Tuesday, May 11th, 2004

Time	Event
1:00p	phonologically meaningless Escher sentences are grammatical (?) but meaningless. There are various other kinds meeting that description: semantic-compositionally meaningless ones like 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' and lexically meaningless ones like 'Iggle squiggs trazed wombly in the harlish goop'. So that's syntax, semantics (i.e. at LF), and lexicon (ie. word semantics) covered. Are there grammatical but phonologically meaningless sentences? (Google has no hits for that yet.) How about this, with contrastive emphasis on something that can't take contrast, not syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically: Jenny is taller THAN Susan. (1 Comment | Comment on this)
1:25p	more puzzling than I I've noticed another curious fact about Escher sentences: a dictum of prescriptive grammar gives an interpretable reading. Unfortunately that grammar itself doesn't work. Consider the prescription to write 'taller than I' instead of 'taller than me', the logic being that it's an elliptical form of 'taller than I am'. Now consider the interpretable 'More people than me have been to Russia'. Turn this into prescriptive grammar, 'More people than I have been to Russia', then extrapose the adjunct, 'More people have been to Russia than I', then reverse the presumed ellipsis: 'More people have been to Russia than I have'. The reason even this won't work as an explanation is that 'more people than me' has no elliptical verb: 'more people than I am'? I'm one person and there are five of them so they're more people than I am? Than I am what? We're also ellipsing a complement, and there's none that makes sense: more people than I am people? more people than I am a person? You can do the extraposition all right: more than ten people, ??more people than ten, but heavy shift allows it: more people than were directly affected. And these do have ellipsed elements, but they're NPs: more people than ten people. The heavy-shifted one has something extra going on that I don't want to think about: more people than people who were directly affected, more people than there were people directly affected. So not just NP ellipsis. Oh wait, we can avoid that problem with either of these: more people than the ten (who were) directly affected. But anyway, 'more people than me' can't be reshaped into a prescriptive 'more people than I (somethinged)'. So the extraposition and ellipsis-reversion solution won't work. Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: Beethoven, Quartet in B flat, op. 130 (2 Comments | Comment on this)
7:47p	MST and exquisitely bad sentences I have discovered MST; and I have discovered it from what (on this limited sample) I hazard to be the funniest MST of all time, operating on the worst stories of all time. There is one prior googlehit for "Escher sentence" before its recent coinage on Language Log, and though it's not exactly the same thing, it's definitely the same inspiration: Frodo nearly didn't escape, but with one less finger. Back: As opposed to the last time he nearly didn't escape, back when he had two less fingers. Restless: Ooh. Could said finger be up your ass, scratching around, trying to find a Coherant Thought? Tele: *blinks. reads sentence again. blinks more* No matter how you slice it, that's still not making sense. Kyuu: This is sort of like one of those Escher paintings, like with the stairways. Or a moebius strip. You keep going round and round trying to make sense of it. The actual words "It's the Escher sentence again!" occur slightly later, commenting on a different sentence, but the first one is the doozy. Though the meaning is clear, it's quite incoherent, and you do chase up and down trying to find a one-word change that would fix it. I am tempted to submit it to a list of sentences to be analysed in ProperTreatment: ResearchIdea, though I've only just found that page*. What those commentators are doing to that wretched sentence is MSTing it, a fan fiction term for taking apart bad fan fictions line by line. It derives from a television show called Mystery Science Theater that did this to bad movies. This particular MST site is The Mountain O' Mock, and they have five stories dissected. I have only read two because I was too weak with laughter and brain uncleanliness to continue, so I'm saving the others up. This one, The Dark of the Moon, is a quite astoundingly ill-written account of Aragorn rescuing a half-elven Mary Sue lying by the roadside. The mockers are quite hilariously brutal. The other one I read was very different in character, an account of the traditional Star Trek mass raping holiday that brings gratuitous nastiness to new depths. * via Chris Potts via Kai von Fintel via A Roguish Chrestomathy -- it's a wiki of some kind whose exact purpose eludes me Current Mood: giggly Current Music: Bach, Brandenburg Concertos (4 Comments | Comment on this)

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