I'd like to point out to you that there's actually a fairly well-known class of grammatical entities, a kind of quantifier called "minimizers" (a cursory search for my favourite one and the word minimizers on google returns this.)
Just for your edification.... What's the difference between the following: 1. John knows fuck all about Linux. 2. John doesn't know fuck all about Linux. 3. Mary has done shit all day. 4. Mary hasn't done shit all day.
"care less" is in the same class. The truth values of these sentences do not change from positive to negated contexts. A friend of mine is currently writing a paper I don't agree with her about on whether or not items that cause sentential negation in French are in fact negation or minimizers or another beast entirely "negative polarity items."
So let's not fight about this. They're grammatical.
lies, I think, in whether or not you can still perform day-to-day tasks while still performing the compulsive behaviour.
For instance, people find it difficult to stop, say, biting their fingernails. It probably releases the same sort of dopamine response in the brain that playing PacMan, gambling or surfing the 'net does. But few people recognize fingernail-nibbling as an addiction; it's a bad habit, but it doesn't have the stigma of an addiction, or it doesn't have the excuse of being an addiction. You can, while still nibbling away all the while, accomplish almost anything else.
On the other hand, internet addiction is not a prime candidate for multitasking. If you're reading slashdot, you're not writing the Jenkins report. If you're playing a flash game, you're not reading those articles from Science that you should be for your dissertation.
I'd say that any repetitive pattern of behaviour can become impossible to stop -- but we only rationalize it as an addiction when it interferes with other normative/positive/goal-directed behaviours.
No, we don't want people to have to think while driving. The thing is, the more people think, the slower they become. For instance, when you open a door (see Norman 1988 for this particular argument in detail), if it's a well-designed door (ie, something with clear norms of operation) you can open it without thinking. If you come to a door that is poorly designed and you have to think about it, it's going to take you MUCH LONGER to react and successfully interact with the door, ie, to enter or exit whichever room or building you are attempting to enter or exit.
Do you want people to slow down their reaction times significantly while they're moving at 80 km/h? Cause I certainly don't.
by removing traffic signs, you're removing the heuristics drivers use to make their decisions easier. This sounds like a good thing, but if you know anything about psychology, you know that it is NOT AT ALL. People don't know how to behave without clear norms. They have to think EVERYTHING through, which slows down their reaction times and increases their error rates.
And in this case, error rates may be expressed in terms of human lives lost. Not good.
I'm sure I'm not the only student forced to contend with the horror that is WebCTVista and FireFox. Regardless of where I use it -- on my laptop, at school, at home, on my room mate's computer -- FireFox loves to hang, in conjunction with Java. Does 2.0 fix this at all, anyone who knows?
Funny, we have no problem with the advantages which athletic and beautiful people have. These are somewhat related to IQ though, via general health, helping us to remain in denial of IQ.
I think you'll find many of the people who reject IQ as being culturally-bound are often exactly the people lamenting that people are treated better based on their looks. There is, in case you hadn't been paying attention to feminism lately, a whole lot of "fat-positivity" going around. (Not that I necessarily agree with it, there's nothing particularly good about being an unhealthy weight; but to wit: weight discrimination is far more prevalent and far more damaging in today's society than race discrimination. Fat people get hired less, for worse jobs, get married less often and are way more depressed. Might just be correlation, but it's still worrisome.)
That said, the tests often are western biased, but this might be without even noticing it. There are principles of language use that you might not even think about as being non-obvious. But take a casual learner of French and give them the following dialogue,
"A: Etes-vous certaine? B: Oui, je suis certaine. Qu'en penses-tu?"
And ask them something along the lines of, "The relationship depicted above is A - two male co-workers, B - two female co-workers, C - A male boss and a female underling or D - A female boss and a male underling" and they'd be likely to get it wrong based on not knowing what sorts of "conventional implicatures" (I'd link to the wiki, but it's lamentably inaccurate) are being made by the pronoun use. What's more, there are huge problems testing children brought up in one language, but educated in another.
And, last, the people who usually clamour that IQ doesn't mean anything are usually the ones that decry Western society as leaving these very people behind, not the ones that wish to prop up our individual-is-all-greater-good-be-damned system.
There goes a promising career path. I know any technology can be used for good or for evil, but in today's political climate, it seems especially irresponsible to be aiding and abetting what may wind up becoming the pretext for torture of some 16 year old blogger.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare myself for my upcoming extraordinary rendition....
OK. So the following is basically ripped off from Dr Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, but the essential difference between the two phrases, and the clue that "I could care less" is sarcastic is the prosody on each of the sentences. In "I couldn't care less," the stress looks like
i COULDn't care LESS
On the other hand, with "I could care less," the stress is more like
i could CARE less
This is actually fairly reliable. Listen carefully for it; whether or not people INTEND it sarcastically, the stress they use in "I could care less" makes it easier to INTERPRET as being sarcastic than sincere.
of the scans they performed to determine this. It'd be interesting to know exactly which structures were bypassed.
Why?
Well, being a university student in both psychology and linguistics gives me a certain....shall we say, schizophrenic view of language and the brain.
On the linguistics side, we have people who claim that Broca and Wernicke's areas constitute, from birth, a specialized language acquisition device, which requires only minimal input to intuit, from innate knowledge and ambient language, the grammatically correct structure of one's native tongue.
On the psych side, I seem to lean much more towards the connectionist viewpoint: ie, nothing is innate; reccurent patterns strengthen connections in a hebbian fashion, and theoretically any sort of neural network for problem solving is possible. Yes, the brain does seem to develop in fairly regular ways, but who's to say that's not because of similar inputs across the human population? We do, after all, share the same earth...
The patient did not speak for years, and then suddenly found it possible to do so nineteen years later - was there damage to the primary speech areas? If so, what rerouting made it possible for him to speak? Doesn't any rerouting (particularly if it does not lead to violations of principals of "Universal Grammar") give the lie to a strict Chomskyan viewpoint?
Neurology is utterly, utterly fascinating. It saddens me greatly that I haven't the training in biology to be useful at all in it.
...well, except that Harper acts as though he has a majority (because apparently "Canadians don't want to go to the polls again so soon" and thus the other parties are afraid to do anything to upset the current parliamentary situation; also, the liberals' not having any leadership right now is something of a problem) and doesn't like to talk to the media about what he's doing.
Just because he's farther left than some Democrats doesn't mean he's in line with many Canadians' values. I'm sorry that the American political system forces you to choose between a pot and a kettle, but that doesn't mean that a man who heads a party whose views are not in line with those of most urban Canadians should be free from criticism.
The kid is in ninth grade. I don't know what it's like where this kid lives, but where I lived, that meant the following things:
1 - We were allowed off school premises for lunch and any and all spares we had. The lunch thing was also the case in grade 8, but we didn't have spares back then. Obviously, having gone to schools in downtown locations for the duration of my schooling, there was no way that we could be supervised by teachers or responsible people at all during that time. 2 - We were expected to make our own way home via public transportation. There were no schoolbuses waiting to pick us up and take us safely home to the watchful gaze of our ever vigilant parents. Shocking. 3 - Occasionally, we went to hang out with friends after school rather than going straight home. Now, I personally didn't always call my parents immediately. I'm a bad daughter, maybe, but hey look I'm still alive.
This kid was terminally naive. Parents have a responsibility to make their kids tech, and more generally, world savvy; they do not necessarily have a responsibility to watch them ALL THE TIME. At the age of 14, kids should have more independence, and especially, more discernment than that. Otherwise they'll never learn to function on their own. They'll never be safe.
uhm, or, the more usual reason people take them in a post-secondary conext, allow you to stay up ALL NIGHT to finish your paper on the Christological Meta-Ethics of Third-Wave Feminism Among Transsexuals in Modern India.
Nice, but no, that's not always the case. The divide between rich and poor doesn't just stop at the household. Schools where the majority of kids are poor tend to get left behind (presidential campaign or no.)
Underfunded schools likely don't have kids who have PSPs, iPods and cell phones as the general rule... and it's often most likely not the parents who were affording them.
Although here, this is the government's fault. The government can afford to get better equipment for the children, despite any griping it might do.
Maybe I'm not a representative sample of your general chick. But growing up (ie, from the age of 7 onwards) I thought programming was the coolest shit ever. I was that kid who would write never-ending batch files and add them into the autoexec.bat file of the class computer; who would unpassword protect program groups in win3.1. I went to computer camp.
What was the difference? I guess maybe that I was in a class filled with devious "gifted" kids. We were a sneaky, spiteful lot. Anything that we could "cleverly" ruin, we'd get kudos for from peers. We'd get in trouble, of course -- but it was social capital to have the reputation for being able to do things.
I think that a lot of the problem is not that computer programming isn't pretty. It's that it's stigmatized as nerdy; and girls internalize that they don't want to be nerdy. They need the opportunity to see what kind of stuff you can do with computers (ie, almost anything you want). They need to realize that it's a viable way to express yourself, and that it is a supremely useful tool.
Even if they don't go into computing, generalized programming skills are incredibly useful. I myself didn't (I had the choice between electrical engineering and linguistics; I chose the latter) but knowing how to design simple algorithms has helped me automate stupid repetitive tasks that my roommate does by hand. Having a basic understanding of java, perl, lisp etc. so far hasn't gotten me any jobs, but I'm happy to have it. Girls don't generally get interested in computers because there's nothing they get out of it socially (even guys, to a point, have some sort of machismo hacker culture to rely on, which I guess I tapped into at the age of 11.) Figure out how to develop that, and you'll see rates of female enrollment skyrocket.
Let's not forget his little campaign to deny national journalists access to him, in favour of speaking directly to regional reporters, whose views he feels are "more in line with his own."
Harper has taken some bizarre, anti-informative, anti-democratic stands in his last.... what, has it only been a hundred or so days? in power. He seems to resent that there is no puppet media outlet a` la FoxNews who will spin his denying cheap access to daycare to working mothers as a "great move to strengthen FamilyValues," or the war in Afghanistan as a "heroic mission aiding to spread democracy across the middle east."
And yet, it seems he's more popular than ever. Go figure.
If that was the case, wouldn't a CT or MRI scan have revealed that immediately, ending all debate? Why were we subjected to this melodrama on CNN for a month and a half?
OK. So maybe advertising is not the most evil enterprise on the face of the earth.... but it is one of the most insidious.
Who makes it so that when you think GE you think fMRI, lightbulbs and NBC rather than nuclear weapons? Advertisers, and their big-brothers, PR people.
Who diverts your attention from the bunnies in shackles testing cosmetics to the voluptuous lashes and attractive partners you'll have if you only use Brand X's mascara? Advertisers.
Who makes you believe that the high price of patented medicine needs to remain high at the expense of the third world and in the interests of the pharmaceutical companies? Advertisers.
So yes, there are companies out there doing more active evil than advertisers. But advertisers play their part in squelching public dissent. They produce the ignorance that allows injustice to continue.
In fact, if you care to look at "gay" through the ages, you'll find that the etymology of the "homosexual" meaning of "gay" is from Victorian slang applied to people in the sex-trades. That meaning is now lost, of course, though it was connected with the "happy" "gay" we still (kind of) retain -- it refered to one consumed with the wanton persuit of pleasure.
is that computational linguistics still hasn't been able to make reasonable progress into Pragmatics; but then again, neither has plain-old-offline linguistics, so that's not unexpected.
Is there nothing Bayesian/connectionist we can do? Some sort of probabilistic contextual indicator of meaning? With-what-certainty-do-I-as-a-machine-believe-this -to-be-sarcasm-or-wordplay?
It's still basically a mystery how we understand metaphor and sarcasm as quickly as we do (despite the Gricean notion that they involve some kind of reanalysis, there's no processing delay: an argument, some say, for a presemantic pragmatics...)
Something with a semantic web could probably determine what was going on in wordplay.... and might shed light onto how we as humans understand these "problematic" (from a generative/UG point of view) utterances. Maybe then we could get past issues like the following sentence:
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
I'm needfully vague here, as I myself am not (currently) a CL...
These RIAA lawsuits remind me of the McCarthy era witch hunts: they have the capacity to ruin lives, sacrificing them to some perceived threat to societal organization or business models.
But unlike witchhunts 50 years ago, these have little to no public support. Everyone lives in fear, and few in the public think the issue is a problem. Likely, no amount of propagandising is going to convince the public at large that their illegal downloading of free music of the internet is going to harm multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations. Lawsuits like these only make them look petty and vindictive. They have the effect of making people less willing to purchase music from RIAA labels; instead, people just become sneakier about their downloading, if they're savvy, or hope that because there have been relatively few lawsuits to date, they have a statistical likelihood of not getting caught that makes it in their favour to continue.
I'm not about to say that musicians don't deserve remuneration for their talents. But these lawsuits are verging on extortion. People's natural inclination is self-interest, unfortunately, which means that as long as they can get something for free, they will attempt to. I don't propose to make musicians charity cases, where their income is contingent on the public taking pity on them and paying them in accordance with their ability and appeal. But something has to give -- we now have unlimited supply of recorded musical content. Regardless of what demand exists, the price rational people should be willing to pay for money is $0. These lawsuits, while they're attempting to make it riskier to pay nothing for music, will be ineffectual.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for your edification.... What's the difference between the following:
1. John knows fuck all about Linux.
2. John doesn't know fuck all about Linux.
3. Mary has done shit all day.
4. Mary hasn't done shit all day.
"care less" is in the same class. The truth values of these sentences do not change from positive to negated contexts. A friend of mine is currently writing a paper I don't agree with her about on whether or not items that cause sentential negation in French are in fact negation or minimizers or another beast entirely "negative polarity items."
So let's not fight about this. They're grammatical.
lies, I think, in whether or not you can still perform day-to-day tasks while still performing the compulsive behaviour.
For instance, people find it difficult to stop, say, biting their fingernails. It probably releases the same sort of dopamine response in the brain that playing PacMan, gambling or surfing the 'net does. But few people recognize fingernail-nibbling as an addiction; it's a bad habit, but it doesn't have the stigma of an addiction, or it doesn't have the excuse of being an addiction. You can, while still nibbling away all the while, accomplish almost anything else.
On the other hand, internet addiction is not a prime candidate for multitasking. If you're reading slashdot, you're not writing the Jenkins report. If you're playing a flash game, you're not reading those articles from Science that you should be for your dissertation.
I'd say that any repetitive pattern of behaviour can become impossible to stop -- but we only rationalize it as an addiction when it interferes with other normative/positive/goal-directed behaviours.
OR is already inclusive! You don't need and there.
No, we don't want people to have to think while driving. The thing is, the more people think, the slower they become. For instance, when you open a door (see Norman 1988 for this particular argument in detail), if it's a well-designed door (ie, something with clear norms of operation) you can open it without thinking. If you come to a door that is poorly designed and you have to think about it, it's going to take you MUCH LONGER to react and successfully interact with the door, ie, to enter or exit whichever room or building you are attempting to enter or exit.
Do you want people to slow down their reaction times significantly while they're moving at 80 km/h? Cause I certainly don't.
by removing traffic signs, you're removing the heuristics drivers use to make their decisions easier. This sounds like a good thing, but if you know anything about psychology, you know that it is NOT AT ALL. People don't know how to behave without clear norms. They have to think EVERYTHING through, which slows down their reaction times and increases their error rates.
And in this case, error rates may be expressed in terms of human lives lost. Not good.
I'm sure I'm not the only student forced to contend with the horror that is WebCTVista and FireFox. Regardless of where I use it -- on my laptop, at school, at home, on my room mate's computer -- FireFox loves to hang, in conjunction with Java. Does 2.0 fix this at all, anyone who knows?
I think you'll find many of the people who reject IQ as being culturally-bound are often exactly the people lamenting that people are treated better based on their looks. There is, in case you hadn't been paying attention to feminism lately, a whole lot of "fat-positivity" going around. (Not that I necessarily agree with it, there's nothing particularly good about being an unhealthy weight; but to wit: weight discrimination is far more prevalent and far more damaging in today's society than race discrimination. Fat people get hired less, for worse jobs, get married less often and are way more depressed. Might just be correlation, but it's still worrisome.)
That said, the tests often are western biased, but this might be without even noticing it. There are principles of language use that you might not even think about as being non-obvious. But take a casual learner of French and give them the following dialogue,
And ask them something along the lines of, "The relationship depicted above is A - two male co-workers, B - two female co-workers, C - A male boss and a female underling or D - A female boss and a male underling" and they'd be likely to get it wrong based on not knowing what sorts of "conventional implicatures" (I'd link to the wiki, but it's lamentably inaccurate) are being made by the pronoun use. What's more, there are huge problems testing children brought up in one language, but educated in another.
And, last, the people who usually clamour that IQ doesn't mean anything are usually the ones that decry Western society as leaving these very people behind, not the ones that wish to prop up our individual-is-all-greater-good-be-damned system.
There goes a promising career path. I know any technology can be used for good or for evil, but in today's political climate, it seems especially irresponsible to be aiding and abetting what may wind up becoming the pretext for torture of some 16 year old blogger.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare myself for my upcoming extraordinary rendition....
Can we stop being so concerned about the 3% of people who are anorexic and start caring about the 60% of people who are overweight and obese instead?
(and neither will you, unless you find artistic merit in artifacts...)
OK. So the following is basically ripped off from Dr Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, but the essential difference between the two phrases, and the clue that "I could care less" is sarcastic is the prosody on each of the sentences. In "I couldn't care less," the stress looks like
i COULDn't care LESS
On the other hand, with "I could care less," the stress is more like
i could CARE less
This is actually fairly reliable. Listen carefully for it; whether or not people INTEND it sarcastically, the stress they use in "I could care less" makes it easier to INTERPRET as being sarcastic than sincere.
to give birth, baptise the kid, and then strangle them before they get the chance to reject God. Salvation 100% guaranteed.
(Honestly though, I love children. It's just that I could never eat a whole one...)
Don't worry, us dykes will keep at least 3 of those P's alive....
of the scans they performed to determine this. It'd be interesting to know exactly which structures were bypassed.
Why?
Well, being a university student in both psychology and linguistics gives me a certain....shall we say, schizophrenic view of language and the brain.
On the linguistics side, we have people who claim that Broca and Wernicke's areas constitute, from birth, a specialized language acquisition device, which requires only minimal input to intuit, from innate knowledge and ambient language, the grammatically correct structure of one's native tongue.
On the psych side, I seem to lean much more towards the connectionist viewpoint: ie, nothing is innate; reccurent patterns strengthen connections in a hebbian fashion, and theoretically any sort of neural network for problem solving is possible. Yes, the brain does seem to develop in fairly regular ways, but who's to say that's not because of similar inputs across the human population? We do, after all, share the same earth...
The patient did not speak for years, and then suddenly found it possible to do so nineteen years later - was there damage to the primary speech areas? If so, what rerouting made it possible for him to speak? Doesn't any rerouting (particularly if it does not lead to violations of principals of "Universal Grammar") give the lie to a strict Chomskyan viewpoint?
Neurology is utterly, utterly fascinating. It saddens me greatly that I haven't the training in biology to be useful at all in it.
...well, except that Harper acts as though he has a majority (because apparently "Canadians don't want to go to the polls again so soon" and thus the other parties are afraid to do anything to upset the current parliamentary situation; also, the liberals' not having any leadership right now is something of a problem) and doesn't like to talk to the media about what he's doing.
Just because he's farther left than some Democrats doesn't mean he's in line with many Canadians' values. I'm sorry that the American political system forces you to choose between a pot and a kettle, but that doesn't mean that a man who heads a party whose views are not in line with those of most urban Canadians should be free from criticism.
oh, come on.
The kid is in ninth grade. I don't know what it's like where this kid lives, but where I lived, that meant the following things:
1 - We were allowed off school premises for lunch and any and all spares we had. The lunch thing was also the case in grade 8, but we didn't have spares back then. Obviously, having gone to schools in downtown locations for the duration of my schooling, there was no way that we could be supervised by teachers or responsible people at all during that time.
2 - We were expected to make our own way home via public transportation. There were no schoolbuses waiting to pick us up and take us safely home to the watchful gaze of our ever vigilant parents. Shocking.
3 - Occasionally, we went to hang out with friends after school rather than going straight home. Now, I personally didn't always call my parents immediately. I'm a bad daughter, maybe, but hey look I'm still alive.
This kid was terminally naive. Parents have a responsibility to make their kids tech, and more generally, world savvy; they do not necessarily have a responsibility to watch them ALL THE TIME. At the age of 14, kids should have more independence, and especially, more discernment than that. Otherwise they'll never learn to function on their own. They'll never be safe.
uhm, or, the more usual reason people take them in a post-secondary conext, allow you to stay up ALL NIGHT to finish your paper on the Christological Meta-Ethics of Third-Wave Feminism Among Transsexuals in Modern India.
Nice, but no, that's not always the case. The divide between rich and poor doesn't just stop at the household. Schools where the majority of kids are poor tend to get left behind (presidential campaign or no.)
Underfunded schools likely don't have kids who have PSPs, iPods and cell phones as the general rule... and it's often most likely not the parents who were affording them.
Although here, this is the government's fault. The government can afford to get better equipment for the children, despite any griping it might do.
Maybe I'm not a representative sample of your general chick. But growing up (ie, from the age of 7 onwards) I thought programming was the coolest shit ever. I was that kid who would write never-ending batch files and add them into the autoexec.bat file of the class computer; who would unpassword protect program groups in win3.1. I went to computer camp.
What was the difference? I guess maybe that I was in a class filled with devious "gifted" kids. We were a sneaky, spiteful lot. Anything that we could "cleverly" ruin, we'd get kudos for from peers. We'd get in trouble, of course -- but it was social capital to have the reputation for being able to do things.
I think that a lot of the problem is not that computer programming isn't pretty. It's that it's stigmatized as nerdy; and girls internalize that they don't want to be nerdy. They need the opportunity to see what kind of stuff you can do with computers (ie, almost anything you want). They need to realize that it's a viable way to express yourself, and that it is a supremely useful tool.
Even if they don't go into computing, generalized programming skills are incredibly useful. I myself didn't (I had the choice between electrical engineering and linguistics; I chose the latter) but knowing how to design simple algorithms has helped me automate stupid repetitive tasks that my roommate does by hand. Having a basic understanding of java, perl, lisp etc. so far hasn't gotten me any jobs, but I'm happy to have it. Girls don't generally get interested in computers because there's nothing they get out of it socially (even guys, to a point, have some sort of machismo hacker culture to rely on, which I guess I tapped into at the age of 11.) Figure out how to develop that, and you'll see rates of female enrollment skyrocket.
Let's not forget his little campaign to deny national journalists access to him, in favour of speaking directly to regional reporters, whose views he feels are "more in line with his own."
Harper has taken some bizarre, anti-informative, anti-democratic stands in his last.... what, has it only been a hundred or so days? in power. He seems to resent that there is no puppet media outlet a` la FoxNews who will spin his denying cheap access to daycare to working mothers as a "great move to strengthen FamilyValues," or the war in Afghanistan as a "heroic mission aiding to spread democracy across the middle east."
And yet, it seems he's more popular than ever. Go figure.
If that was the case, wouldn't a CT or MRI scan have revealed that immediately, ending all debate? Why were we subjected to this melodrama on CNN for a month and a half?
OK. So maybe advertising is not the most evil enterprise on the face of the earth.... but it is one of the most insidious.
Who makes it so that when you think GE you think fMRI, lightbulbs and NBC rather than nuclear weapons? Advertisers, and their big-brothers, PR people.
Who diverts your attention from the bunnies in shackles testing cosmetics to the voluptuous lashes and attractive partners you'll have if you only use Brand X's mascara? Advertisers.
Who makes you believe that the high price of patented medicine needs to remain high at the expense of the third world and in the interests of the pharmaceutical companies? Advertisers.
So yes, there are companies out there doing more active evil than advertisers. But advertisers play their part in squelching public dissent. They produce the ignorance that allows injustice to continue.
In fact, if you care to look at "gay" through the ages, you'll find that the etymology of the "homosexual" meaning of "gay" is from Victorian slang applied to people in the sex-trades. That meaning is now lost, of course, though it was connected with the "happy" "gay" we still (kind of) retain -- it refered to one consumed with the wanton persuit of pleasure.
Semantic shift happens. Deal with it, people!
is that computational linguistics still hasn't been able to make reasonable progress into Pragmatics; but then again, neither has plain-old-offline linguistics, so that's not unexpected.
s -to-be-sarcasm-or-wordplay?
Is there nothing Bayesian/connectionist we can do? Some sort of probabilistic contextual indicator of meaning? With-what-certainty-do-I-as-a-machine-believe-thi
It's still basically a mystery how we understand metaphor and sarcasm as quickly as we do (despite the Gricean notion that they involve some kind of reanalysis, there's no processing delay: an argument, some say, for a presemantic pragmatics...)
Something with a semantic web could probably determine what was going on in wordplay.... and might shed light onto how we as humans understand these "problematic" (from a generative/UG point of view) utterances. Maybe then we could get past issues like the following sentence:
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
I'm needfully vague here, as I myself am not (currently) a CL...
These RIAA lawsuits remind me of the McCarthy era witch hunts: they have the capacity to ruin lives, sacrificing them to some perceived threat to societal organization or business models.
But unlike witchhunts 50 years ago, these have little to no public support. Everyone lives in fear, and few in the public think the issue is a problem. Likely, no amount of propagandising is going to convince the public at large that their illegal downloading of free music of the internet is going to harm multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations. Lawsuits like these only make them look petty and vindictive. They have the effect of making people less willing to purchase music from RIAA labels; instead, people just become sneakier about their downloading, if they're savvy, or hope that because there have been relatively few lawsuits to date, they have a statistical likelihood of not getting caught that makes it in their favour to continue.
I'm not about to say that musicians don't deserve remuneration for their talents. But these lawsuits are verging on extortion. People's natural inclination is self-interest, unfortunately, which means that as long as they can get something for free, they will attempt to. I don't propose to make musicians charity cases, where their income is contingent on the public taking pity on them and paying them in accordance with their ability and appeal. But something has to give -- we now have unlimited supply of recorded musical content. Regardless of what demand exists, the price rational people should be willing to pay for money is $0. These lawsuits, while they're attempting to make it riskier to pay nothing for music, will be ineffectual.