Tuesday, August 3, 2010

discourse is that thing...

Hal Daume, NLPer extraordinaire, waxes poetic on discourse and concludes that interpretation is abduction  where the purpose of discourse is to give you an interpretation about whatever is not in the sentence itself given that you assume the sentence must be coherent. Money quote: what do we have to assume about the world to make this discourse coherent?

It was a modest post by a very smart man, but it all seemed a little too Grice-lite to me. But Daume gets bonus points for the Jerry Hobbs shout out. Not enough linguists read Hobbs.

Snowclone bait: isn't 'Xer extraordinaire' a snowclone? Time to email Erin...

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TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...