I love Linguistics! It's sucha bugger! :) We covered some really interesting stuff yesterday and it took me awhile to get a few of them...
Check out the following sentences.. they ARE legal sentences in English:
The horse raced past the barn fell.
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
The cotton clothes are made from grows in Mississipi.
Since Keith always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him.
And there are many more!!! Can you see how these senteces are actually correct? Or has your syntactic parser been led down the garden path like these sentences are supposed to do? Well, they actually aren't all that complex. Let's have a go at it together and make some sense of them!
The horse raced past the barn fell.
In clearer terms: The horse that was being raced (past the barn) fell!!
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
Also: The man who hunts (not necessarily hunts ducks!) ducks out on weekends.
The cotton clothes are made from grows in Mississipi.
Also: The cotton that clothes are made from... grows in Mississipi.
Since Keith always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him.
Also: Since Keith always walks, a mile seems like a short distance to him. (Oh! The magic of the COMMA).
See the logic now? :)
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
私は来た。
After such a spectacular period of silence, one must probably have assumed that either I
1) am dead (TOUCH WOOD);
2) have forgotten about this blog; or
3) have delibrately abandoned this blog.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), none of the above are true. It's simply due to a lack of time... and why might this be so, especially considering that I am supposed to be supposedly enjoying my long Aussie summer holiday?
Well, I've been spending my days in true workaholic fashion: weekends spent working on the holiday island of Sentosa, exercising my foreign language skills by mingling with the tourist crowd; weekdays spent in school-waking up daily at 6am, remniscent of my horrifying school-going days-teaching history and English, urging me to enforce what little knowledge I have so far in Linguistics, to aid in my teaching methods.
I must say, I have been learning quite a few new things. One of these days, against proper ethics, I intend to conduct a discreet little Linguistic experiment involving my students from the different levels. But what it's going to be about, I don't know yet. Probably something on the level of semantics, or a sociolinguistic background study... hehe!
1) am dead (TOUCH WOOD);
2) have forgotten about this blog; or
3) have delibrately abandoned this blog.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), none of the above are true. It's simply due to a lack of time... and why might this be so, especially considering that I am supposed to be supposedly enjoying my long Aussie summer holiday?
Well, I've been spending my days in true workaholic fashion: weekends spent working on the holiday island of Sentosa, exercising my foreign language skills by mingling with the tourist crowd; weekdays spent in school-waking up daily at 6am, remniscent of my horrifying school-going days-teaching history and English, urging me to enforce what little knowledge I have so far in Linguistics, to aid in my teaching methods.
I must say, I have been learning quite a few new things. One of these days, against proper ethics, I intend to conduct a discreet little Linguistic experiment involving my students from the different levels. But what it's going to be about, I don't know yet. Probably something on the level of semantics, or a sociolinguistic background study... hehe!
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