That that

After a marathon phone conversation with Nathan tonight, I find myself more and more aware of language and thought and discourse and and and…Aaauuuugh *brain implodes*

I’m also hyper-aware of my use of that now.  Yay being a linguist and being surrounded/bombarded by data all the time.

I told Stefan about how much I’ve been thinking about the phonetics-phonology interface, and he asked if I’d had any dreams about it.  Upon my reply (negatory; dreaming about lambdas and S-expressions and donkeys and in German all seems to be reasonable, but I still can’t fathom the idea of dreaming about phonetics-phonology), he responded “Well, you’re not thinking about it enough, then”.  Touché.  Of course, I’ll bet that part of my lack of dreaming about that stems from my lack of sleep.

Also–it’s Friday?!  When the hell did that happen?  Nathan told me he was going to LA this weekend, and I thought today was Monday so when he said that he had to pack for his trip, I got totally confuzzled.

Lastly: this NP-S relative clause stuff is exciting.  Talking about it with Nath just made me even more excited about working on this.  I like talking about linguistics/philosophy; I feel like I get a better grip on these things when I talk/write about them, when the language makes (somewhat more) manifest all the ideas floating around in and out of my head.  I get this Zen-like feeling of engagement and understanding when talking about semantics that I don’t quite have access to outside of talking to someone.

Pink chicken butt

In a discussion about language, grammar, syntax (/operational semantics), semantics, rationality, inference, …

Emma: …(speculative blather about the human cognitive process and logical ability)

Nathan: You could even call that…rationality.

Emma: Ok, sure, but that’s a sort of loaded word, too, wouldn’t you say?

Nathan: Yeah, but…

Emma: If you’re not going to let me have grammar on account of it being loaded…

Nathan: Ok ok…

Emma: Well, ok.  At some point we’re going to have to agree on some primitives.

Nathan: Why?  When we do that, we’ll be done talking!

I need friends with Super Soakers

Today’s xkcd:

Selected Works of Richard Montague

I second the frustration of Gillian Russell re: finding original works by Richard Montague.  It’s amazing to me that Formal Philosophy… is so hard to get.  And extremely maddening.  (Although, hey!  I can get an electronic copy of it from Springer for $32.  $32?!  It’s a PDF!  Montague is dead!  Who the hell is that money going to?!  Grr, intellectual property laws in academia.)  Thankfully, the library at Brown had a copy, but I’m still shocked that it’s so near-impossible to get your hands on this book.  I mean, the Lambda Calculus was easier to track down, and I originally had to order it from the publishers in the Netherlands (but yay, Amazon!).

Sinn, the greyhound

For Nathan:

(And yes, I know, the greyhound looks more like a cocker spaniel.)

Type-shift

I had this revelation on Monday about sets and type-shifting, and even though it’s sort of something that I should have understood already, I was quite tickled and pleased with this mini epiphany.

It just dawned upon me that type-shifting is much more than a mechanical backdoor trick around some type-mismatch problems. Type-shifting takes a set and creates a new set describing the original set. So in the standard example of lifting an NP of type e to the generalized quantifier type et, t, not only is this a neat trick for getting around things like conjunction reduction, but it is actually shedding light onto what assumptions are made upon accepting the notion of a set; taking the singleton set and making a set of properties which hold of the member of the singleton set shows that whenever we make a set of objects, we are cutting across certain properties which may vary among individual members of a set and saying that for our purposes, these differences are irrelevant. What matters are the specific properties we wish to highlight, which all the members of the set share. Considering this, once you establish a certain set, you can of course make a set whose central property concerns its interaction with the initial set.

I’m not sure if I’m really expressing myself with the clarity and precision that I’d like, but as I get more comfortable with this idea, I’ll post a more coherent description of what it is that I’d finally realized this week.

It’s clear to me now that the job of the semanticist is not just to develop clever formal tools to describe the way grammar composes meaning, but also to recognize what the philosophical implications of adopting certain tools are. Previously, I’d just thought of these tools as wrenches and hammers; now I realize that they are also nails and screws. I’d taken for granted these logical operations as purely mechanical devices, but I’m beginning to see how they also have very deep philosophical roots.

How to think

From the introduction to Enderton’s “A Mathematical Introduction to Logic”:

This book does not propose to teach the reader how to think. The word ‘logic’ is sometimes used to refer to remedial thinking, but not by us. The reader already knows how to think. Here are some interesting concepts to think about.

Humans are not grammar!

Thursday in Polly’s syntax class, I got the most clear understanding of the endeavor of a linguistic framework of grammar attempts to accomplish.

Linguists often meet some amount of skepticism when we reveal our work to others because the theoretical claims are pitted against questions such as “People can’t actually be doing that in their heads when they say that, can they?”

The common answer is: “Well, we aren’t trying to model rules of real-time production or perception, just the rules of the grammar.” That usually quiets people, not because it is a sufficient answer, but because it is given with such dogmatic confidence that it is a sufficient answer, as very little follow-up explanation is provided. The question most people are left with after hearing this response is, “If you’re not modeling anything human, what ARE you doing? What else is there?”

I think that’s the question we’re trying to get at, the “What else is there?” part. What part of language systems relies on the human linguistic ability (and where does that come from?) and what part relies on some other sort of non-human system? How do these parts interact?

Theoretical linguistic theories are modeling the non-human part–that is, as Polly Jacobson once so aptly put in response to a question about how we are able to parse sentences if there are an infinite number of derivations: humans are not grammar! The grammar contains a set of well-formed (both syntactically and semantically) expressions, proven well-formed by a series of rules, also a part of the grammar. Somehow real-time perception and production interact with the grammar, but explicitly how that is done has yet to be explained. This explanation can only be born once we have a good understanding of the structure of the grammar and how elements such as syntax and semantics interact.

The series of rules in the grammar model the native speaker’s unconscious (somehow acquired) knowledge about the grammar of his/her language. By explicitly stating that the grammar is the unconscious knowledge is not to dismiss ultimately addressing the questions of real-time perception and production, but rather, to focus the task at hand to an already tricky set of questions to answer.

Where does the grammar come from? Is it some product of whatever is responsible for the human ability to communicate unlike any other animal? Is that ability its own unique thing? Other animals have been shown to communicate in their own way; to postulate some special human communication seems conceited and ill-motivated. Instead, what if our language ability evolved from the combination of the animal (or mammalian) gift of communication and the incorporation of logic, once humans evolved well enough to begin implicitly understand logical relations amongst objects and events in the world?

(And what is logic as it relates to human perception? More on this later…)