Félicitations to Marie Catherine de Marneffe, who recently received a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. She was one of fourteen students selected from a highly competitive pool based on an intensive review process. Quite an honor. Be sure to congratulate her when you see her!

Bruno Estigarribia has just been appointed as research assistant professor in the department of Psychology at UNC Chapel Hill (subject to final provostial approval), in the Cognitive Program. He'll continue doing research on typical and atypical development, and language in general, on his own and in collaboration with alumna Jennifer Arnold, Peter Gordon, and Misha Becker. He's currently writing a lot of grant proposals... Congratulations, Bruno!

Routledge recently published a four-volume set on Computer-Assisted Language Learning edited by our own Phil Hubbard (EFS) This is in their Critical Concepts in Linguistics series. Way to go, Phil!

This just in! Lauren Hall-Lew is about to be honored with a Centennial TA Award. This is fantastic news about a fantastic TA. Way to go, Lauren!

Correction: Last week's edition incorrectly identified Kathryn Flack Potts as the second linguist to move from Hampshire College to Stanford. In fact, she is the third. Our recent graduate Philip Hofmeister, now a postdoc at UC San Diego, was the second. Sesquipedapologies to all those who may have been inconvenienced by this error. :-)

SPINfest!

The inaugural SPINfest!, a festival for Semantics and Pragmatics in the North (of England), took place late last month in the Whitworth Hall Council Chamber in Manchester. The presentations included all current members of the ever expanding Stanford-in-Manchester outpost:

• Andrew Koontz-Garboden (U Manchester)
  "Derived statives"
• Martina Faller (U Manchester)
  "Pluractionality in Cuzco Quechua"
• Iván García Álvarez (U Salford)
  "There are no exceptive determiners in English"

Speaking of the Stanford-in-Manchester outpost, Inbal Arnon is giving a talk today at the Multiple Perspectives on the Critical Period for Language Symposium at Ohio State. Her title is: "How the units speakers learn from influence what gets learned". Then she's traveling to Chicago where she's presenting a paper at Northwestern's Language and Cognition Workshop: "Starting Big - the role of multi-word phrases in language learning and use."

Then there's the Roots Workshop in Stuttgart next week, where the program includes:

• Andrew Koontz-Garboden (U Manchester) and John Beavers (UT Austin)
  "Is there a manner/result complementarity in verbal roots?"
• Beth Levin, John Beavers and Shiao Wei Tham (Wellesley College),
  "Manner of Motion Roots Across Languages: Same or Different?"

And in case you're in London on June 17, be sure to check out the 4th Conference on Austronesian Languages and Linguistics (ALL4) to be held at SOAS, where you'll find papers by:

• Melanie Owens, Stanford University
  "Austronesian Serial Verbs, and Serial Verb Terminology, in the Typology of Serialization"
• Peter Sells, SOAS, London
  "Dimensions of Syntactic Analysis in Toba Batak"

If you plan to stay on that side of the Atlantic, you can hop up to Copenhagen June 25-7 for the Fifth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLAVE), where Penny Eckert will be giving a talk entitled "Where does the social stop?". Or you can come back to Menlo Park to hear Geoff Nunberg (UC Berkeley and CSLI), who will be at Kepler's Bookstore to talk about his new book The Years of Talking Dangerously.

And of course July 6 - August 13 is the 2009 LSA Linguistic Institute, hosted by UC Berkeley, which is not to be missed. Paul Kiparsky, Beth Levin, Sharon Inkelas, Bill Croft, and Rob Podesva will all be teaching there, as well as scores of other interesting linguists. Be sure to catch the Child Language Research Forum. It includes papers by Marie-Catherine de Marneffe ("Input and pattern frequencies matter for acquiring French past participle forms") and Inbal Arnon ("Children's sensitivity to distributional patterns: re-thinking the path of relative clause acquisition") and a plenary talk ("Language as a Process") by Bill Croft. Emily Bender is also the organizer of an institute conference -- Cyberling 2009: Towards a Cyberinfrastructure for Linguistics. And at the Eighth Biennial Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology, another institute conference, you can find papers by Bill Croft ("A typology of grammatical hierarchies"), Tanya Nikitina ("Typology of the place vs. goal differentiation in adpositional systems"), Bill Croft et al. ("Generality of semantic processes: evidence from a typological study of polysemy"), and a plenary talk by Joan Bresnan.

But if you're in Europe in July, there's the LFG 09 Conference in Cambridge, which includes papers by Tina Bagel, Miriam Butt, Ron Kaplan, Tracy Holloway King and John Maxwell III ("A treatment of clitics via prosodic phonology in LFG"), Alex Alsina ("The prepositional passive as structure-sharing"), I Wayan Arka, Avery Andrews, Mary Dalrymple, Meladel Mistica and Jane Simpson ("A computational morphosyntactic analysis for the applicative -i in Indonesian"), Ash Asudeh ("Adjacency and locality: a constraint-based analysis of complementizer-adjacent extraction"), Annie Zaenen and Dick Crouch ("OBLs hobble computations"), Annette Hautli and Tracy Holloway King ("Adapting stochastic LFG input for semantics"), Michael Wescoat ("Udi person markers and lexical integrity") Ron Kaplan ("Deep natural language processing for web-scale search"), and Joan Bresnan ("The dynamics of syntax: implications for LFG").

And right after that, you could take the Eurostar back to the continent. The HPSG 2009 Conference will be in Göttingen, where the only Stanford voice will be Ivan Sag, giving a tutorial on Sign-Based Construction Grammar and a paper (with Paul Kay) on "Not as Hard a Problem to Solve as You Might Have Thought."

Finally, if you've still got energy at the end of August, head over to Copenhagen for the International Summer School in Grammaticalization. Elizabeth Traugott is one of the featured lecturers.

Conversion Factors

1. Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = 1 Eskimo Pi

2. 2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton

3. 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope

4. Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond

5. Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram

6. Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour = Knotfurlong

7. 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Sterling

8. Half of a large intestine = 1 semicolon

9. 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahurtz

10. Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower

11. Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line

12. 453.6 graham crackers = 1 pound cake

13. 1 million-million microphones = 1 megaphone

14. 2 million bicycles = 2 megacycles

15. 365.25 days = 1 unicycle

16. 2000 mockingbirds = 2 kilomockingbirds

17. 52 cards = 1 decacards

18. 1 kilogram of falling figs = 1 Fig Newton

19. 1000 milliliters of wet socks = 1 literhosen

20. 1 millionth of a fish = 1 microfiche

21. 1 trillion pins = 1 terrapin

22. 10 rations = 1 decoration

23. 100 rations = 1 C-ration

24. 2 monograms = 1 diagram

25 4 nickels = 2 paradigms

26. 2.4 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University Hospital = 1 IV League

27. 100 Senators = Not 1 decision

Check out the Marriage License (a video posted by Educate Against Prop 8).

And here's some funny absentee notes written by parents in South Africa.

New Stock Market Terminology

Oy Holy Night

For events farther in the future consult the Upcoming Events Page.

FRIDAY, 5 JUNE

• UCSC Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference

  Summer Kniveton, Stephanie Kramer, Heather Mahan, Brendan O'Donnell, and Marine Riou. The distinguished alum speaker is Nick LaCara.
  1:55pm, Room 210, Humanities One, UCSC

• End of the Year Party

  Socializing, kebabs, pita, and hummus!
  4:00pm, MJH 126

SUNDAY, 14 JUNE

• Commencement

UPCOMING EVENTS (always under construction)

LINGUISTIC DEPARTMENT EVENTS PAGE

Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading, or even subscribing, to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.

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