Mal Shah

it is affecting the way i speak for sure (i complain about AI a lot more and a lot more annoyedly than i used to)

yeah - imo, though i've never gone into the weak islands lit, i feel one of the things we've lost w phases is a way of talking about this sort of thing (or repair by ellipsis, if it exists)

when i'm explaining this stuff i always use an ECP/CED violation; i *think* those are horrible in any context

would you give such a speech irl??

Type Logical Semantics? Well, yeah, I like to think of myself as a logical type of semanticist

glad to be done with work and finally have some free time to work

two pages inc refs trees and examples! should be able to find a way to improve it

What say you Wittgensteinians

I had a dream that I attended a lecture about linear logics that made me understand them but I woke up and now I'm back to not understanding

do not tempt me

the gender ratio does suck. but there's about 5 people cited, counting Chomsky for Barriers. abstracts suck

that's right!!!!!!

Is it bad or is it just funny to submit to a syntax conference citing nothing written after 2000

(I swear i'm not *that* out of touch)

does anyone know anything about the syntax of british english "do you want your car cleaning?"

i have some takes but couldn't find previous literature

can i propose even {\sc ...}ing it

not as far as i remember. but i did give my parents the crappy ones and kept the good ones for myself when i made them play them with me

The cover of every OUP volume collecting Davidson's papers be like

these were a huge thing when i was a little kid ≈18 years ago, they're back?

decades of cyberpunk fiction, and I don't believe a single writer fully predicted how embarrassingly stupid so much of AI was going to be

Polysemy and Philosophy Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon where a word has more than one sense. Polysemy is important to philosophy. This article considers four related strands of discussion in philosophy in which polys....

My new article 'Polysemy and Philosophy' is out in Philosophy Compass. It explores the signicance of polysemy in four strands of discussion in philosophy dx.doi.org/10.1111/phc3...

that's what they're going by these days?

John R. Ross - Wikipedia

RIP linguist Haj Ross (1938-2025) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R....

where in england was this?

absence makes the sartre go ponder

i meant that seems like a straightforward case where appeals to innateness etc. play a crucial, useful role in the theory (and fwiw that's typically how i read the claims of universality in GB – constraining the hypothesis space for acquisition)

meaning the claim of universality is of some use here

even in a theory of the acquisition process?

i'm imagining a theory that says something like "the kid doesn't entertain low attachment of "why" in (1)

(1) why did you ask whether the teacher gave us homework

because the ECP is universal"

i'm super curious, was there a particular claim that prompted the post? i can't think of a time off the top of my head where the fudge about idiosyncratic terminology happens

oh sure, i wouldn't defend any actual GB era condition (though the main ones like subjacency, ECP, etc. i think are like 90% right in terms of empirical coverage)

but i don't think the arguments for those (putatively universal) conditions were bad arguments

though i do say this as a 1960s-mid 1980s syntax stan

sure, sometimes this is wrong when there *is* variation (telling you premise ii is false in those cases), but more often than not, that turns out to be related to a whole family of differences in the relevant lang

do you think this goes wrong somewhere?

imo the general form of argument isn't bad! chomsky's discussion of parasitic gaps is a great ex:

i) pgs are subject to conditions x y z in english
ii) no way these are learned from the input
→ pgs are subject to these conditions x-linguistically

lather rinse repeat for movement, binding, etc.