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In episode 1 of the Wire, the boys discuss American history and exceptive constructions. Video after the Continue Reading »

emma :: Jul.18.2008 :: semantics, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams, wrote:

I wish myself at Braintree. This wandering, itinerating Life grows more and more disagreable to me. I want to see my Wife and Children every Day, I want to see my Grass and Blossoms and Corn, &c. every Day. I want to see my Workmen, nay I almost want to go and see the Bosse Calfs’s almost as often as Charles does. But above all except the Wife and Children I want to see my Books.

I’ve been collecting a bunch of them recently, actually. I’ll post more soon.

emma :: Jul.10.2008 :: semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »

Hello to anyone who still bothers to keep me in his/her feed:

We’re hitting the middle of the summer, and so far I have learned the following:
(1) Human subject research, as simple as it seems it should be, is never that simple. IRB protocols…I think I may stick to theoretical stuff in the future.
(2) If you fold a bed sheet, stick it in the bag, and put the bag in the freezer for 1-2 hours, you can enjoy cool comfort without air conditioning for upwards of 3 minutes.

I guess the newest update is that I am doing human subject research. I’m recording people saying stuff and doing some fairly simple prosodic analysis. That is, I will be doing this once I get the IRB protocol approved.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been reading about exceptives and emphatic reflexives.

emma :: Jul.10.2008 :: linguistics :: No Comments »

Wikipedia demonstrates presupposition failure:

emma :: May.08.2008 :: semantics, linguistics, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

Despite the obvious disadvantages of being not only the only theoretical linguistics grad student in department, but also the entire state of Rhode Island, there is the perk of not having to share any resources with anybody else (except for perhaps ambitious undergraduates). This means that you may find yourself in the library on a Wednesday afternoon, searching for a copy of Yoad Winter’s dissertation, and finding a copy of BHP’s Montague Grammar sitting on a top shelf. It’s been checked out a total of seven times: 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1998, 2003 and now 2008.

The Winter dissertation? Checked out for the first time today.

Another library anecdote after the Continue Reading »

emma :: Apr.30.2008 :: linguistics :: 2 Comments »

Pretty solid donkey anaphora in the chorus of the Trina song following the Continue Reading »

emma :: Apr.21.2008 :: semantics, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

I intend the interpretation where the universal quantifier has wide scope.

1. For the Curb Your Enthusiasm fans:
Last weekend I fell down a flight of stairs. (Well, I didn’t fall down the entire flight. I fell, landed on my back, then slid the rest of the way down. Note to self: don’t hurry in socks down carpeted steps, ever.) I spent most of the weekend chilling out and went to Health Services on Monday where I was told that no structural damage was done, but I had strained some pretty bad muscle tension. I was then prescribed a painkiller and a muscle relaxant. The muscle relaxant was cyclobenzaprine. Which is exactly what Larry David is handed in the seventh episode of the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm:

(h/t Ben for pointing this out to me and also lifting everything over half a pound for me.)

2. Quantification over times and individuals
I love Garfield minus Garfield. Pretty much every strip makes me laugh out loud. For several minutes. And a recent gmg has an example of quantification over times and individuals and how you don’t seem to get inverse scope:

3. There was something else, I swear. But I forgot.

emma :: Mar.23.2008 :: semantics, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

…but it had to be maded.

if u eats meh, i r ACC

emma :: Mar.12.2008 :: misc, syntax, linguistics :: 4 Comments »

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 »