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 »
Comments, as always, welcome. Continue Reading »
emma :: Nov.22.2007 :: semantics, linguistics :: 1 Comment »
Simon has a great post about Principle B and R. Kelly.
A preview:
Listening to the lyrics and given the lack of any other contextually salient females in “I’m a Flirt”-land (the salience of possible “he” referents is established by the presence of guest performers on the track–T.I. and T-Pain–and the fact that the “right” is sung by someone other than Kelly), a natural way to interpret the last line is to co-index “she” and “her,” which of course represents a flagrant Principle B violation.
emma :: Nov.16.2007 :: syntax, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »
I’m sure someone else has already thought of this, but a couple of visits to jesustortilla and jesusoftheweek and miracletortilla inspired me to make some Jesus-in-a-tortilla inspired lolart:
By the way, SNEWS was absolutely wonderful. It was a great crowd this year, plenty of nice talks and fun dioramas. I finally got to meet Lance in person, received lovely feedback from Itamar and chatted it up with Elizabeth, a former student of Polly’s now working with David Dowty. And I must say, I’m pretty convinced by the arguments I made in my talk. That functional shifting rule really is somethin’.
emma :: Oct.20.2007 :: semantics, linguistics, nerdiness :: No Comments »
My SNEWS handout.
(and WAH my Sharvit ref typo that I printed 40 copies of.)
emma :: Oct.20.2007 :: semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »
Talk was on Monday, I think it went all right, though I’m not entirely pleased that most people came up to me afterwards to say something along the lines of “I didn’t understand a word you said, but you were really confident and came across really smart”.
Anyway, here’s the handout for Monday’s talk.
I’m finishing up the handout for my SNEWS talk, so if you’re lambda/semantics savvy, wait for those notes.
emma :: Oct.19.2007 :: semantics, linguistics :: No Comments »
Simon and I went up to Boston to see a talk by Yoad Winter at M.I.T. yesterday. It was both of our first times there, and we both had a lot of fun. Luka was very kind to show us around the department and introduce us to everyone. The people we met were all very cool, smart and awesome. And, wow, their department definitely has a much nicer building than ours, along with better views and better furniture. There was a party after the talk, and it was nice to be socializing amongst a crowd who could joke along about variables and assignment functions and the PTQ.
Afterwards, we went to dinner in Chinatown (after getting lost about 500 different ways):
You gotta love Chinatown.
Oh, and one more anecdote: Luka pointed out Chomsky’s office to us from the lounge, and we got to glimpse the man at work. And his Bertrand Russell poster. I think it was this picture:
emma :: Sep.22.2007 :: linguistics :: 4 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 »
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 »