Monday, September 12, 2011

Linguistic Links: two unrelated but intriguing phenomena

So. I'm sure most if not all of you are already deeply buried in readings for your classes, but I wanted to post a couple links to some interesting goings-on in the linguistics world. Well worth checking out, even if the checking-out has to be postponed until Thanksgiving or winter break.

(I will be posting more links to articles etc. throughout the year...good for bookmarking...for that rainy/foggy/cold San Francisco day when the only thing you want to do is cradle a coffee and imbibe a fascinating snippet of linguistics research...)

The first one is called "Meet The Computer That Tells The 'That's What She Said' Joke Better Than You":
http://www.businessinsider.com/thats-what-she-said-computer-technology-2011-4
Read about robots and double entendre/humor identification!
(Scroll to just below the article to access the actual paper.)

The second is entitled "Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Piraha don't have numbers":
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html
It's a talk with Daniel L. Everett (and accompanying full text) about recursion, and how the language of a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon challenges the Chomskian claim that recursion is the essential property of human language.

Enjoy!

-Hannah

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