

Rules no one teaches but everyone learns - quoderat
http://blogs.csmonitor.com/verbal_energy/2007/05/rules_no_one_te.html

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byrneseyeview
"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon.
I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing
about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great
dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do.
The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I
ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with
language."

\-- J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter to W.H. Auden (7 June 1955)

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kurtosis
This is the kind of thing that should be picked up by statistical parsers
which presumably use patterns like this to choose the "correct" parse of a
sentence from the multitude of possibilities. Of course it is more meaningful
when a human points it out.

The "Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material ::
purpose" hierarchy should enable inferences about the meaning of words which
have never been seen before. It would be really interesting to see if someone
could construct something like wordnet from inferences based on patterns like
this.

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frankus
If you enjoyed this article, check out the book _The_Language_Instinct_ by
Steven Pinker, which is all about the cognitive basis behind language.

He has a good followup that I haven't quite gotten through yet, called
_The_Stuff_of_Thought_ that's a bit more about how rules of language serve as
clues to how the brain processes information.

A couple of his other books are less related to language, but equally good:
_The_Blank_Slate_ and _How_the_Mind_Works_.

They're all pretty accessible (certainly to a crowd like the one that reads
HN), if not exactly light reading.

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joe_bleau
I just finished _The Blank Slate_ a few weeks ago. I had the overriding
impression that it could have been 50% shorter had he been a little less
defensive. Too much of the book seemed to be pre-emptive explanations to
defuse potential criticisms or misinterpretations of some of his arguments.
I've never read a book like this before, so maybe that style is common to the
genre and I just didn't know to expect it?

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jk4930
It's probably defensive because most folks in the sociology / humanities
departments _hate_ evolutionary psychology, sociobiology etc. and call it
fascist, racist, elitist. Trust me on this, I know their reactions on such
topics.

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omouse
Yeah, considering that the evolutionary psychologists don't actually
understand evolution, their defensiveness is expected:
<http://www.slate.com/id/2124503/>

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jamroom
I would actually disagree that these rules are not "taught" - I believe they
are taught and learned, just as language is taught and learned, and the order
in which you place adjectives, and in fact the entire language "structure"
will in large degree depend on your primary language, and how your parents
talked to you as an infant/toddler/child.

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timr
I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that "layered" adjectives don't
require commas. _"His battered old canvas fishing hat"_ certainly seems as
though it could use a pause. But then, I tend to think of commas as as
indicators of verbal pacing more than strict grammatical constructs.

~~~
twoz
_"His battered old canvas fishing hat"_

Sans-comma Questions:

    
    
      Is it a battered old hat used for canvas fishing?
    
      Does he have two battered canvas fishing hats of which this one is the older of the two?

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tokenadult
PLEASE don't indent unless you mean to show code samples line-by-line.

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Zev
I don't think its that big of a deal in this case; it didn't cause the window
to stretch (Unless your browser is < ~650px). And it was a good example to
have laid out like that.

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russell
I didn't know I knew that, but now that I know I know it, maybe my words wont
step on each other any more.

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ambulatorybird
This is pretty cool. I remember once joking with a friend, and I offhandedly
described her office as being in a "little crappy building". As soon as it
came out of my mouth, I realized it should have been "crappy little building"
(opinion precedes size).

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madcaptenor
A little crappy building would be a building which contains small amounts of
crap, I think.

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nostrademons
I'd parse it as (a (little crappy) building), i.e. "little" becomes an adverb
modifying "crappy" instead of an adjective modifying "building".

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mlLK
This axiom could serve as a great launch-pad for introducing set theory.

