Noncompositional

This past Saturday, thanks to Mark Liberman’s tip, I made my way over to some sort of major California city across the bay from my humble residence, and took in my weekly extracurricular linguistics class (also in attendance was a dubious girlfriend and a few linguist colleagues). Actually, first I heard the slam poetry of D. Blaine, and got exposed to the work of action/romance novelist Liz Maverick. But for me (and seemingly for a fair number of people in the crowd), the spotlight event was none other than some grey-haired professor of…linguistics?.

Geoff Pullum read juicy selections from the Language Log companion book, Far From The Madding Gerund, including a retelling of the classic (?) panda joke, and (what seemed to get the best response), OICTIQ. If Writers With Drinks had existed in the mid 1980s, I’m sure audiences would have been treated to the essentials of GPSG, an equally thrilling book, though probably best enjoyed at a frat party, rather than a Mission-district tavern.

In the following intermission I braved my way through a sea of adoring fans to find the now-very-hip Pullum, and acquired a little something. On the way I learned that GKP’s part-of-speech tagger (which, incidentally, has helped to save the world multiple times, or at least the MC said so) uses an HMM, and also apparently uses a hybrid of Martian and parrot technology. But, curiously enough, it still classes worth as an adjective. Well, you can’t get everything right.

Unfortunately, I missed the rest of the acts; previous engagements and all. But I do feel sorry for them; who (or what), after all, can top linguistics?