The Psycho-Jap-Linguist

Garden path sentences

2008-05-01T20:05:00.002+10:00

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? :)

私は来た。

2008-01-26T14:27:00.000+11:00

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!

Mad Magazine's 1989 Special summer issue

2007-11-14T17:06:00.001+11:00

This article is very おもしろい (interesting)...

Imagine that I was only 2 years old when this was published. In fact, it was originally published in an issue in the '70s! Well, how I came to know of this was because my dad confiscated it from a student back in 1989. This student had been reading MAD in my dad's literature class, and had attempted to do so discreetly by placing the magazine behind his Macbeth text. D'ya know what was so ironic about the whole thing?? The issue's cover was this:

Now how'd'you like that...

Humble beginnings...

2007-09-15T22:16:00.000+10:00

Let's begin by declaring that I NEED A LATERAL HYPOTHALAMIC LESION!!!!!
The day I get that it'll cure my bingeing tendencies.
That's what I get from psychology.

Next, I present the question: How is it that Indonesians (a majority, at least) who live/grow up in Singapore still possess a different accent from the average Singaporean, while Chinese in Australia, for example, who grow up here but speak Mandarin in their homes can still attain the Aussie accent?
Now that's linguistics.

ええ？日本語で何といますか。
And that's Japanese.

So heLLoOO... that was just a little introduction and preview of what I'll be rambling on about in this newww journal. For tracking, learning, entertainment and amusement purposes.

Disclaimer: I'm a newbie university fresh(wo)man so please don't take anything to heart. Also, some 'ideas' talked about might not necessarily be mine so credits to whoever in advance. Finally, any additional opinions or thought provoking questions and insights are welcome!!!