The syntax and semantics reading groups gather tomorrow (September 12), at 2:30 pm, in the department lounge, to plan for the semester. In the past, these student-run groups have led separate but overlapping lives. What does the future hold? A blissful interface?
[Thanks Aynat, Annahita, and Martin!]
The Cognitive Science Brownbag program will be active throughout the semester, with lots of talks that are of interest to linguists. For example, up first is Julie Van Dyke from Haskins Labs (September 17, 12:00-1:30 pm, Tobin 512b). The website has lots of information about this and future talks.
[Thanks Meg!]
The new McCarthy-Pater NSF grant Investigations in Optimality Theory: Typology, Learning, and Modeling held an organizational meeting on Wednesday (Sep 10). They hope to hold meetings regularly on Wednesdays, at 4:00 pm, in the Partee Room. Anyone aiming to work as an RA on the grant should attend these meetings, and they are open to the whole department as well.
A brief description of the project.
[Thanks Joe and John!]
UC Santa Cruz Linguistics is holding a graduate reunion conference, September 12-13. Chris Potts is giving a joint paper with Florian Schwarz called 'Expressives in the wild: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora' (associated paper). Chris is also a (part-of) Bargunnedytts, for whom the description theory of names is true.
The alumni conference got some press.
Elizabeth Hinkelman writes:
I just ran across a lovely piece of scriptwriting from the British sitcom The Vicar of Dibley, in which I can't believe it's not butter is used compositionally in variations embedding the product name. The lines are delivered convincingly by the actress Emma Chambers at the beginning of the episode 'Animals':
[Thanks Elizabeth!]
