some-antics.com

How to get subjects

From Price et al. 1991 “The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation”:

Subjects were rewarded with pizza and soft drinks after the session. The subjects were all native speakers of American English, naive with respect to the purpose of the experiments. Most were engineering students, recruited through flyers advertising the free pizza. For the second two speakers, F3A and M1B, to attract more subjects, we increased the incentive by offering an addition $50 prize to the person who scored highest on the task.

emma :: Apr.30.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

“Hey, you’re a true Rhode Islander now”

I was just chatting with Val, my officemate Justin’s wife, and we were talking about sushi. I asked her if she had ever been to Ran Zan, one of the first restaurants that I’d ever visited in Providence. She asked where it was and I said, “It’s where Hope & Blackstone converge, next to where Maximillian’s used to be.” Justin then noted that I had just referred to the location of a place with respect to a landmark that no longer existed, as Rhode Islanders tend to do so often. (I’ve heard “where the old Shell station used to be” so often that I wish I had been here while it still had existed.)

emma :: Apr.27.2007 :: misc :: 1 Comment »

But!

While poking around on the web, I came across Kai von Fintel’s seminar notes on exceptives â€“ great stuff! In addition to some more great resources on other work being done on exceptives (especially the Lappin (1996) paper which I was totally unaware of), Kai has a nice proposal at the end of the notes (pp. 5-8) for an NP-level approach to the exceptives. The idea is that the exceptives take the entire NP as its argument, but the NP is not your regular et,t GQ â€“ it’s an et,ett with an extra argument slot in it! Yup! This fits in very nicely, I think, with the NP-S view of things. The pdf here is a short overview of Kai’s proposal, how it fits in with the NP-S analysis, and how to make Kai’s proposal variable-free using the tools given by the NP-S approach :-P

I’ve yet to work out the more complex examples, but I think they will fall out pretty straightforwardly.

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

Glamour grammar

From the OED, the etymology of glamour:

[Originally Sc., introduced into the literary language by Scott. A corrupt form of GRAMMAR; for the sense cf. GRAMARYE (and F. grimoire), and for the form GLOMERY.]
1. Magic, enchantment, spell; esp. in the phrase to cast the glamour over one.

Gramarye:
1. Grammar; learning in general. Obs.
2. Occult learning, magic, necromancy. Revived in literary use by Scott.

So, you see, grammar is glamorous.

emma :: Apr.22.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

“Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore.”

As promised from my last post, here’s the Daily Show’s coverage of the story about Seattle requiring any showing of “An Inconvenient Truth” to be paired with an opposing view. An opposing view such as Frosty Hardison’s:

“The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. … The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.”

For more on the story, see the Seattle PI story here.

Hardison and his wife, Gayla, said they would prefer that the movie not be shown at all in schools.

“From what I’ve seen (of the movie) and what my husband has expressed to me, if (the movie) is going to take the approach of ‘bad America, bad America,’ I don’t think it should be shown at all,” Gayle Hardison said. “If you’re going to come in and just say America is creating the rotten ruin of the world, I don’t think the video should be shown.”

emma :: Apr.22.2007 :: misc :: 3 Comments »

More NP-S, some exceptives, less rain

NP-S versus Det-Nom, more detail on domain restrictions, and some musings on exceptives

Special thanks to my mysterious illness for mysteriously letting up. I didn’t fancy another day spent in the bathroom. Also, more thanks to Mr. Rain for letting up as well. Hey Mr. Mystery Illness, are you and Mr. Rain in cahoots?

I saw this bit on the Daily Show about a father in Seattle who demanded that his daughter’s school show an alternative view on the global warming issue after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was shown. The father insisted that, in fact, there are extreme colds and hots around the world, so this certainly can’t be global warming; what was it that caused parts of California to freeze this winter? I’ll try to trackdown a clip and post it when I can.

Related: I just read this article about how the National Science Teachers Association turned down 50,000 free copies of an Inconvenient Truth DVDs last fall because they didn’t want to concern some of their funders’ interests.

And speaking of Laurie David, she was on Bill Maher earlier this week talking about her recent campaign to get college students involved in the global warming issue. When discussing her optimism for our chances in actually fighting this, Bill Maher expressed his own eternal pessimism about everything, and asked, “If Americans were told that they could stop global warming by not using the remote control for their tvs, would they do it? Or would they just say, ‘Ah, fuck it’?” Bill Maher can be a bit too cynical even for my tastes sometimes, but it got me thinking â€“ maybe I should use my remote control less. (Ah, but how will I reap the benefits of digital cable? I don’t think my cable box even has the appropriate buttons on the box for me to stop using my remote.)

emma :: Apr.20.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

Nor’easter

This evening, I learned a new word: Nor’easter

I’m from Southern California. I’m used to earthquake drills and aftershocks that crack buildings. Not flood warnings. But I suppose this is what I get for living in a place called the Ocean State.

Thankfully, I live on a hill.

emma :: Apr.16.2007 :: misc :: 9 Comments »