Extreme Makeover, Sesquipedalian edition

The Sesquipedalian will be getting a serious makeover this weekend, and will emerge with a spiffy new look next week (along with the rest of the departmental website). Don’t worry, you can always find the latest issues at the usual URL:

http://sesquipedalian.stanford.edu/

And back issues will continue to be available at the archives here.

QPFest 2015!

QP Fest will take place on Friday, April 24!  Here is the program. It will happen in Room 100-101K (note unusual location).

1:30-2:30pm SESSION I
John Rickford, chair

  • “Nonstandard agreement in Standard English: The social perception of agreement variation under existential there” –Katherine Hilton
  • “Prosodic neighborhood effects in spoken word production” –Olek Glowka

2:30-2:45 Break

2:45-3:45pm SESSION II
Sara Kessler, Chair

  • “Is Something Afoot in Chuvash?” – Kate Lindsey
  • “A neural network approach to learning OT constraints” –Tim Dozat

3:45–4 Break

4pm-5pm SESSION III
Lelia Glass, Chair

  • “Mapping Projective Content: an investigation of ‘too’ in preschoolers’ English” – Masoud Jasbi
  • “Unless, exceptionality, and the pragmatics of conditional statements” – Prerna Nadathur

5pm SOCIAL (at departmental kitchen)

We Can Still Win the Linguist List Fund Drive!

A guest post from Robin Melnick, heartily endorsed by your Sesquip staff:

Let’s show our support for the Linguist List annual fundraising drive! Although the department has been the leader in the drive in years past, we are currently a distant third place with just nine donors so far this year.

If you’re not a current subscriber to any of the Linguist List feeds – job postings, conference announcements, calls for papers, book reviews, and much more – well, you will be when you get to that looking-for-a-job phase!

Even if it’s only a few bucks, every bit helps.

Ed King Receives Dissertation Fellowship

Many congratulations to Ed King, who has received a Dissertation Fellowship from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research!

Joan Bresnan Receives Strategic Fellowship

Joan Bresnan has been awarded a Strategic Fellowship at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain, and Behavior to develop a collaborative project on the dynamics of spoken syntax. She will visit NZILBB in September 2015. Congratulations, Joan!

Grant Workshop for Linguistic Fieldwork

On 22 April 2015, the Fieldwork Group will hold a Grant-Writing Workshop with a particular focus on the Linguistics Department Fieldwork Grant. Rob Podesva, who is on the committee for this department internal grant will be there to answer questions and make suggestions about what to include and how to prepare.

Linguists In Industry!

Ever wondered what life is like on the outside?

The LSA has released a helpful and informative video on what it’s like to be a linguist working in industry. You can watch the video here, which features our very own John Rickford!

Look Who’s Talking!

Lauri Karttunen gave a keynote talk at the CICLing-2015 conference in Cairo on Thursday, April 16 on “From Natural Logic to Natural Reasoning”.

Vera Gribanova gave a talk on April 10 at the UC Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle on “The Verbal Identity Condition in ellipsis: Consequences for head movement”.

Ignacio Cases will present “Learning Compositionality with Scala” at Text By The Bay 2015 on April 25.

Several Stanford linguists will be presenting at CLS 51 next weekend in Chicago:

  • Boris Harizanov will present a paper co-authored with Ryan Bennett & Robert Henderson on “Non-local prosodic subcategorization and its role in the syntax/prosody mapping”
  • Thomas Grano (B.A. 2006) will present “A coercion-free semantics for intention reports”
  • Alessandro Jaker (Ph.D. 2012) will present “The Consonant Hierarchy in Dëne Sųłıné”