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 »