some-antics.com

So today, my officemate Justin was debugging Matlab code and asked me about the boolean and operator. I explained to him that you don’t write and but rather use &&. He then asked if he could do the following “a < b && !== c", where he meant that a is less that b and a is not equal to c. "No, Justin, Matlab doesn't do conjunction reduction." Not the funniest thing I've ever said, but given the day I've had, it was a lovely moment for me.

Also: Happy Passover! I just came back from my first seder which was so so much fun. I got to ask the four questions AND I found the afikoman. I reclined and somehow managed to have the four obligatory glasses of wine.

Lastly: Celeste is blogging again!

emma :: Apr.03.2007 :: misc, linguistics, programming, nerdiness :: 6 Comments »

This is delayed news, but I wanted to wait until I finished some work to post this :-P

I found out last week that I got the fellowship to attend this summer’s LSA Institute at Stanford. Palo Alto, I’ll see you in July!

emma :: Apr.03.2007 :: misc, linguistics :: No Comments »

…and more!

New set of notes out, covering some of the things I worked on over Spring Break while lounging in sunny (and warm!) Los Angeles.

The task at hand was to see if an NP-S view was possible in functional readings of NPs and then, if so, if such a view could also be taken in the “binding into heads” cases. So, could you take the NP-S approach in a sentence like “The woman who every man loves is his mother”? And if so, can you then extend that analysis to “The woman who he loves who every man invited is his mother”? The answer I propose is that given apparatus we’ve already assumed we needed in a Det-Nom approach (most crucially, Jacobson 2002’s m operator), nothing extra is needed to get an NP-S analysis to work. I need to work out the details of each with respect to the “binding into heads” cases, but I suspect that, actually, the NP-S approach (coupled with a solid RC stacking rule) might come out cleaner and simpler than Det-Nom.

Next up: more Chinese data! And! A comparison of these variable-free approaches with the variable-full ones. Stay tuned, gentle reader ;-)

Also: I forgot to link the papers in the references section which are available online. Two are available at semanticsarchive, except for the quantifier restriction one, which you can get if you e-mail Polly; her L&P paper is available through their site but you need a subscription or access to a library with one to get a full text version (grr, I know!). The two at semanticsarchive, though, are both excellent and great reads if you already know a bit of VFS.

emma :: Apr.03.2007 :: misc, semantics, linguistics :: 2 Comments »