Oh Hey There

nyomklyu:

TAM

i love me some event semantics (i assume TAM=Tense-Aspect-Mood?). what you can appreciate is the general ordering of speaker mood (about an event) > modality and tense (whether and roughly when an event occurred) > aspect (how an event occurred or occurs). so playing with the extreme ends you’ll find that in english “he completely already frankly fucked up” is not as ‘felicitous’ (the semantic version of ‘grammatical’) as “he frankly already completely fucked up”. that’s basically what i interpret this hierarchy as saying.

(Source: nyomklyu)

muroo: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Phrase structure tree auto reblog.

Cat In The Bag (via muroo, swas, dexae)

Oh man this is bringing back memories from Syntax I. All sentences labelled with # cannot refer to the idiomatic secret-that-could-get-out “cat in the bag” of (1) [see Carnie 2002]:

1. The cat is out of the bag.
2. # The cat thinks that he is out of the bag.
3. The cat is likely to be out of the bag.
4. # The cat is eager to be out of the bag.
5. # The cat is reluctant to be out of the bag.
6. I want the cat to be out of the bag.

We spent a good half hour of class-time brainstorming and testing predicates and raising constructions for cat-out-of-the-bag sentences: the cat is begging/itching…, it is possible/probable…, it is willed/fucking destined that the cat be out of the bag.

Edit: The “fucking destined” one is an actual English subjunctive. Boom!

kened:

probably the most famous sentence ever written by noam chomsky. he wrote it to show that an utterance can be linguistically, at least syntactically, valid, yet utterly meaningless. is it.

if i’ve parsed the phrase structure rules incorrectly let me know (for example:are Det1 and Det2 co-terminous? or is Det1 super-ordinate to Det2? - is it the ‘green-ness’ which is without colour or the ideas?)

In NP[ DP[ A[colourless] A[green] ]DPN[ideas] ]NP—what you have pictured—neither colourless nor green strictly modify the other, so I gather a conjunctive reading as in “colourless and green ideas” or “green and colourless ideas” (ordering does not matter in a conjunction).

That is an okay reading, but I’ve always parsed it with green ideas being modified, i.e. NP[ A[colourless] NP1[ A[green] N[ideas] ]NP1 ]NP. The difference here is that the green ideas are colourless.