hand by 15 August 1993.
The University of Colorado at Boulder has a strong institutional
commitment to the principle of diversity in all areas. In that spirit, we
are particularly interested in receiving applications from a broad spectrum
of people, including women, members of ethnic minorities, and disabled
individuals.
Rank: Visiting Assistant Professsor Expected Salary: $25,000
Please contact:
Lise Menn, Chair, Linguistics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
Office: 303-492-8041
Fax: 303-492-4416
e-mail: ling@cubldr.colorado.edu or lmenn@clipr.colorado.edu
-- UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA: One year visiting assistant
professor. Qualifications: Ph.D. in English or Linguistics with a
specialization in English language. To teach 'Structure of American
English,' 'History of the English Language,' and courses in literature
and composition. Course load: 2/3 or 3/2. Fall term begins August
23, 1993. Women and minorities encouraged to apply. Send CV, letters
of recommendation, and transcripts to
Prof. Howard H. Hinkel, Acting Chair
Department of English
University of Missouri
Columbia MO 65211
Deadline for application: June 20.
-- UNIVERSITY OF YORK: Applications are invited for a lectureship in
Linguistics and English Language in the Department of Language and
Linguistic Science tenable from 1 October 1993 until 30 September
1999. Candidates should have an established area of linguistic
expertise and a strong commitment to research in a branch of
linguistics relevant to the department's work. They should be able to
demonstrate research achievement. Our research is mainly focussed on
phonetics, phonology, syntax and sociolinguistics but the research
interests of members of the department include semantics,
computational linguistics, conversational analysis, historical
lingustics, dialectology and second language acquisition. The
department also houses a major research project into high quality
speech synthesis funded by British Telecom. Candidates should be able
to contribute to the teaching of English Language courses.The
successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to the
general linguistics teaching of the department by contributing to
first-year linguistics courses and by participating in first-year
general tutorial teaching of linguistic theory. The precise duties of
the post will be by arrangement with the Head of Department. Six
copies of applications (one only from overseas candidates) with full
curriculum vitae and the names and addresses of three referees, should
be sent by 8 June 1993 to
Personell Department
University of York
Helsington, York YO1 5DD
UNITED KINGDOM
fax: (0904) 433433
Please supply e-mail addresses and fax numbers for both yourself and
referees if possible. In the letter of application candidates should
outline their research interests and plans and their teaching
experience, and they should outline the contribution they would wish
to make to the department, in both research and teaching. Please
quote reference number 3366. Interviews will be held in York on the
afternoon of Tuesday 6 July.
-- UNIVERSITY OF YORK: Applications are invited for a lectureship in
French Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistic
Science from 1 October 1993. Candidates should have a strong
commitment to research in the linguistics of French, specializing in
some branch of linguistics relevant to the department's work. They
should be able to demonstrate research achievement. They will be
responsible for undergraduate courses in French linguistics, including
aspects of the history and linguistic structure of the French
language. Candidates should have a good command of French, and
preference may be given candidates who will make some contribution to
the teaching of French language, in a course which lays special
emphasis on both the teaching of varieties of French and the
linguistic analysis of the French language. The successful candidate
will also be expected to contribute to the general linguistics
teaching of the department by developing an option in linguistics or
contributing to one or more of the established option courses, bu
contributing to first-year courses in general linguistics and by
flexibility in our teaching programme for the incoming candidate to
develop individual interests. The precise duties of
the post will be by arrangement with the Head of Department. Six
copies of applications (one only from overseas candidates) with full
curriculum vitae and the names and addresses of three referees, should
be sent by 8 June 1993 to
Personell Department
University of York
Helsington, York YO1 5DD
UNITED KINGDOM
fax: (0904) 433433
Please supply e-mail addresses and fax numbers for both yourself and
referees if possible. In the letter of application candidates should
outline their research interests and plans and their teaching
experience, and they should outline the contribution they would wish
to make to the department, in both research and teaching. Please
quote reference number 3365. Interviews will be held in York on the
afternoon of Thursday 1 July.
(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.)
-/-/-/ INSTA-PRIZE /-/-/-
This is it, your last chance to win an insta-prize until September:
Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) had some part of his body
replaced with gold. What was this gilt prosthetic?
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/
-/-/-/ 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'.
Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
their employees, makes any warranty, whatsoever, implied, or assumes
any legal liability or responsibility regarding any information,
disclosed, in this publication, or represents that its use would not
infringe privately owned rights. No specific reference constitutes or
implies endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by Stanford
University or the Linguistics Department, or their employees. The
views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those
of Stanford University or the Linguistics Department, or their
employees, and shall not be used for advertising or product
endorsement purposes.
This journal printed on 100% recycled electrons
Void where prohibited
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