some-antics.com

Steve Pinker was on the Colbert Report!  Almost as great as Chomsky on Ali G.

(Thanks, Simon.)

emma :: Feb.28.2007 :: misc, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

Simon: see this is almost entirely for my benefit ;-)

Hmm. Define z-love.

emma :: Feb.28.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

Recent discussion from the Semantics Reading Group: (We’re reading Kratzer’s unpublished manuscript The Event Argument.)

4000 passengers were served 1000 gin & tonics*.

Are the passengers sharing drinks in this sentence? That is, is it required that each of 4000 passengers received a drink? And now consider the following:

4000 passengers consumed 1000 gin & tonics.

And now:

1000 gin & tonics were served to 4000 passengers.

*(Tonic water and quinine therein courtesy of W.V. Quine, of course***.)
**(Title totally irrelevant.)
***(Don’t you dare believe anything Simon says about Quine.)

emma :: Feb.28.2007 :: misc, semantics :: 8 Comments »

And he has a blog.

(The proprietor has been so kind as to make no judgments – as far as I know – about this proprietor’s ability to understand the thoughts of a philosopher.  For the record, this proprietor, too, made no assumptions about the lack of intelligence of her imp’s brother.  She assumed, actually, quite the opposite, if you really must know.)

emma :: Feb.26.2007 :: misc, philosophy :: 2 Comments »

I thought I’d just make a real post in response to Lance’s comment on my last post to clarify on the “fancy generalized quantifier” type (name courtesy of Polly :-P).

[[every boy who left who came before John]] = λE(e,t)[λM(e,t)[ ∀x [(left’(x) & came’(x) & E(x) & boy’(x)) -> M(x)]]]

The idea here is that E is a domain restriction argument, which can be filled either by some contextually salient restriction or by a relative clause (or perhaps other restrictions, such as exceptives).  Kai discusses motivations for domain restrictions in his thesis (in Section 2.2.2) and associates the restriction with the quantifier.  If you pass up that argument to the whole GQ, it gives the relative clause a place to contribute to the whole meaning of the GQ.  (This isn’t a totally new idea; Bach & Cooper 1978 have this extra argument in their approach to relative clauses.)  My idea is that if there is always a domain restriction argument in the GQ, we can have the relative clause fill that spot – but, we’ll need to pass up a new argument slot once we combine the GQ with the RC, not just for stacking but to leave that open for any contextually salient domain restrictions.

emma :: Feb.24.2007 :: misc, semantics, linguistics :: 2 Comments »

Work on relative clauses is coming along nicely. There’s a link on the antics part of the site to where I’m keeping all my notes on the matter, which should be updated every week or so around Monday. (Eventually, I’ll make a directory for all of my older stuff, as well.) The latest is a patch to my initial stab at embedding a domain restriction argument in the quantifier phrase. I’d flopped around the arguments so that the type of the relativized NP was quite silly looking and posed a problem to RC stacking. A sneak peek at where I’m at now (types are in parens because I’m too lazy to escape the angle brackets :-P):

[[every boy who left who came before John]] = λE(e,t)[λM(e,t)[ ∀x [(left’(x) & came’(x) & E(x) & boy’(x)) -> M(x)]]]

emma :: Feb.20.2007 :: misc, semantics, linguistics :: 3 Comments »

Upon saying that to Simon tonight (hey, look! your first mention in my blog! ;-P), I remembered one of the more amusing misunderstandings I had while I was in Berlin.  During my first week in Berlin, I dined often at the numerous döner kebab imbisses in the city.  And often when ordering, I would be asked if I would like Schafskäse (that’s Schaf [sheep] + Käse [cheese]) on my falafel wrap.  I kept mishearing Schlafskäse (Schlaf [sleep]).  Then I realized that I must have been getting that wrong, so I thought OHHH, it must be Schaffskäse (schaff as in schaffen [to achieve]).  Eventually I realized what was going on and felt quite sheepishly silly (pun most certainly intended).

emma :: Feb.16.2007 :: misc :: 4 Comments »

Celeste: What did you talk about?
Emma Cunningham: Ummmmm lots of stuff! Semantics, etc.

emma :: Feb.11.2007 :: misc, semantics :: No Comments »

Kai von Fintel has a post on his blog (under Geek) about how he’s removed the Dock in his OS X setup.

Also, this is less necessary if you’re running OS 10.4 with Spotlight, but I’ve been using LaunchBar since I got my first PowerBook, and I love it.  I actually think it’s much nicer than Spotlight (and much more customizable), so I recommend it even if you have Tiger.

(LaunchBar is shareware, so if you try it out and are eager to jump aboard, let me know and I can give you a registration key.  Also, if you’re on a PC, LaunchBar-like applications are available to you, too.  I’d definitely suggest getting one for PC users.)

emma :: Feb.09.2007 :: misc, nerdiness :: 2 Comments »

I finally got the iSight mount kit (to replace the mounts that I’d gotten with my iSight but lost somehow in my first journey from LA to Providence) today. Before this, my iSight was either often sitting in a corner of my desk or mounted to my laserjet with some goofy double-sided mounting tape. So YAY! Now everyone can see me and my green room :-P

(I got my iSight when I got my first PowerBook, way back in the summer of 2004. Apparently Apple doesn’t sell iSights anymore! Which makes some sense since they come built into almost every computer they make now, but I imagine it sucks quite a bit if you had gotten one of the pre-iSight Apples and never got one because you figured Well, I don’t know anyone else with a webcam who I could videochat with and now can’t get an iSight.)

emma :: Feb.09.2007 :: misc, nerdiness :: No Comments »