Bienvenus/Willkommen/Svagat! to some more department visitors, whose research interests are described below:

I am Adams Bodomo, originally from Ghana, and currently Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong, School of Humanities, Linguistics section. I am interested in morphology, syntax, semantics and their interfaces. I have worked on phenomena like serial verbs, complex predicates, ideophones, nominalization, tone and noun classes in languages such as Dagaare, Akan, English, French, Norwegian, Cantonese and Zhuang. I am currently on sabbatical leave here as a Visiting Scholar, working with Arto Anttila on aspects of the Dagaare language, especially tone and its interaction with morphology. I also hope to work with other linguists here on some of the above topics.


I come from Freiburg in Southwestern Germany, a small town that has corpus linguists and the Black Forest. It is also the sunniest city in Germany, even if Munich says otherwise. In my postdoctoral research here I am looking at variation among local and Caribbean language resources in the speech of Jamaican immigrants in North America.


I joined the department last February, working as a postdoc with Dan Jurafsky. A week before that, I received my PhD in computer science from Columbia University, where I worked with Kathy Mckeown on multi-document summarization. I am in the lucky situation where I know what the future holds for me - after I complete my stay at Stanford, I will join the CS faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. I grew up in Bulgaria and I hope some day I will be able to do some linguistic work with my native language, something I've never had the opportunity to do up to now.


I'm visiting from Korea and received my PhD in Linguistics from Kyungpook National University in 2005. My research is in the area of SLA, Second/Foreign Language Teaching and Learning and has been focusing on the effects of learner proficiency and learner-learner dyadic interaction in L2 learning. I am currently in the process of transcribing audiotaped recordings to investigate the workings of learner interaction from the perspective of sociocultural theory.

• Mary Dalrymple has been promoted to Professor at Oxford University!
  
  [Editor's Note: Promotion to Professor in the UK is an even bigger achievement in the UK than in the US - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lecturer.]
  
  
• Melanie Levin, our former Student Services Coordinator, has just accepted a job as the Student Affairs Officer in the UCLA Linguistics Department. Who'da' thunk?!
  
  
• Julie Sweetland has just started a new job working for `a fantastic nonprofit that does professional development for teachers (and does it well)'. Read about it HERE.

Although a few of us will have to miss today's Social because of a CSLI/H* retreat, it's sure to be outstanding, given how much time the Social Committee has been working on planning the food for this event. In this surreptitious photo, they were caught by our reporter Gretchen in the midst of yet another of their 7-hour marathon meetings. Yumm... Can't wait. (no pressure; no pressure...)

Subject: Re: Announcing the New Sesquipedalian
From: Kyle Wohlmut
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 10:57:57 +0200
To: "Ivan A. Sag"

Hey Ivan,
There's a blast from the past :-) great to see that that famous name lives on... I might just have to contribute something now!
Hope you're well, say hi to all,
K.

[Editor's Note: Kyle Wohlmut, musician extraordinaire, was our department receptionist in the 1990s. He created the Sesquipedalian and produced it on a weekly basis for several years. He now lives in the Netherlands. Sesquip had no idea he was still on the linguists list...]

• MONDAY, 2 OCTOBER
  
  Stanford Phonology Workshop
  14:15. MJH Room 126
  Arto Anttila
  Gradient Phonotactics in Optimality Theory
  
  
• TUESDAY, 3 OCTOBER
  
  Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
  12:00. 3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
  J. L. McClelland (Psychology and MBC, Stanford)
  Graded constraints in English word forms
  
  Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop: "The Construction of Meaning"
  14:15pm. MJH Rm. 126
  Andrew Koontz-Garboden (Stanford University)
  Monotonicity at the lexical semantics-morphosyntax interface
  This is a practice for a talk to be presented at NELS. A long abstract may be found HERE.
  
  
• WEDNESDAY, 4 OCTOBER
  
  Developmental Brownbag Lunch Series (Psychology)
  12:00. Jordan Hall (Bldg. 420), Room 102
  Jennifer Winters and Chia-wa Yeh (Stanford Psychology)
  Introduction to research at Bing Nursery School
  
  NLaSP (Natural Language and Speech Processing) Colloquium
  16:15-17:30. Bldg. 200, Room 305
  Yi Zhang (UC Santa Cruz)
  Beyond Search: Proactive Document Recommendation With Bayesian Graphical Models
  
  SLSG (Statistical Learning Study Group) Meeting
  17:30. MJH Rm. 126
  Sharon Goldwater
  Word Segmentation and the Use of Statistical Learning in Language.
  
  
• THURSDAY, 5 OCTOBER
  
  CSLI CogLunch
  12:00. Cordura Hall 100
  Amy Perfors (MIT)
  Poverty of the Stimulus: A Rational Approach
  
  SPLaT (Stanford Psychology of Language Tea)
  17:15-18:30. MJH Room 126
  Michael Ramscar (Psychology)
  Pavlovian linguistics: the predictive nature of symbolic learning
  
  
• FRIDAY, 6 OCTOBER
  
  Speech Lunch
  First meeting of the year
  12:00-13:00 in the Phonetics Lab (Bldg. 420 basement).
  (Try to arrive a couple minutes early to avoid the long noon line at the Thai Cafe).
  
  Logical Methods in the Humanities
  12:00. Bldg. 90, room 92Q
  John McCarthy (Stanford Computer Science)
  Formalizing common sense in mathematical logic
  
  [Editor's Note (for you newbies): This is not John McCarthy the UMass phonologist. This is the legendary John McCarthy who invented the LISP programming language and who coined the term Artifical Intelligence in 1956 (among other accomplishments).]
  
  

• The first Syntax Lunch will be on Tuesday, October 10 at 12:00 Save the date and read the Sesquipedalian for more details...
  
  
• Masha Polinsky (Harvard University) will be speaking at UC Santa Cruz on Monday, October 9.
  
  
• 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.
  
  

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? Contribute something at the top of this page or write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.