In the Spring quarter, Elizabeth Traugott will be a Visiting Professor in the Departments of English and Linguistics, Stockholm University, where she will teach a course on constructionalization.

Can the direction your baby faces in his/her stroller affect his/her language development? Maybe so, according to the New York Times. Read about it here.

Paul Kiparsky just got back from The Seventh GLOW in Asia, where he gave an invited talk on "Lexicalization as non-exemplar-based analogy: the origin of dvandva compounds".

Bruno Estigarribia gave a talk at the North Carolina State Brown Bag on March 9th, titled "Variation and The Task of Learning Language".

Elizabeth Traugott will given a plenary talk on "The development of information-packaging formulae from the perspectives of grammaticalization and constructionalization" at the Symposium on Formulaic Language, March 19th, Växjö University, Sweden.

And coming up at the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, to be held March 26-29, 2009 at the University of Arizona, we have:

• Anaphoric direct objects in spoken European Portuguese: Variation, topicality and cross-dialectal comparison
  -Scott Schwenter (The Ohio State University) & Gláucia Silva (Dartmouth)
• Variation in Spanish clitic placement: the persistence of pragmatic factors
  -Rena Torres Cacoullos & Scott Schwenter (The Ohio State University)
• Detours along the perfect pathway
  -Patricia Amaral & Chad Howe
• The PP and Dative Alternation in Spanish: Syntax or Semantics?
  - John Beavers & Chiyo Nishida (University of Texas - Austin)

The field has lost a great researcher: S.-Y. Kuroda (1934-2009).
A tribute to Yuki's life will take place at UCSD on March 17, 4:30-7:30 PM. More information is available at the UCSD linguistics website.

Olga Delivers!

It's a boy - born to Olga and Giulio on March 1 around 10:15pm! Everyone's doing just fine!


Daniele Caviglia (4 kg, 56 cm)

Finnish humor is back this week with this video teaching you to learn finnish pronunication in less than 10 minutes...
Great stuff here....

Jewish Haikus

Lacking fins or tail
the gefilte fish swims with
great difficulty.

On Passover we
opened the door for Elijah.
Now our cat is gone.

After the warm rain
the sweet smell of camellias.
Did you wipe your feet?

Her lips near my ear,
Aunt Sadie whispers the name
of her friend's disease.

Today I am a man.
Tomorrow I will return
to the seventh grade.

Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she sighs softly.
But her son is forty.

The sparkling blue sea
reminds me to wait an hour
after my sandwich.

Like a bonsai tree,
is your terrible posture
at my dinner table.

Jews on safari --
map, compass, elephant gun,
hard sucking candies.

The same kimono
the top geishas are wearing:
I got it at Loehmann's.

The shivah visit:
so sorry about your loss.
Now back to my problems.

Mom, please! There is
no need to put that dinner roll
in your pocketbook.

Seven-foot Jews in
the NBA slam-dunking!
My alarm clock rings.

Sorry I'm not home
to take your call. At the tone
please state your bad news.

Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I've done?

Today, mild shvitzing.
Tomorrow, so hot you'll plotz.
Five-day forecast: feh

Yenta. Shmeer. Gevalt.
Shlemiel. Shlimazl. Meshuganah
Oy! To be fluent!

Quietly murmured
at Yom Kippur services,
'Yanks 5, Red Sox 3.'

A lovely nose ring,
excuse me while I put my
head in the oven.

Hard to tell under the lights.
White Yarmulke or
male-pattern baldness.

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

FRIDAY-SATURDAY, 13-14 MARCH

• 10th Annual Semantics Fest

  "The Construction of Meaning"
  All Day, Cordura 100

MONDAY, 16 MARCH

• Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium

  Judith Tonhauser (The Ohio State University)
  "Realis reference by paradigmatic blocking"
  4:00 to 5:30pm, Dwinelle 182, UC Berkeley

MONDAY, 30 MARCH

• Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium

  Bob Port (Indiana)
  TBA
  TBA, Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

TUESDAY, 31 MARCH

• Spring Quarter starts

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?

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of types O-, A-. For an appointment, visit http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. And the Blood Center recently got a new bloodmobile. Check it out HERE

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