Saturday, October 15, 2011

Sentences from linguistics that make my head explode.

"Imagine a linguist considering (1):

 (1)   John owns a sofa

While pondering the meaning of (1), he finds that it is true in case John owns a sofa. This
causes him to hypothesize that (1) can mean that John owns a sofa."

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"Three is a basic existential determiner because it is true that: Three cats are in the tree iff three cats which are in the tree exist."

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"Berman (1974) briefly mentions nominal-AIC readings in her discussion of 'hard nuts' (which I call clausal AICs)."

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"Note that we have examples like Get the fuck up those stairs, where again the fuck is after a verb before a PP, and is semantically inert (the utterance means "Get up those stairs"). And in both cases, the PP is obligatory: neither *Shut the fuck nor *Get the fuck are grammatical with the pleonastic reading of the fuck.
Second, the fuck can co-occur with a direct object NP: I don't know how a full-grown Burmese python got into this maternity ward, but get it the fuck out of here before it eats any babies.

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"In other words, pretty much all of the data discussed by Rizzi and Cinque, save for extraposition islands of the it is time to ... type (B4)."

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