NP+Dogg

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’.

“Airport ’86 Revisited” revisited

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.

FYP

It’s done.

Comments, as always, welcome. Read the rest of this entry »

loltortilla

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’.

If you miss today…

My SNEWS handout.

(and WAH my Sharvit ref typo that I printed 40 copies of.)

FYP talk notes

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.

SNEWS 07

FYI: I’ll be one of many presenters at SNEWS next week at MIT. The talk will be a modded version of my first year project talk so w00t.

F.Y.P., P.Y.T.

The first year project presentation is just around the corner. I somehow manage to explain generalized quantifiers, relative clauses, domain restrictions AND functional NPs all without lambdas in 15 minutes.

Thrilled about my acknowledgments.

We pack and deliver like UPS trucks

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.

Some syntactic considerations

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.