From today’s NYT:
Back in 1857, they were the hottest names in old New-York. Harvey Burdell and Emma Cunningham — the violent, rapacious and brutally murdered society dentist and his scheming and probably murderous mistress, mutual antagonists in the most lurid true-crime drama of the age.
emma :: Sep.19.2007 :: misc :: 1 Comment »
FYI: Mooncake Day, otherwise known as the mid-autumn festival, rolls into town next week, the 25th.
emma :: Sep.18.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »
Something that I’ve come across several times while working on the relative clause project is the realization that sometimes there’s really no motivation or advantage to saying that there is only one way to combine certain constituents. What ends up mattering more is not the order in which you compose up constituents, but rather what allows you to get such compositions. For example, to get NP-S to work at all, I proposed one solution would be to shift the meaning of the noun so that it contained an extra domain-restricting argument. You can get a derivation in which the structure is NP-S-like, but then again, you could also get another derivation in which the structure of the NP were more Det-Nom-like. The point isn’t that NP-S is better than Det-Nom; it’s that you can get a lot of expressive power by incorporating this shifting rule (stacking, extraposition, exceptives, etc.). Because in Categorial Grammar, the idea of rigidly defined constituent structure and combinatorics isn’t just unnecessary, it’s insufficient.
emma :: Sep.11.2007 :: syntax, semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »
emma :: Sep.09.2007 :: pop-culture :: No Comments »
