Congratulations from everyone to Florian Jaeger (U. Rochester) and Neal Snider who were recent joint recipients of the Jerrold J. Katz Award, for the paper they presented at last year's CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, entitled "Implicit learning and syntactic persistence: Surprisal and cumulativity". Nice going, guys!

The Linguistlist Fund Drive has begun and, as many of you know, in past years our department has won the Grad School Challenge, with people affiliated with Stanford donating more to Linguistlist than any other university. Alas, we are in 44th place at the moment, well behind such generous contributors as Fluminense Federal University, the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and even -- yes, believe it, the National University of Shipbuilding. Help our department maintain its reputation for generosity. Donate to this important cause at: http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2008/gradschools/allschools.cfm. And make sure your contribution is accounted to Stanford!

This is the last newsletter of the quarter. The New Sesquipedalian will resume in April.

The innovative "African American Women's Language" conference organized by Sonja Lanehart at the University of Texas San Antonio, March 7-8, included several Stanford-related presentations:

• Alim, H. Samy (UCLA; PhD Educ Lx, Stanford 2003), "We just doin our sista thang": Styling African American Women's Language in Interaction
• De Bose, Charles (Cal State U-East Bay; PhD, Lx, Stanford 1975), Church lady talk: African American female language in/an the church
• Green, Lisa & Tracy Conner (U Mass. Amherst) [Conner is BA, Lx, & MA Sociology, Stanford 2007], Rhetorical markers in developing African American English-speaking girls language
• Kortenhoven, Andrea (Calvin College instructor; Stanford PhD Lx student), Pentecostal women testifyin
• Rickford, Angela E. (San Jose State U; PhD Educ, Stanford 1996), Six deep teaching strategies for engaging struggling K-12 students in literary and literacy development (and their relevance to female AfAm students)
• Rickford, John R. and Mackenzie Price (Lx, Stanford; Mackenzie is an undergraduate senior), Girlz II women: Foxy Boston and Tinky Gates revisited

And at a recent Kyoto workshop on "Inferential Mechanisms and their Linguistic Manifestations", we find two papers by Stanford folks:

• Cleo Condoravdi: "Free Choice and Uncertainty"
• Stefan Kaufmann: "Japanese Tenses and Temporal Connectives"

In addition, this week at USC, Arto Anttila gave a talk on "The role of prosody in constituent ordering".

Thanks to all of you who wrote in trying to identify last week's mystery linguist. We had one incorrect guess (James A. Fox) and ten entries correctly identifying the young fieldworker as Paul Kiparsky. Most of these guessers may have cheated, however, since it seems that Paul discussed his early fieldwork adventures in a class last year... But in any case, the first correct guess was by Anubha Kothari, who wins an edible prize. This week's (famous) mystery linguist is shown here giving a Forum Lecture at the 1966 UCLA Linguistic Institute.


Who is this linguist?
The first correct guess sent to sesquip@gmail.com wins a prize.

Disorder in the American Courts Re-Visited

These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.



ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS : Gucci sweats and Reeboks.



ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?



ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!



ATTORNEY: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
WITNESS: We both do.
ATTORNEY: Voodoo?
WITNESS: We do.
ATTORNEY: You do?
WITNESS: Yes, voodoo.



ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?



ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: Uh, he's twenty-one.



ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shittin' me?



ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Uh.... I was gettin' laid!



ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Are you shittin' me? Your Honour, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?



ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Now whose death do you suppose terminated it?



ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Guess.



ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.



ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All my autopsies are performed on dead people. Would you like to rephrase that?



ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.



ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy on him!



ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Huh....are you qualified to ask that question?



And the best for last:

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

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

• FRIDAY, 14 MARCH

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

    • Kent Bach (San Francisco State University)
      "Relatively Speaking"
      9:00am, 90-92Q
    • Isidora Stojanovic (Jean Nicod Institute)
      "Semantic Content and De Se Assertion"
      1:00pm, 90-92Q

  • Ninth Annual Semfest

    Sponsored by the Construction of Meaning Workshop.
    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)
• MONDAY, 17 MARCH

  • Berkeley Phonetics and Phonology Phorum

    Rosemary Orr (ICSI Speech Group)
    "A human benchmark for language recognition"
    12:00pm, 46 Dwinelle, UC Berkeley

  • Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium

    Joseph Sabbagh
    "Predicate Initial and Predicate Final Word Order in Tagalog"
    4:00pm, 182 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
• FRIDAY, 21 MARCH

  • Falam Fest (Berkeley)

    Presentation of research on Falam (Kuki-Chin; Tibeto-Burman) currently being conducted in collaboration with Ni Luai Thang and Ngun Thla Dim
    3:00-7:00pm, 1229 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley




• 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-, O+, A-, A+, B-, 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.