some-antics.com

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 »

Wikipedia demonstrates presupposition failure:

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

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 »

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 »

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 »

It’s done.

Comments, as always, welcome. Continue Reading »

emma :: Nov.22.2007 :: semantics, linguistics :: 1 Comment »

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 »