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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 »

ceilingcat can has cheezburger so big cannot nom it?

[relatedly, the Omnipotence Paradox]

emma :: Apr.29.2008 :: pop-culture, question :: No 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 »

This is the first thing that results when you search for “bertrand russell” on Google Video:

(h/t Ben)

emma :: Mar.27.2008 :: 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 »

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 »

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 »

A little FoTC to round out your week. Clips after the flip. (So flip that shi-)

Continue Reading »

emma :: Sep.27.2007 :: pop-culture :: No Comments »

emma :: Sep.09.2007 :: pop-culture :: No Comments »