In June I participated in a face recognition fMRI experiment run by Jean Vettel, a fourth year in our department who works in Mike Tarr’s lab. It was my first time doing fMRI and it was really very cool. Even cooler is the Quicktime movie Jean just sent me of my brain! I have no idea what it’s doing but it’s still awesome! My brain! Proof that something’s there!
emma :: Jul.31.2007 :: nerdiness :: 1 Comment »
Yesterday morning I left San Francisco and all of NorCal, catching a ride with one of my fellow LSA Institute participants and her brother in a bright green VW Beetle heading south. Along the way, we stopped by the quiet town of Solvang, wee Denmark in California! I had no idea that such a place existed, but I was happy to have seen it. We also made a stop in Santa Barbara, where I ran into an old friend from high school rather unexpectedly.
I’m in LA now (or, more precisely, in Sherman Oaks), bumming at Jon’s house, eating tacos, watching nerdy tv, and lounging in the pool. I’ll be here until next week (past my birthday), and I’m excited to get back to Providence!
emma :: Jul.30.2007 :: misc :: 2 Comments »
I was listening to KCRW Music yesterday and Googled this strange song I was listening to, only to discover that the strange song was a recent single by Robyn (the Swedish pop star behind the 90s hit “Show Me Love”) AND an even stranger viral video cover of the song “Humps” by 90s hit artist, Alanis Morissette.
emma :: Jul.27.2007 :: misc, pop-culture :: 1 Comment »
Today is the last official day of the LSA Summer Institute. I furiously spent this week crunching through Treebank to get the data that I needed for Birner & Ward course and finally got my abstract in to them yesterday afternoon. It was nice to have this last Friday feel sort of like a free day, with no work to worry about doing on the train.
I just got out of Chris Potts’s Dimensions of Meaning, and I am really very happy that I got to sit in on that. Chris very nicely went over three main topics: appositives, expressives and quotation. With each, he showed how they had extra dimensions of meaning that were sometimes even very systematic in their extra-dimensionality, and the discussion in the expressives part of the course was especially engaging. (Any time you’re in a room full of linguists swearing up a storm, you can’t help but giggle, right? Especially if someone also makes a nerdy use-mention distinction joke about it all.)
And a great quote from Chris Potts from class today, during a discussion on scare quoting:
The direct object “moves” to [spec CP].
emma :: Jul.27.2007 :: semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »
Just in case anybody’s wondering, relative clause extraposition “out of” a definite NP in English is very very rare. And I would know, since I can’t even get 50 good, solid tokens of that construction to show for my Information Structure and Word Order Variation project.
DUE TOMORROW >:-o wah.
emma :: Jul.25.2007 :: linguistics :: 3 Comments »
So around 5am this morning, I woke up from my nightmare about tgrep2 and Treebank to a shaking apartment. Being quite delirious from fever, I had no idea what was going on until I realized that OMG THE BIG ONE HAS HIT. I passed out shortly thereafter and forgot about it completely until just now, when I thought it was just a part of my dream.
It wasn’t.
emma :: Jul.20.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »
In my search for relative clause extraposition:
It should be noted, also, that Treebank is totally frustrating when looking for non-canonical word order tokens. For example, RC extraposition is treated as there being an *ICH-x* (that’s insert constituent here with an index) and a coindexed SBAR-x appearing later in the sentence.
emma :: Jul.19.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »
Last night there was a party for computational linguistics people. I met more interesting folk, got some nice feedback on the first-year project, received very helpful advice on what relative clause extraposition looks like in Treebank from none other than Chris Manning (when I have more time I will hopefully be able to post about how awful it looks), and was given a very large jar of homemade kimchi from Dan Jurafsky.
emma :: Jul.19.2007 :: linguistics :: No Comments »
I had a really neat conversation with a fellow Computational Semantics classmate this afternoon (his name is James and he’s at Oxford now), and while chatting about relative clauses, he asked if there were anything to account for domain loosening. As in, sometimes when we say “every student danced at the party last night” we aren’t totally committed to each and every student at the party dancing (vaguely reminiscent of the Kadmon & Landman observation of domain widening when going from “some” to “any”). And for a second, I panicked. Because it really would be awful if, despite all this work on accounting for overt and covert restrictions, I still had to leave something to fuzzy pragmatics. And then I realized: this sort of loosening is to exceptive constructions as covert domain restrictions are to relative clauses. Because just as you could say “every student danced at the party last night” if 9 out of 10 students danced, your hearer could also say, “hey, wait a minute! Fred was in the corner the entire night!” and you might reply, “ok, every student except Fred danced at the party last night.” Analogous to “every student danced at the party last night” with the hearer’s response “But my brother who’s a student at Brown wasn’t dancing” and the speaker replying, “ah, well, every student that goes to Stanford was dancing”.
That, and I found out that Emmon Bach has been sitting in the back row of our Computational Semantics class. It took me a while to realize that this was, indeed, the Emmon Bach of Bach & Cooper (1978), at which point, I felt pretty embarrassed for saying “blah blah, according to Bach & Cooper (1978)–omigod.”
Err, yeah.
emma :: Jul.16.2007 :: semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »
I’m sitting in Student Union café thingy, and a bunch of high schoolers, all with Jamba Juices, are sitting and watching the Montel Williams show quite enthusiastically. You’d think that Stanford would put something up besides daytime talk shows and court tv, but I guess not.
Want less banality, more linguistics? Continue Reading »
emma :: Jul.13.2007 :: semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »