Category Archives: Linguistics

Binding key combinations to specific input source languages in OS X

After 4.5 years of struggling with OS X’s input source menu, I have finally figured out how to bind key combinations to selection of specific input sources (read: English, traditional Chinese through Pinyin, Japanese Hiragana, …).  Here are the steps: Note the specific names of the input sources on the input menu you want to […]

A better way to get APA citation style in LaTeX

Earlier I posted on combining natbib and apacite to approximate APA citation style. Well, I became aware that this approach doesn’t handle the rule that in-text citations should be “AuthorA and AuthorB (year)” whereas parenthetical citations “(AuthorA & AuthorB, year)”. I can’t figure out how to get this to work while using natbib. So I’ve […]

Getting the longnamesfirst option to work with natbib in LaTeX

I publish in a number of journals that use the rules of APA style.  I prefer to write my papers in LaTeX, and to use BibTeX together natbib to manage citations and bibliographic references.  One of the rules of APA style says that the first citation of a bibliographic reference must be the “long” citation […]

Another good showing for UCSD at the LSA

The January 2010 LSA preliminary program is available online, and UC San Diego has another strong showing, with nine presentations overall.  This compares favorably with UC Davis (4), UCLA (5), and UC Santa Cruz (6) and we’re just behind MIT and Stanford (10 each), Maryland and Johns Hopkins (11), and UMass (12).  Once again UC […]

tipa, Sweave, and linguex heads-up

If you use LaTeX for linguistics paper writing, and use either the tipa package for IPA or the Sweave package for interleaving R code with LaTeX, and you also use the linguex package for formatting examples, you may occasionally encounter the problem of odd formatting of examples.  Just be sure to call both \usepackage{tipa} and […]

High-attachment garden path

Who says it doesn’t happen? First Black Mayor in City Known for Klan Killings I boggled… (http://nytimes.com/, 12:51am 22 May 2009)

UCSD well represented at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference!

The CUNY 2009 conference schedule came out a few days ago, and UCSD is pretty well represented among the talks (this is a single-track conference).  Here are some quick numbers: UCSD: 4 Rochester:4 MIT:2 Dundee:2 USC:2 Glasgow:2 Stanford: 2 MPI – Nijmegen: 2 UC Davis: 1 Wisconsin: 1 UMass: 1 UIUC: 1 Ohio State: 1 […]

A case of controversy

Stanley Fish, in his most recent column, “Memo to the Superdelegates: No Principles, Please“, said several highly controversial things, most notably that the Democratic primary process isn’t really democracy, or to the extent that it is, it’s the kind that the Founding Fathers feared, and the superdelegates should limit that democracy by voting politically rather […]

Extraposed relative clauses without “that” marking

I wondered whether this was possible. Well, it is: Unfortunately, he didn’t realize how firm the ground was he had his feet on. — To catch a thief, about 25 minutes into the movie (spoken by Mrs. Stevens)

Epic non-constituent coordination

Who says that X -> X Conj X???? Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. (From the New York Times, 13 January 2008, online here)