Note to potential "friends" in the special LiveJournal sense in which "friend" has become a verb: I would like to know who you really are, especially if you'd like to be mutual friends. Please see the nice essay written on this topic by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) petrark here: http://petrark.livejournal.com/2690.html#cutid1, asking potential friends to let him know their identity: I agree with the sentiments expressed there. And getting in touch with me is not hard; my Live Journal profile includes my real website, and my website includes my e-mail address. Thanks!
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| 2008-04-06 12:39 |
| Signs of spring in Kazan last weekend |
| Public |
| Moscow |
 cheerful |
| Dvorak Piano Trio #4 "Dumky", Beaux Arts Trio |
| 2008, kazan, spring |
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I'm already late posting this - this week was too busy, and now spring is really here already. These are from March 28-30 in Kazan. 6 signs of spring:
1. Little kid drawing with chalk on the sidewalk
2. зяблик
3. девушки
4. грачи
5. велосипед
6. where all that's left of the snow is the well-trodden path
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Manfred Krifka will be in Moscow next week, and I'll probably have him for Wednesday late afternoon and evening. If there happened to be a concert that we'd both enjoy, I'd happily take him to one. I've looked at afisha.ru and vashdosug.ru and don't see anything that looks too promising. Kinds of things I think we'd like: either something very Russian (like Russian liturgical music performed in a Russian church, or Russian folk music if it's real, or any Russian classical music), or something like chamber music -- string quartet, trio, etc (my favorite instrument is the cello, and Manfred and his daughter have both been taking violin lessons for two years now) or early music. A concert by conservatory students would be fine if they're probably good. I don't think we want to hear a Russian military band (that's one choice that day), or any opera (nothing too 'big'), and not pop or jazz.
Oh, and we both have special affection for Czech music. Manfred's wife is Czech-American, and I have close ties to Prague and happy memories of many wonderful concerts in Prague with good friends.
It's not obligatory that we go to a concert, of course. If we don't, I can take him home to dinner, which would also be nice. But if someone happens to know of a nice concert on April 2, please let me know! (Does anyone know what's on then in the Malyj Zal of the conservatory? That's a spot I know and like.) And if you'd be interested in coming too and having a chance to get acquainted with Krifka (who is very nice!), let me know. (But "too" is presuppositional, and the presupposition isn't yet satisfied, so that's a conditional invitation ....)
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| 2008-03-23 12:34 |
| LINGUIST List Fund Drive |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| calm |
| Franck's Symphony in D Minor |
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Here's a repeat of an appeal that I just posted to the mosling list.
Dear friends, colleagues, and students in Moscow,
LINGUIST List is currently hosting its annual fund drive. The organization's needs are modest and the return on our contributions is significant. If you or your students have had any benefit from any of the many services of LINGUIST List – discussion forum, job listings, book announcements and reviews, calls for papers and conference programs, links to resources of many kinds on language and linguistics, and many other services – please consider making a contribution. LINGUIST List depends on a sizable staff of paid graduate students, and our annual contributions are necessary to help pay their assistantship salaries. (By the way, they welcome graduate students from around the world – I just discovered that there is currently one who graduated from Ilya Shatunovsky’s program at Dubna. So if you are interested in getting an M.A. in Linguistics at Eastern Michigan University and working for LINGUIST List while you’re there, go look at the section of their site on “Student Opportunities at LINGUIST” -- http://linguistlist.org/support/opportunities.html .) If you donate online using a credit card (http://linguistlist.org/donation/index.html ), you can name your university so that it becomes part of the “Graduate School Challenge” contest – MGU is already listed, but I don’t see RGGU yet. (Sorry, I credited my own gift to UMass! We came in second last year and the year before, beaten by Stanford both times, but well ahead of MIT!) If you’re in Moscow and you don’t have a VISA or Mastercard and want to contribute to LINGUIST List, I would be willing to help as an intermediary – if you can get cash to me (rubles or dollars or euros), I can then make a contribution with my credit card, and I’ll credit whatever university you wish in the Graduate School Challenge. (If your university is not yet in their menu list, I’ll ask them to add it.) Places you can find me: at RGGU on Tuesdays where I teach 12:15 – 3:30; at Pesetsky’s lecture at RGGU on April 1 at 5:30; at the 3rd Moscow Student Conference on Linguistics April 3-4 (MSCL-3: http://www.philol.msu.ru/~otipl/new/mscl), or at the workshop Formal Semantics in Moscow / Формальная семантика в Москве 4, Москва, ABBYY Software, April 5-6. If you bring cash to me, please also bring a piece of paper with your name, the amount of money, and the university that you’d like to “credit”. If you’d like a receipt, please print one out (Received from __[your name]___ on ___[date]_____, 2008, the following amount for a contribution to LINGUIST List: __[amount]___. Signed, _________________), and I’ll sign it. I read in an article about LINGUIST List written by Helen Aristar-Dry for GLOT International that although the readership of LINGUIST List is highly international, most of the contributions (though by far not all) during the fund drive are made by Americans. She supposes, probably correctly, that there are two main reasons for this: (i) Americans are more accustomed to providing public support for institutions they care about – National Public Radio stations depend in large part on individual contributions made during fund drives, for instance --, and (ii) people in other countries may not all be able to make payments in US currency or by credit card. I’m trying to do my part to help overcome both problems in Moscow – now please do yours!
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| 2008-03-16 23:16 |
| Jenufa -- a better libretto anywhere? |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| happy |
| none - I'm about to listen to the broadcast of a dogsled race in Alaska |
| jenufa, mariinsky, moscow, opera |
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Time out from working on the CD for my semantics course. I'm going to watch a sled dog race online. (Originally I was going to be in Alaska right now watching them live, but it didn't work out this year; I hope I'll be there at this time next year! My daughter-in-law says maybe it's just as well that it didn't work out this year -- she came down with the flu, did poorly in last weekend's races, and is only now beginning to feel better. But it would have been nice to be there to do some mothering!)
Anyway, in between getting lots of work done setting up the contents of the CDs and watching the races, I wanted to post a note to follow up on my earlier appeal for help in finding out about the opera Jenufa being performed in Moscow.
Thanks to help from ЖЖ friends, I did go to the opera Jenufa last night, together with mura_vey , and I'm very glad I did. Thanks to everyone who helped or tried to help, and thanks to mura_vey both for help and for the good company! One of the joys of retirement is doing homework for pleasurable occasions, so I "prepared" for the occasion the way I used to when I was a student -- I bought the opera on iTunes (well, when I was a student I would listen to it in a music library instead) and I found the libretto online, but in spite of trying every possible encoding, it would not show all the Czech characters correctly, and on my screen it substitutes the letter "u" for many different Czech letters that have diacritics, both consonants and vowels! Does anyone have a copy of the libretto in a good version (that is, where the Czech really looks like Czech!), either electronic or, if you live in Moscow so I could borrow it, paper? I know enough Czech so that I was mostly able to read the scrambled version, but I realized when I followed the Russian translation (posted electronically above the stage during the performance), that I had missed a number of details.
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I posted about my RGGU course earlier -- the crucial links and the current schedule are here -- and I just wanted to add a reminder that the rest of the semester will be devoted to topics in anaphora. I gave an introduction to issues in anaphora at the previous lecture, which was March 4, and that included a tentative schedule and overview of topics for most of the rest of the semester. The handout can be downloaded from the course website. This Tuesday and the next two weeks after that will be centered on the issues raised in Heim's dissertation, which include discourse anaphora, donkey anaphora, competing theories of indefiniteness and definiteness, the introduction of "tripartite structures" in the semantics of strong quantifiers like every, the similarities between anaphora and presupposition, and the beginnings of the dynamic approach to semantics, with "context change potential" the new basic semantic value for sentences.
Everyone is welcome (to both 'seminar', which meets at 12:15, and the 'lecture', which starts at 2pm); if you haven't been coming so far, I suggest that you download at least the March 4 handout in advance, and maybe let me know that you plan to come so I can make sure there will be enough handouts. Be warned that we meet (at least so far) in a rather small room (the main LaTyp office at RGGU), and you need a propusk to get in to RGGU.
I'm in the process of making new CDs for this year -- cumulative, with everything that was on my 2007 MGU semantics CD, which in turn contained everything that was on the cooperatively-produced 2005 MGU semantics CD, and this year with a lot of additions relating to semantics and syntax of anaphora. I may not have enough for everyone interested, but I'll be sure to make a couple of copies that can be kept at RGGU (and perhaps one for MGU) where they could be borrowed to copy. Many of the course readings and suggested readings exist online, but some of them are in very large files (e.g. Heim's dissertation, Buring's book On Binding, the Heim and Kratzer textbook, and various articles that were scanned to create pdf files), so it's convenient to have them on CD. I will have the CDs with me this Tuesday if all goes well.
I may as well use this occasion to say that if you have any favorite anaphora references in electronic format that I might not have or might not even know about, if you send them to me this evening (Sunday) or not too late tomorrow, together with bibliographic reference so I know what they are, I'll be glad to include them on the CD. You can get a partial idea of what I already plan to put on the CD by looking at the course website and at the handout to the March 4 lecture. I don't have very much in Russian -- offerings are welcome.
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| 2008-03-01 17:57 |
| lytdybr on Language Log |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| happy |
| Bach Cello Suite #1, Rostropovich |
| lytdybr |
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I just posted to Language Log about my discovery of what lytdybr means and where it came from. Thanks to everyone who made comments to my ЖЖ post about it last Monday.
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| 2008-02-25 16:36 |
| You learn something new every day ... |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| amused |
| Bach English Suite #5, Murray Perahia |
| lytdybr |
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I just found out what the tag "lytdybr" really means. Up until today I had only seen it on posts from mashaaa and I had invented an etymology of my own, based on my first association to "ly" being "love you", and thinking that "ybr" might be Yu. Br. I suppose that last is unlikely because only an English speaker would really think of "Y" as the first letter of "Yura", and there's no natural reason to use "Br" instead of "B" as the last initial. Anyway I could imagine Masha and Yura continents apart using such a tag as a friendly message. I had to make up something for the "td", and my guess was "love you to death" (that's positive in English, I hasten to add).
But then today I just saw the same tag on a post by sesili, and that was a big surprise and made my original hypothesis come crashing down. So then I googled and found a Wiktionary entry about it, which I found really interesting because I didn't even know about the CATEGORY of abbreviations based on typing on a QWERTY keyboard as if typing on a Cyrillic one. (For any readers who didn't already know, it's the word дневник, 'diary'.)
Are there some other standard Cyrillic > QWERTY abbreviations?
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Sometime a few weeks ago somewhere in Moscow I saw a billboard that said that the Mariinsky Theater was going to perform Janacek's opera Jenufa in Moscow sometime soon. My fuzzy memory says March 3, but I could be wrong. Just now I finally remembered to start looking for it online and find out details, but I can't find it. I guess I'm not as good at googling things in Russian as I am in English. (I couldn't find it on Афиша, I couldn't find it on the Mariinsky Theater's own site, though they talk about some other performances in Moscow, I couldn't find it by googling in English or Russian.)
Can anyone help me find out about it? And if it really does exist and if there are still tickets available, the follow-up question is going to be whether anyone would like to go with me, because Volodja doesn't like opera or concerts and I prefer going together with someone. But it's too early to ask that question, because first I have to find out if it's at a time when I can go and if there are tickets available. Help? Thanks!
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| 2008-02-20 23:44 |
| Kibrik on Kultura TV Thursday morning 10am |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| working |
| Respighi, the Hen |
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I just learned that excerpts from an interview with Aleksandr Kibrik will be shown at the beginning of the 10:00 AM hour (in the news) on the Kultura channel, in connection with it being "Native Language Day".
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| 2008-02-16 19:52 |
| My RGGU course will meet on TUESDAYS |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| relieved |
| Orlando Gibbons, The Silver Swan, Douglas Frank Chorale |
| semantics rggu teaching |
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Today the class decided on the revised time for my RGGU semantics course:
Lectures: Tuesdays, 14:00-15:30
Seminars: Tuesdays, 12:15-13:45 (BEFORE the lecture! That's because one member of the prime target audience, the RGGU 4th-year linguistics students, cannot make it to the 12:15-13:45 "para".)
A reminder: the website for the course, updated as we proceed, is HERE.
And perhaps not only those in the course might be interested in a document that is linked there, also updated as we go along, called "Links to Readings 2008", and it's HERE; it contains not only links to specific course-related readings but also some more generally useful semantics-related sources, and a bit of syntax. (Suggestions for more things to link there are always welcome.)
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| 2008-02-14 16:37 |
| Schedule uncertainties for my RGGU course |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| calm |
| some nice chamber music I don't know on the radio (online from Amherst) |
| rggu formalsemantics course |
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A note about my semantics course at RGGU this semester: it is scheduled for Saturdays, lecture 12:15 - 1:45 and seminar 2:00-3:30. But we are trying to get it changed to a weekday -- I don't like to teach on Saturday, and it's also bad for some of the students. If you were hoping to attend but couldn't come last Saturday and haven't been in contact with me, please send me an e-mail with your schedule. We'll try to decide on an alternative time when we meet this Saturday, and I've been collecting information from the participants that I know about.
The new time will be posted at RGGU LaTyp and also on my course website when it has been decided.
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| 2008-02-01 18:23 |
| My RGGU course starts Saturday Feb 9 |
| Public |
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I have found out that my RGGU course will meet on SATURDAYS, 12:15 - 3:30 (lecture plus seminar), starting Feb 9. (That was not my preference, and I'm unhappy that it conflicts with the Uspensky-Pentus seminar at MGU, but that's the time that has been assigned to my course.)
And I have set up the web page for the course with a preliminary schedule and with links to some of the readings. The web page is here:
http://people.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_2008/RGGU08_formal_semantics.htm
We are still at the sanatorium Valuevo where my internet access is not very good. Can someone please do me a favor and post this information at msk_semantics and at chomsky_ru? Thank you!
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| 2008-01-20 00:06 |
| My semantics course at RGGU this semester |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| cheerful |
| Schubert, Arpeggione Sonata, Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten |
| semantics rggu teaching |
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This is an informal preliminary announcement -- I'll make a formal one via RGGU soon. This semester I'll teach an introduction to formal semantics at RGGU. I don't know the schedule yet. The course will begin with the usual introduction to formal semantics and the lambda calculus as in past courses at MGU and RGGU. This year after the first several weeks of introductory material we'll focus on the topic of ANAPHORA, something I haven't concentrated on in past years. Topics will include bound variable anaphora vs 'coreferential' anaphora, pragmatic aspects of anaphora and deixis, similarities between nominal and temporal anaphora, syntax-semantics issues including the analysis of reflexive pronouns, plain pronouns, "null" pronouns; VP anaphora; strict vs sloppy identity. We will try to look at most of the issues from a cross-linguistic perspective, but I will need the help of the participants for that. We will also look at similarities between the 'lifespan' of discourse referents and the 'lifespan' of presuppositions. One foundational reading will be Irene Heim's dissertation, which offers a formalization of the notion of a 'discourse referent' introduced by an indefinite NP, and which treats definite NPs as anaphoric expressions. We'll also look at work by Bach and Partee, by Reinhart and Reuland, by Kamp, and many others. We may also look at some work on adjectival and adverbial anaphoric expressions like такой, так by Landman and Morzycki.
As usual, lectures, handouts, and the majority of the readings will be in English, but students can do assignments in Russian or English and discussion can be in any mixture of Russian and English. Handouts and most readings will be made available online.
Prospective participants and interested semanticists and syntacticians are very welcome to suggest topics related to anaphora to put onto the agenda.
My husband and I will be away at a sanatorium at Voluevo from Jan 20 to Feb 12, but Iwe will be reachable by e-mail or by cell phone (I'm not putting my number here, but some of you know it, and probably most of you know someone who knows it. The LaTyp helpers at RGGU know it. If classes start before Feb 12, I'll certainly come to class. But between now and Feb 12 my access to the internet will be limited and I won't be following ЖЖ as closely as usual.
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| 2008-01-11 13:13 |
| new photos uploaded to my Flickr site |
| Public |
| Moscow |
| cheerful |
| Borodin Polovtsian Dances |
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Yesterday I did some non-academic catching-up work, posting a lot more photos to my Flickr site.
Details and a couple of samples below the cut.
( Read more... )
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curious