Ambiguity WIN
- J: also, you are the champion of randomness
- Me: some day, i want to write down my train of thoughts in a shower
- J: syntactic ambiguity!
Thick Skin Required
- Professor: So why is it that Pollock proposes the solution he does in this paper? (long silence follows)
- Me: He's trying to explain a particular verb movement that occurs in French.
- Professor: That is *precisely* the wrong answer. That's exactly what you should not have come away with.
Why not the hell?
With my newfound syntactic knowledge, I’ve been trying to take not of the stranger things we say. The latest strange utterance came from me:
So I thought, “Why not the hell take one?”
So, why did I move “not” from it’s more expected position (“Why the hell not take one?”) to further up? In a classic example of Web 2.0-fueled academia, I asked Joe, who used the construction in his Facebook status, catching the attention of a Damien Hall who pointed us in the right direction. There’s actually a Penn Working Papers in Linguistics volume with an article by Jon Sprouse about it: “The accent projection principle: Why the hell not?” (info at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/papers/v12.1-contents.html).
Lesson of the day? If you want a linguist’s attention, use Facebook to throw the right examples in their face.
