Congratulations to Stacy Lewis, whose talk, "The role of ambiguity avoidance in (near-)mergers", won the William Labov and Cambridge University Press Prize for Best Student Paper at NWAV. There were many excellent student papers at NWAV this year, so this is a particularly great honor!

By the way - the other prize, the Charles Ferguson Prize for Best Student Poster Presentation, went to our undergraduate alum Kara Becker, who's now a graduate student at NYU, for her joint talk with Amy Wong: "The short-a system of New York City English: An update". Sesquicongratulations to both!

Venezky Collection on Display: The late Richard Venezky, who received his Stanford PhD in linguistics in 1965, was a leading expert in the history of literacy and reading. Green Library currently is featuring a display based on his work. It includes a number of American primers and readers, including the New England Primer (1813), The Southern Primer (1860), the Elson-Runkel readers that first introduced Dick and Jane in 1930-31 and an 1868 primer written in the Mormon phonetic alphabet. more information HERE.

Happy Thanksgiving to all from the New Sesquipedalian Staff...

The recent Workshop on Nominal and Verbal Plurality held in Paris, CNRS included the following talks:

• Patricia Amaral and Chad Howe. Nominal and verbal plurality in the diachrony of the Portuguese Present Perfect.
• Martina Faller (U Manchester). Pluractionality in Cuzco Quechua
• Asya Pereltsvaig (Stanford University). Variations in Distributivity

And the anthropologists are in town this weekend (well, in SF - close enough), and the AAA program includes the following Stanford-related presentations:

• Rob Podesva (Georgetown U): Linking phonological variation to discourses of ethnicity and place in DC
• Sarah Benor (Hebrew Union College): Adult Language Socialization: Learning Strategies Among Newly Orthodox Jews
• Miyako Inoue (Anthropology): From the talking event to the talked event: the stenographer’s role at zadankai and Japan’s linguistic modernity
• Bonnie McElhinny (U. Toronto): Discussant, session on LANGUAGE IN DC: THE BIDIRECTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY AND PLACE
• Norma Mendoza-Denton (U Arizona): Stance triangulation among Latin American immigrants to Spain
• Mary Rose (Ohio State U) and Lauren Hall-Lew: Ranchers and farmers: Social meaning and linguistic variation in US rural communities
• Jennifer Roth-Gordon (U Arizona): Conversational Sampling, Race Trafficking, and the Invocation of the "Gueto" in Brazilian Hip Hop
• Qing Zhang (U Arizona): The Role of Television in the Reconfiguration of Indexical Order

Next week, Eve Clark and Herb Clark (Psychology) are off to Copenhagen, where they will encounter our old friend and department alum Florian Jaeger (U Rochester). They're all participating in The Danish Royal Society Symposium on Empirical Methods in Investigating Linguistic Perspective:

• Eve Clark: "Speaker perspective: Lexical and deictic choices in acquisition"
• Herb Clark: "Establishing perspectives with people in other locations, times, and worlds"
• Florian Jaeger: "What is 'complex' for speakers? Evidence that information density affects language production"

Last week's winner was Middy Pineda, who correctly identified the name `Ivan'. The powers that be are still looking for her to give her the appropriate prize... MMNG will continue after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Stunning Break with Last Eight Years

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off."

The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

"Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are, like, needing also," she said.

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

FRIDAY, 21 NOVEMBER

• WECOL Conference

  UC Davis

• SocioTea

  10:00am, MJH 126

• Speech Lunch

  No meeting this week

• UCSC Linguistics Colloquium

  Sharon Inkelas (Berkeley)
  An Inside-out Approach to Multiple Exponence in Morphology
  
  4:00pm, Silverman Conference Room, Stevenson College, UCSC

• Department Social

  Gourmet delights by the Social Committee
  
  4:00pm, in the Department Kitchen

SATURDAY, 22 NOVEMBER

• WECOL Conference

  UC Davis

SUNDAY, 23 NOVEMBER

• WECOL Conference

  UC Davis

MONDAY-SUNDAY, 24-30 NOVEMBER

• Thanksgiving Holiday

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, B-, and AB-. 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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