some-antics.com

New write-up here, which covers the syntax of relative clauses, the syntactic category of relative pronouns, and the particulars of our domain restriction shift. A lot of it depends on an extraction slash | rule: anything of category (A/B)/…C can shift into (A|C)/…B, with the corresponding semantic argument switch, where the | indicates that this is a category missing an argument of category C.

(For those of you who have voiced prior concern over my non-use of LaTex, I’m in the middle of going back to LaTex, but just had to punch this write-up out without thinking about which symbols need escaping and how to make things look like I would like them to. So, with luck the next write-up I post will look prettier with those pretty semantic evaluation brackets.)

Somewhat unrelatedly, I’d been meaning to blog this for a while now, but kept forgetting. A particularly snarky quote from Stephen Neale’s reply to Stanley & Szabo (2000):

Also, I find Stanley and Szabo’s own semantic account of quantifier matrix incompleteness quite plausible on one interpretation–it is vague enough to admit of many. It appears very late in their paper, most of which seems to constitute an attempt to blast the logical terrain so hard that when their theory finally emerges it will face no competition.

emma :: Aug.27.2007 :: syntax, semantics, linguistics :: 4 Comments »

Simon, on the perks of having your syntax and semantics tightly coupled, in a recent post:

for somebody like me who’s more comfortable with lambdas than slashes (at the moment), this means you can just hang out with the lambdas, work more than twice as fast, and be confident that your syntax hasn’t fallen off a cliff.

The great thing about working in CCG is that once you’ve worked out your semantics, you’ve already partially taken care of the syntax as well.

emma :: Aug.27.2007 :: syntax, semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »

…and how linguistics is not one of them.

emma :: Aug.26.2007 :: linguistics, pop-culture :: 5 Comments »

[link to source]

emma :: Aug.24.2007 :: linguistics :: 1 Comment »

I’m sure all the linguistics blogs out there have already pounced on this, but if you still haven’t seen it…

The Daily Show mentions my current profession:

(ht Yo-Shang)

More amusing commentary from Yo-Shang:
There’s totally a cocktail party effect with “linguistics”, no?
I remember reading “the Unbearable Lightness of Being” and was like “LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR!”

And (also from Yo-Shang), comments from Mr. Verb’s blog entry about this:

Anonymous said…

“W” would specialize in semantics and maybe dabble a bit in derivational morphology…..

Ummm?

emma :: Aug.24.2007 :: linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

Adrian, who used to be in the big ‘first year’ office down the hall, recently got moved to our office. Reinette walked by the door and popped her head in.

Reinette: Is Adrian here?
Me: Oh, I don’t know where he went. But he came in today.
Reinette: But he’s in here, right?
Me (somewhat puzzled): Um, not right now?
Reinette: Not IN-in here. (She points to the sign next to our door.) Just that he’s in here.

emma :: Aug.22.2007 :: semantics, phonology, linguistics :: 1 Comment »

emma :: Aug.21.2007 :: pop-culture :: 2 Comments »

But I find this Wikipedia entry on vi vs. Emacs to be fascinating.

Re:

vi users enjoy joking that Emacs’s key-sequences induce carpal tunnel syndrome, or mentioning one of many satirical expansions of the acronym EMACS, such as “Escape Meta Alt Control Shift” (a jab at Emacs’s reliance on modifier keys).

On a Mac, Meta is really no problem–unless you also think the spacebar is carpal tunnel syndrome inducing. As for Control, reconfigure your Caps Lock to be Control, silly! (”But then HOW WOULD YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS????”) Shift…really?

And anyway, the best way to reduce carpal tunnel is to pick up Dvorak, psha.

(Disclaimer: most opinions expressed here mostly exaggerated for comedic effect. :-P)

emma :: Aug.20.2007 :: nerdiness :: 6 Comments »

emma :: Aug.19.2007 :: misc, pop-culture :: No Comments »

One of the reasons why I abandoned the idea to have the domain restriction as part of the meaning of the quantifier/determiner was because I couldn’t see a way to restrict the x in [[the]]: λP[ιx[P(x)]]. Polly suggested that I try working with the raised version of [[the]], Montague’s et,ett type [[the]]. And I knew that I had thought about this problem before, tried to crack, came up against something tricky and decided to stick with have the domain restrictions being nominal restrictions.

It turns out that all we need is a (generalized) conjunction operator and our good friend geach. My N/RC shift is just this: λP[λQ[P ∏ Q]], where in an ordinary NP like the dog, P would be the set of dogs and Q some other restriction on individuals in that domain. I used ∏ and not ∩ in my rule because it was the easiest way to generalize that rule so that you could get functional domain restrictions as well (as in the woman who he loves who every man invited…is his mother, where the restriction is type ee,t). With this rule, you don’t even have to concern yourself with working with a higher-typed [[the]] (though it turns out that if you geach the type-lift operator and then apply it to e-typed [[the]], you get the higher-typed meaning for free). You just need to geach [[the]] twice and then apply it to the conjunction operator and you’ll get λP[λQ[ιx[P(x) & Q(x)]]]. It turns out that this is the same trick that will get you the domain restriction into quantifiers.

emma :: Aug.17.2007 :: syntax, semantics, logic, linguistics :: 6 Comments »