Whew. That was intense. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Open House, especially Diane Jakobowski, who organized it all so amazingly well! Don't forget the Sem Fest next Friday!

No other subject in the university is as important as fieldwork... So says the Humanities Express of The Ohio State University. And they cite alums Mary Rose and Judith Tonhauser in making the argument. Check it out (with pictures) HERE.

Luc Baronian and his wife Stephanie Michelet are happy to announce that Cael Vasken Michelet Baronian was born on February 26. Everything is going well, he's happy, healthy and very calm... Sesquifelicitations to the whole Baronian-Michelet family!


Bienvenu Cael Vasken Michelet Baronian!

And let's not forget this summer's ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference, hosted by The Ohio State University, where a number of the department's computational types will be presenting, videlicet:

• Efficient, Feature-based, Conditional Random Field Parsing
  Jenny Finkel, Alex Kleeman, and Christopher Manning
• Finding Contradictions in Text
  Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Anna Rafferty, and Christopher Manning
• Which words are hard to recognize? Prosodic, lexical, and disfluency factors that increase ASR error rates
  Sharon Goldwater, Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning
• Unsupervised Learning of Narratives
  Nathanael Chambers and Dan Jurafsky

Dear readers:

Sesquipedigratitude to those few of you bold enough to take a stab at identifying last week's mystery linguist. Once again, the favorite wrong guess was `Tom Wasow'. But this week, we have a winner. The first person writing in with the correct identification was phonologist and vibraphonist extraordinaire Stephanie Shih, who apparently had a sudden photosynthetic epiphany in the middle of her Wednesday afternoon syntax class... The correct answer is, believe it or not...... Stanley Peters. Stephanie wins a double prize!

We'll have more pictures from the meetings of the UCLA English Syntax Project in the weeks to come. But not yet. This week's picture was taken in Bloomington, Indiana in 1952. On the right is Tom Many Guns (Listen to a couple of his musical recordings at the Smithsonian Global Sound website). On the left is our mystery linguist, someone affiliated with our department, who started his fieldwork career at a very early age. The first correct answer sent to sesquip@gmail.com wins a prize.


Who is this linguist?

OK folks. Last week's name was Liz, you know: [lIz]. That was easy and the winners were: Neal Snider and Lis Norcliffe! Let's try another one...

The first person who finds Meghan and (in person) identifies the right (first) name (of a department member) wins a `chocolate prize'.


Whose name is this?

NEW BUSH COINS (Change For The Better)

Daffy Definitions

• Bustard -- n., A very rude Metrobus driver.
• Debentures -- n., false teeth bought on credit.
• Nincompoop -- n., the military command responsible for battlefield sanitation.
• Ineffable -- adj., describes someone you absolutely cannot swear in front of, such as the Queen Mum, or Martha Stewart.
• Pontificate -- n., a document given to each graduating pope.
• Discussion -- n., a Frisbee-related head injury.
• Internet -- n., the web of interns in which Ken Starr has tried to snare Bill Clinton.
• Polarize -- n., a very cold look.
• Brisket -- n., a straw container for a mohel's instruments.
• Mausoleum -- n., floor covering used in crypts.
• Cursive -- adj., sort of cursing, i.e., "Oh, fiddlesticks," or "H-E-double toothpicks."
• Buttress -- n., a long strand of derriere hair.
• Lobster -- n., a slick-talking, oily, obnoxious person who represents special interest groups on Capitol Hill
• Foundling -- n., an apprehended child molester.
• Shadow -- n., a fish whose husband has died.
• Macadam -- n., the first man on Earth, according to the Celtic bible.
• Marionettes -- n., residents of Washington who have been jerked around by the mayor.

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

• FRIDAY, 7 MARCH

  • Representation Roundtable

    Abstraction at different levels of linguistic representation (the `grain size' problem)
    1:15-2:15 PM, ExL Lab
    

  • Linguistics at Santa Cruz Conference

    2:25pm-4:45pm, Stevenson Fireside Lounge, UCSC

  • Weekly Social!

    4:00 in the department lounge
    
• SATURDAY, 8 MARCH

  • Linguistics at Santa Cruz Conference

    10:00am-2:00pm, Stevenson Fireside Lounge, UCSC
• MONDAY, 10 MARCH

  • Berkeley Phonetics and Phonology Forum

    Rachelle Waksler (San Francisco State University), Linda Wheeldon (Birmingham University), and Jenny Wing (Birmingham University
    "Feature specification and underspecification in the mental lexicon"
    
    12:00-1:00pm, 46 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • Graduate Research Grant Information Session

    Information session for the VPGE Dissertation Research Opportunity Fund and the H&S Graduate Research Opportunity (GRO) Award
    
    
    • Chris Golde (Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Education)
    • Joseph Brown (Assistant Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Studies and Diversity Programs for H&S)
    • Shelly Coughlan (Anthropology Department) on field research proposals
    1:00pm, MJH 462 (Terrace Room)

  • Phonology Workshop

    Matthew Adams
    "Variation and Optimization in the English Comparative"
    
    3:15pm, MJH, Chair's Office
• TUESDAY, 11 MARCH

  • NLP Reading Group

    CANCELLED
• WEDNESDAY, 12 MARCH

  • Workshop on Meaning, Context, and Communication: A Paris-Stanford Interchange

    9:30-11:30; 1-5 in Tresidder Union, Sequoia Room

  • NLaSP Colloquium

    Liang Huang (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Forest-based Search Algorithms in Parsing and Machine Translation"
    4:00pm, Gates 104
• THURSDAY, 12 MARCH

  • Workshop on Meaning, Context, and Communication: A Paris-Stanford Interchange

    9:30-11:30; 1-5 in Tresidder Union, Sequoia Room

  • SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum

    Aurelie Beaumel
    "Placebo effects, price, and consumption utility: How price can change the taste of wine"
    4:15, 380-380C (Math Corner)

  • The Clara Sumpf Yiddish Lecture Series

    Dan Miron (Columbia)
    "Breathing Through Both Nostrils? Mendele Moicher Sforim's Yiddish/Hebrew Bilingualism and its Cultural Significance (in English)"
    8:00pm, Stanford Humanities Center
    
• FRIDAY, 14 MARCH

  • Workshop on Meaning, Context, and Communication: A Paris-Stanford Interchange

    9:00-11:00; 1-3 in 90, 92Q

  • Ninth Annual Semfest

    "Construction of Meaning"
    All day, MJH 126
    

  • Morphosyntactic Changes in Middle Chinese Symposium

    All day, Okimoto Conference Room, Encina Hall East, 3rd Floor
    (Most presentations will be given in Chinese)
• SATURDAY, 15 MARCH

  • Morphosyntactic Changes in Middle Chinese Symposium

    8:30am-1:30pm, 250-252A, 2nd Floor
    (Most presentations will be given in English)




• 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.
• WHAT'S HAPPENING AT UC SANTA CRUZ?
  
• WHAT'S GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY?
  
• HOW ABOUT MIT? UMass Amherst? U Chicago? Rutgers?

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of as well as a shortage of O, A+, and AB-. For an appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. The Blood Center is also raising money for a new bloodmobile.

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.