• Congratulations to our own Arnold Zwicky, who was recently elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. This distinction was given in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of psychological science. It is also awarded in recognition of his status as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is quite an honor -- hats off to Arnold!

Arnold M. Zwicky: APS Fellow


• Recent grad David Yoshikazu Oshima, currently a visiting faculty at Arizona State University, has been awarded a prestigious, three-year JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Congratulations, David! [Now will he take it, or will he keep teaching in the US? - The Sesquipeditor]
• A warm welcome to our new department visitors:
  
  
  

  Patricia Amaral

  Patrícia Amaral is a PhD candidate coming from the Ohio State University and the University of Coimbra (Portugal). She is currently working on her dissertation The meaning of approximative adverbs: evidence from European Portuguese. Her research interests include the semantics of gradable predicates, event structure, semantics and pragmatics of polarity items, lexical semantics, and semantic change. Besides Linguistics she enjoys theater and photography.

  
  
  
  
  
  

  Eystein Dahl

  Eystein Dahl is a doctoral candidate in Sanskrit at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He has a background in Classical Studies, Philosophy, Indology and Comparative Indo-European Linguistics from the Universities of Oslo, Bonn, Cologne and Freiburg. In his current research project he investigates the diachronic development of the Vedic tense/aspect system.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Jan Strunk

  Jan Strunk is a PhD student from Bochum, Germany. He was here before in 2003/2004 and received an MA in linguistics from Stanford. His dissertation topic is relative clause extraposition and how it can efficiently be disambiguated and dealt with during parsing. Other interests include sentence boundary disambiguation, noun phrase syntax in general, and applying NLP techniques to help in the documentation of endangered languages. In his free time he likes reading, jogging, and playing soccer. He'll be here during the winter quarter to work on his thesis and to get some advice on it.



• Late night radio listeners out there in Sesquipiland (Sesquiland?, Sesquipedland?) may have caught this story on the NPR show Day to Day late Wednesday night. For those who missed it, the story reports on the recent meeting of the American Dialect Society and features an interview with Stanford alum Rob Podesva speaking about the paper Multiple features, multiple identities: A sociophonic profile of Condoleezza Rice, his joint work with Jason Brenier, Lauren Hall-Lew, Stacy Lewis, Patrick Callier, and Rebecca Starr (as reported in last week's rag). Maybe your civilian friends will start batting about the term `hyperstandard' (they might think it has to do with the WWW, however. (See http://www.nist.gov/itl/div894/ovrt/people/sressler/hyperStd/HS3Paper.fm.html.)
• Closer to home, the Stanford Daily's Katie Taylor has identified the top 10 Catchwords of the Literati:
  
  
  1. Juxtaposition
  2. Race/ethnicity
  3. Dichotomy
  4. Ironic
  5. Feminist
  6. Duality
  7. Subjective/objective
  8. Paradoxically
  9. Ubiquitous
  10. Iconoclasm
  Among other things, the words are important because, Taylor claims, `every title of every book that every Stanford professor has ever published actually contains one of these words.' [We note that `quantifier scope' is not on the list...]
• Undergraduates! - Want to publish your research? Then submit to SURJ! The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal (SURJ) is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed publication of research articles written by Stanford undergraduates. Now accepting research papers from ALL ACADEMIC FIELDS! Submission deadline for spring publication: February 2, 2007. To find out how to submit your article and get more info, visit: http://surj.stanford.edu
• The end of an era....Andrew Koontz-Garboden left the nest this week -- to take up a position as Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Raise your glass, toast him once more, and check out his new life and webpage here.
• Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, 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.
  

Another view of the Anaheim reunion

People are still talking about the Anaheim Alumni Reunion (and no one caught anyone in the act of doing anything this week.... AHEM!). Pictured here are KCat, CCat and Melanie... Bottoms up!

• Three men are sitting stiffly side by side on a long commercial flight. After they're airborne and the plane has leveled off, the man in the window seat abruptly says, distinctly and confidently, in a loud voice, `Admiral, United States Navy, retired. Married, two sons, both surgeons.'
  
  After a few minutes the man in the aisle seat states through a tight lipped smile, `Admiral, United States Coast Guard, retired. Married, two sons, both Judges.'
  
  After some thought, the fellow in the center seat decides to introduce himself. With a twinkle in his eye he proclaims, `Master Gunnery Sergeant, United States Marine Corps, retired. Never married, two sons, both Admirals.'
  
  
• [and marginally related]
  
  During training exercises, the lieutenant who was driving down a muddy back road encountered another jeep stuck in the mud with a red-faced colonel at the wheel.
  
  `Your jeep stuck, sir?', asked the lieutenant as he pulled alongside.
  
  `Nope', replied the colonel, coming over and handing him the keys, `Yours is.'
  
  
• [also on the margins:]
  
  Having just moved into his new office, a pompous, new colonel was sitting at his desk when an airman knocked on the door. Conscious of his new position, the colonel quickly picked up the phone, told the airman to enter, then said into the phone, `Yes, General, I'll be seeing him this afternoon and I'll pass along your message. In the meantime, thank you for your good wishes, sir.' Feeling as though he had sufficiently impressed the young enlisted man, he asked, `What do you want?'
  
  `Nothing important, sir,' the airman replied, `I'm just here to hook up your telephone.'
  

[Thanks to Susan Fischer]

• FRIDAY, 19 JANUARY

  • SocioLunch

    12:00. MJH 110 (aka the Ugly Dark Room)
    
    Bring your own lunch, as well as notes, handouts, fond memories from the LSA.
    

  • Linguistics Department Colloquium

    15:30pm. MJH 126
    
    Keren Rice (U. of Toronto)
    Place of articulation neutralization: evidence for universal phonological markedness?
    

  • Weekly Social

    17:00 in the department lounge. Gourmet delights from the Social Committee.
    
  
  
• Saturday, 20 JANUARY

  • The (Un)usual Events Fest

    All day in MJH 126
    
    
• MONDAY, 22 JANUARY
  

  • Phonetics and Phonology Forum

    12:00-12:00 in 26 Dwinelle (UC Berkeley)
    
    Erin Haynes:
    A Subcategorization Approach to Opacity and Non-suppletive Allomorphy in the Cupeño Habilitative Mood
    Anne Pycha: Gemination as Non-local Lengthening
    

  • Stanford Phonology Workshop

    14:00pm. MJH 126
    
    Organizational Meeting featuring tea and scones
  
  
• TUESDAY, 23 JANUARY
  

  • Syntax Workshop

    17:30pm. MJH 126
    
    Line Mikkelsen, with Michael Houser, Angela Strom-Weber, and Maziar Toosarvandani (University of California-Berkeley)
    Two VP-Anaphors in Danish (abstract)
  
  
• FRIDAY, 26 JANUARY

  • Weekly Social

    17:00 in the department lounge. Gourmet delights from the Social Committee.
    
  
  

• For local linguistic events, always consult the Department's event page, available RIGHT HERE
  
  
• Got broader interests? The New Sesquiped recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.
  
  
• What's happening at UC Santa Cruz? Find out HERE.
  
  
• What's going on at UC Berkeley? Check it out HERE.
  
  

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