some-antics.com

Chris Barker and Polly Jacobson’s book Direct Compositionality is now available for pre-order!  There’s information about the book, links to where to order it and the introductory chapter here at semanticsarchive.net.  I’ve been waiting for this book to be published since before I’d started applying to graduate schools, and I’ve remained excited for its release into the world throughout all that’s happened.  I know this will probably make me seem more like a goofy fan-girl than anything, but YAY! :-D

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: misc, syntax, semantics, reading, linguistics :: No Comments »

“You’re a discusser,” Naomi tells me today after the Phonetics-Phonology Interface seminar, which is down to three people plus Stefan. And, in fact, this is true, and even though it’s not my particular area of expertise nor interest, I’m quite happy to have found a forum for discussing. Now, to round up some semantically-oriented folk!

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

Sad news for “old school” members of Flickr (pre- purchase by Yahoo!):

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based
Flickr sign in system.  From that point on, everyone will
have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

(If you’ve read other blogs of mine in the past, feel free to skip this entry…)

From Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent:

Take, say, sports — that’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it — you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about — [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in — they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.

You know, I remember in high school, already I was pretty old. I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? [laughter] I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know? [audience roars] I mean, they have nothing to do with me, I mean, why I am cheering for my team? It doesn’t mean any — it doesn’t make sense. But the point is, it does make sense: it’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on.

lulz.

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: misc :: 1 Comment »

I had this revelation on Monday about sets and type-shifting, and even though it’s sort of something that I should have understood already, I was quite tickled and pleased with this mini epiphany.

It just dawned upon me that type-shifting is much more than a mechanical backdoor trick around some type-mismatch problems. Type-shifting takes a set and creates a new set describing the original set. So in the standard example of lifting an NP of type e to the generalized quantifier type et, t, not only is this a neat trick for getting around things like conjunction reduction, but it is actually shedding light onto what assumptions are made upon accepting the notion of a set; taking the singleton set and making a set of properties which hold of the member of the singleton set shows that whenever we make a set of objects, we are cutting across certain properties which may vary among individual members of a set and saying that for our purposes, these differences are irrelevant. What matters are the specific properties we wish to highlight, which all the members of the set share. Considering this, once you establish a certain set, you can of course make a set whose central property concerns its interaction with the initial set.

I’m not sure if I’m really expressing myself with the clarity and precision that I’d like, but as I get more comfortable with this idea, I’ll post a more coherent description of what it is that I’d finally realized this week.

It’s clear to me now that the job of the semanticist is not just to develop clever formal tools to describe the way grammar composes meaning, but also to recognize what the philosophical implications of adopting certain tools are. Previously, I’d just thought of these tools as wrenches and hammers; now I realize that they are also nails and screws. I’d taken for granted these logical operations as purely mechanical devices, but I’m beginning to see how they also have very deep philosophical roots.

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: misc, semantics, philosophy :: 3 Comments »

While I was in California over the break, Celeste and I were in a supermarket in Garden Grove where there was a sticker in the window of the store telling shoppers not to buy tobacco products for minors.  The tagline was: “It’s not just wrong, it’s illegal.”   I leave it to you, Gentle Reader, to comment on why this tagline is so amusing.  :-)

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: misc :: 2 Comments »

From the introduction to Enderton’s “A Mathematical Introduction to Logic”:

This book does not propose to teach the reader how to think. The word ‘logic’ is sometimes used to refer to remedial thinking, but not by us. The reader already knows how to think. Here are some interesting concepts to think about.

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: logic, reading, philosophy :: No Comments »

Pierrehumbert, et al. (2000) Conceptual Foundations of Phonology as a Laboratory Science

for Stefan Benus’ Phonology-Phonetics Interface seminar. Very clear overview of “laboratory phonology”, its goals, methodology and theoretical assumptions.

emma :: Jan.29.2007 :: misc, reading, phonology, phonetics :: No Comments »

Last night I went to the Providence opening of David Lynch’s new film, Inland Empire, with a couple of pals from the department. I’ve seen a couple of other works by Lynch, but this was much zanier than either Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet. I couldn’t tell what I thought of the film throughout most of it. Most of it I was battling trying to figure out what was going on and why, wondering if at any moment Mr. Lynch might throw the audience some clue as to what vague sense of continuity there might be, and hoping that he would take this scene as his last scene. One thing is certain: Lynch knows his conventions and he knows them well enough to defy them like crazy (there’s a certain gripping and jarring sequence towards the end that plays so heavily on defying the standard conventions of filmmaking and also demonstrates Lynch’s beautiful creativity). Eventually (after three hours) the movie ends (the closing sequence very reminiscent to the closing sequence of 8 1/2 for me), the lights come up, and I still haven’t decided what I thought of the film, what the hell has been going on for the past three hours, and whether or not I liked what I just saw.

Then we left the theatre.

In Providence, Rhode Island.

And walked to the Volvo parked in four-degree weather.

It was only at that moment (about a minute and a half after the credits closed) did I realize what had been going on for those three hours. David Lynch had invited us into a world that, at the beginning looked quite like a world which we could inhabit, and slowly and cautiously took us into a much more surreal world, one that still closely mirrored ours, but was so unlike the world I was used to, that after three hours, the world I was used to seemed itself surreal in its own way. This is the gift that Lynch offers in each of his works, and in Inland Empire he so sneakily slips this into your hand that you don’t even notice it until it’s gone.

emma :: Jan.28.2007 :: misc :: 2 Comments »

On Friday, in Josh Schechter’s Advanced Deductive Logic class, Josh made a side remark about the misconception that logic is about how we humans do things rationally. It’s a good point, I think, because while some arguments may be logically sound and valid, human argumentation does not necessarily mirror “pure” logic (”pure” in quotations because I’m not really sure what I mean by that). A comic to explain this:

emma :: Jan.28.2007 :: misc :: 1 Comment »