Language Module

Yesterday’s reading for Syntax Reading Group was Asya Pereltsvaig’s Negative Polarity Items in Russian and the ‘Bagel Problem’, and it was interesting for a lot of the same reason’s that I enjoyed last week’s paper.
Basically, the so-called ‘bagel problem’ is this. There are two (types of) negative polarity items in Russian that are in [...]

As a kind of followup to yesterday’s post - I notice that today on PrawfsBlog there is a post about whether to use “data” and “media” with plural agreement. Prawfs comes down firmly on the side of singular agreement - which I personally applaud.

‘Media’ and ‘data’ are mass nouns expressing uncountable quantities. When used [...]

Every profession has its bugbears - those bits of “common sense” that fall into its domain that the public earnestly believes in but which are totally incoherent when examined. For Economists, it’s the make-work fallacy, for Astronomers, it’s the idea that proximity to the sun causes the seasons, for Statisticians it’s likely to [...]

In Syntax Reading Group we’ve been reading Negation in Slavic, a collection of papers on the titular subject. Today’s was The Morphosyntax of Polish Verbal Negation: Towards an HPSG Account by Anna Kupść. It’s an interesting paper because it really hammers home the differences between HPSG and the so-called “Standard Theory.”
There’s an attribution [...]