This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics:
The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English by Tony Velasquez
on Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:00am-11:15am, in Wallenberg Hall, Room 124. Committee: Arto Anttila (advisor), Robert Podesva, Dan Jurafsky, Katherine Hilton, and Tanya M. Luhrmann (Professor of Anthropology serving as University Chair); the format for this open part of the oral exam is a 30-45 minute talk by the PhD candidate followed by questions from those attending, for a total of no more than 75 minutes.
The abstract, from which you will see where I got the title of this posting (though, because I am the sort of person I am, the title is also a playful indirect allusion to several dirty jokes; jokey notes to come below):
A number of factors influence the duration of words. Among these, syntactic structure and informativeness are two which, through their effects on the durational patterns of words, offer clues to speech production and the processes speakers engage in when varying word duration. In this talk, I will elaborate on the systematic differences between information computed online and that which is stored for later retrieval, and detail how the latter but not the former interacts with durational patterns of words in a way similar to syntactic structure. The presentation connects the predictions of large language models with those made by more traditional, surface-level features found in the linguistics literature and with the predictions of a classic algorithm for determining prominence from syntactic structure, and ultimately offers a more detailed picture of the relationship of syntax and information with the prosodic realization of utterances in spontaneous spoken English.
TV on this blog. He has appeared twice so far, the second time in conjunction with the work of Tanya Luhrmann.
— on 10/14/25 in the posting “… that I am precious to them”:
On Friday, for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Stanford Linguistics Department, it look the complex labors of four graduate students — Melissa Cronin, Tony Velasquez, Büşra Marşan, and Jonathan WuWong, cheers for you guys! — to get me there by 4 and back to my house later. And there were far too many people there for me to greet more than a few, but that was sweet, and then I realized that I would almost surely never see the out-of-town visitors again in my life, and probably few of the Stanford people, and that was sorrowful.
— on 11/10/25 in the posting “Gods and tables”, quoting e-mail from TV on 11/8:
your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.
how far? / how long?
— first, in my 12/18/16 posting “The Yule log”:
The Old Log Inn joke. A joke that’s been around for a long time — since Middle English, for all I know — has a lost traveler stopping to ask his way of a couple in the midst of making love (a man and a woman in some versions, two men in another). “How far is the Old Log Inn?”, the traveler asks, and gets beaten up for his query.
— then an assortment of dirty jokes in which someone is moved to ask of some object How long is it?, eliciting a response like That’s a personal question / That’s none of your goddam business.
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