some-antics.com

So today in Syntax, Polly was talking about how nouns don’t take other nouns to their right (but they do take PP modifiers). For example, you don’t say things like “husky dog” in English.

This isn’t a counterexample, but I couldn’t help but think of the ProperName+Dogg phenom.

Possible lexical entry for “Dogg” (following Jacobson’s triplet notation of phonological form, syntactic category, semantic extension):
“Dogg” = < /dɑg/ ; NP[+name]/ _LNP[+name]; λx_e[x[+gangsta]]>

So “Dogg” takes an individual and returns that individual with a +gangsta feature.

EDIT: so I was thinking about this on my way home for lunch, and I realized that my lexical entry needs to be revised a little. [+gangsta] should really just be a syntactic feature, allowing it to license other [+gangsta] constituents (e.g. “bling”, “fo-shizzle”). Semantically, “Dogg” has the extension of the identity function over individuals, defined only for individuals that are actually illin’–so really, its only effect is presuppositional.

Revised lexical entry:
“Dogg” = < /dɑg/ ; NP[+gangsta]/ _LNP[+name]; λx_e: x∈baller_S[x]>

where baller_S is the set of all individuals that be illin’.

emma :: Feb.26.2008 :: syntax, semantics, linguistics, pop-culture, nerdiness :: No Comments »

Raj said to Jeff about nothing remotely linguisticky at all: “it gets a little combinatorially explosive.” (He was talking about how to interface Traktor with the real mixer. Some mess of RCA jacks involved.)

Also, in episode 59 of the Wire (S05E09, also known as the penultimate), the character Michael Lee delivers an epicly sweet case of contrastive focus reduplication [see the Salad-Salad Paper]: “Is that Big Walter-Big Walter or skinny Big Walter?”

EDIT (about an hour after posting Raj’s quote I read in the Wagner dissertation, p. 62):

The important lesson to learn from the combinatorics of coordination is that whichever of the two options in (68) we employ, we should pick exactly one of them, since otherwise the combinatorial possibilities explode.

emma :: Feb.26.2008 :: syntax, phonology, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

I’ve been reading Michael Wagner’s 2005 dissertation Prosody and Recursion and his examples pulled from Gleitman (1965) remind me of this thing that’s not all that interesting but cute. Check it after the Continue Reading »

emma :: Feb.25.2008 :: syntax, phonology, linguistics :: No Comments »

F. Cardone and J. R. Hindley. History of Lambda-Calculus and Combinatory logic. To appear as a chapter in Volume 5 of the Handbook of the History of Logic.

(h/t to LtU)

emma :: Feb.24.2008 :: logic :: No Comments »

So right now, icanhascheezburger is having a caption contest for a series of pictures about poker. Here’s mine:

For the short version of the explanation, see sentence (6) here. For the long version, see the full-length Horn (2005) “Airport ‘86 Revisited: Toward a unified indefinite any“.

Hey! You should totally vote for this so I can go to Vegas.

emma :: Feb.21.2008 :: semantics, nerdiness :: 2 Comments »

In case your four-year-old is doing your taxes…

emma :: Feb.13.2008 :: misc :: No Comments »

(h/t to speicherCat for this)

Over the weekend, a link appeared in my inbox to something called Project LambdaCan.

Project LambdaCan is an amusing exercise in absurdity. It implements a reducer (interpreter) for the Lambda Calculus, a formal system (programming language) developed by Alonzo Church in the 1930’s to attack the deepest mathematical problem of the day. This was the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of whether or not there exists an algorithm capable of deciding the truth or falsehood of all statements in mathematics.

Project LambdaCan takes this tool for exploring the most profound mathematical problems and implements it on a microcontroller better suited to the most mundane of tasks, like running a vending machine or microwave oven. And it sticks the microcontroller in a can that you can connect to your PC using a USB cable.

Of course, the extreme overhead involved in supporting the painfully abstract Lambda Calculus notation makes LambdaCan struggle to compute arithmetic as simple as 11 + 12 = 23. The microcontroller would perform much better if programmed in its native language. Furthermore, the very idea of plugging a LambdaCan coprocessor into a typical PC to perform computations is absurd since the PC could undoubtedly handle much larger computations faster on its own.

emma :: Feb.11.2008 :: nerdiness :: No Comments »

A couple of minor observations you should be made aware of:

1) Portrait by: Elias Gottlob Haussmann, courtesy of Wikipedia
2) Director of the video for Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack”: Michael Haussman

kthx.

emma :: Feb.05.2008 :: nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

Sorry I’ve been so M.I.A. lately:

Spring ‘08 is in full swing, and I’m happily busy starting a sort of new project, cleaning up my FYP (revised version to come), TAing for Polly’s Intro Syntax course, enjoying the bizarrely warm winter (*ahem* contextually salient comparison class), and taking two classes on topics I know very little about.

I won’t promise a more detailed post, since it tends to be the case that when I make such promises no such post ever arrives, but I think I’ll be posting more frequently this semester since I have fewer main entrees on my plate (w00t extended metaphor).

emma :: Feb.03.2008 :: misc :: 1 Comment »