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April 20, 2005
habemus linguam?
Language Log always has a load of interesting stuff on it.
Bill Poser just posted an interesting discussion of the syntactic ambiguity of Quebec English Teachers and a most unnatural intended interpretation, and Geoff Pullum’s post Habemus Linguam? uses yesterday’s communication from the Sistine Chapel to make a point about the definition of linguistics. The sentence from Syntactic Structures that puzzled Pullum in his early days is:
From now on I will consider a ‘language’ to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.
B-)
Posted by Billy at April 20, 2005 5:04 PM
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