Gee Gabe, I think your automated blogger has set the bar on this site a little too high. I know my life was changed the moment I heard that "the next vanguard of waiters sashayed towards him with the sauce over the world." Wow, I think I just got goosebumps there.
Anyway, my organic-matter mind will still attempt to contribute a list (just a list for now, hopefully expansions on these will follow) of a few things I've discovered this last month that on some level blew my mind:
-pragmatic intrusion: "it's better to drive home and drink three beers than to drink three beers and drive home"... truth conditionally this sentence is contradictory, but the implicatures which allow this to make sense are below the level of a sentence. people at the institute have ideas about compute below-sentence-level implicatures, but no agreement on solutions
-"illogical negation" constructions like the following:
-he could care less/ he couldn't care less
-that'll teach you to swim/ that'll teach you not to swim
-the box is packed / the box is unpacked
-don't fail to miss the sign / don't miss the sign
(these pairs are all synonymous)
I've found that some of these do odd things when embedded under attitude predicates... some of them actually become logical! this suggests there is more going on than just problems computing the number of negatives
-the question of whether, if we construct a probabilistic grammar, there is a difference between a very low probability sentence, and sentences at the limit point (i.e. completely ungrammatical)... more crazy to me, is how in the world could we test this empirically?
-RELEVANCE... entire theories of semantics and pragmatics (and syntax and phonology...) depend on humans being able to figure out what is "relevant" for effective communication. Shouldn't we be finding out more from psychologists and cognitive scientists about how people actually might accomplish this feat? Otherwise, at least many talks I've seen here go down the drain without a good understanding of how we might determine relevance. Or even what it means for something to be "relevant."
-David Beaver is doing some really neat stuff on the semantics/phonology interface, with discourse particles, focus, and prosody. I hope to post more about this later.
-the F-word... I took a class with Chris Potts about other "dimensions" of meaning. One of those is the expressive realm, which includes all your favorite curses. Note how "fucking" doesn't contribute to the truth conditions of a sentence OR the assertive content:
-A: "I saw your fuckin' dog in the park."
-B: #"No, he's very sweet."
You can't refute expressive content. We basically concluded in this class that expressives have a quality of "speech act" about them, like "promise." One you say "I promise to clean up" an action takes place just in the speech act. Seems to be the same with expressives. But there's a lot of interesting things about them that I forget at the moment but hopefully I can expand upon later... if the autoblogger doesn't beat me to a brilliant post about them first :-)
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3 comments:
I'm unclear on situations where "the box is packed" and "the box is unpacked" are equivalent. I know you told me before. I've forgotten.
If you just moved from one house to another, with the boxes still untouched, I think you can refer to them as either "unpacked" or "packed." They're not completely interchangeable. But in the sense "those are still packed," or "look at those unpacked boxes" they refer to the same state. At least to me and ppl like Geoffrey Pullum's partner It turns out that this is actually much less interesting than the stuff that happens with "could care less" and "that'll teach you," but that's for another time and another post.
that's right - thanks! It still sounds weird to me, but I can see someone saying that pretty easily
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