I like the fact that he is skeptical of many different points, whether they be identified as "conservative" in modern lingo or not. Conservatism, for all the rhetoric out there, can leave a bad taste in many people's mouths, so I find it interesting that he is not a "evangelist" of conservatism, who insist that conservative ideals must be spread across the world. That, to me, is a bit refreshing.

I certainly lean towards a conservative points of view, but the idea that one person has all the answers is something that I am skeptical towards.

Thanks for sharing!

Well, I'll not delve more in to my point of view, then. Hit me with PMs if you so desire for my quick version of conservatism

As for cool ideas, one I stumbled upon at the book store today that is edited by George R.R. Martin and is a collection of stories about "old school Mars," and the golden age of science fiction style. This, of course, is referencing "Princess of Mars" and other books where Mars is not a barren dust bowl but a exotic planet of canals, aliens and the like: http://www.amazon.com/Old-Mars-George-R … s=old+mars

One of the reasons I enjoy books like this so much is because it really is a look back in to human history and how we viewed the world. The process now of trying to write science fiction can be laborious indeed due the need and expectation of more realistic technology, the hazards of space travel, the length of time it would take, etc. Instead, the style recalls more of a sense of adventure, rather than the technical aspects of technology.

Good job with that whole "not turning this thread political" thing guys. Thumbs up.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2013-11-07 08:07:17)

White text on a black background is the only thing that separates man from the animals, bucko.

Hummingbirds aren't real.  RON PAUL 2012

Ok, this is kinda sad, but the first thing that came into my head was something professional.  I still remember as clearly as if it were yesterday being told this in like day 3 of Linguistics 110: Introduction to Linguistics, and it's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing now.  (This will generally work for only native or near-native speakers of English, so apologies for the people that this leaves out.) 

To start with, consider the following question, taken completely in isolation and without any context whatsoever:

Which relatives do you want to visit?

Without any context, this question is actually ambiguous.  There are two different situations/actions/states of affairs that this question could be asking about.  In actual normal use, the context will tell you which question the speaker is asking, but without that context it could be either.  So the first question is: what are those two readings/interpretations for the question?

So that already raises an interesting question:  how do you know that?  I'm 100% sure you weren't taught it at school.  And because context almost always tells you which interpretation is intended, I'd be surprised if you'd ever noticed the ambiguity before. 

However, it gets more interesting.  In 'fast' speech or 'sloppy' speech, want and to are frequently contracted to wanna.  Given the preceding discussion, how does that affect the question?

Which relatives do you wanna visit? 

Now for people who share the intuition (which is hopefully most of you), that's really weird.  I'm really sure that at school or in a grammar class or something, nobody ever told you anything about wanna, or if they did it was just "don't use it writing" or "it's sloppy" or something.  So how do you know the fact in the spoiler, instantly and without any prior training?  And how do we all know it, given our different background, linguistic experiences when acquiring English, etc.?

So the intuitions are themselves interesting, but where do they come from?  The explanation also raises interesting issues.  The standard explanation for the ambiguity goes something like this (in a somewhat simplified form):  the rule for forming English wh-questions (questions involving who, what, how, when, etc.) requires moving the "wh-word" to the front of the sentence (among other things, which we'll put to one side).  And this requirement erases a distinction between two different "underlying" structures.

You want which relatives to visit --> Which relatives do you want to visit?

You want to visit which relatives --> Which relative do you want to visit?

So the first one is the underlying source for the "which relatives do you want to come and visit you" interpretation, and the second one is the underlying source for the "which relatives do you want to go and visit" interpretation.  But the distinction is erased in the surface question; hence the ambiguity.

The phenomenon of wanna-contraction, as it's called, then provides striking evidence for the reality of these underlying structures.  If we say that want and to can only contract to wanna when they're next to each other in at this underlying level, we explain why "which relatives do you wanna visit?" is not ambiguous, and specifically why it only has the "go and visit" reading.  Once you do wanna-contraction, only the second underlying structure is a possible source for the speaker's question.

So anyway, I don't mean to have a little mini-lecture or anything, but I thought that was really cool when I was 17, and still do actually. Perhaps no one else does, but that's the risk one takes I suppose.

Well, I guess there's a couple issues here, although I think they boil down to the same observation:  the fact that these phenomena are pretty systematic.  If it were just laziness, or a result of individual speakers just idiosyncratically doing whatever, I don't think you'd expect the intuitions/judgements to be as uniform as they seem to be.  (And I should say that I cut out a slight hedge in the original post which I should have left.  My students, who are speakers of British English, don't always have the ambiguity, and that may be relevant here.  As far as I know, it works for American English though.)

Here's another contrast which might work better (where the leading asterisk indicates that the sentence is claimed to be ill-formed/ungrammatical):

The child seems to be sick/The child seems sick
The child seems to be sleeping/*The child seems sleeping

I suspect if we did a 'proper' study, and polled everyone on the site, virtually everybody would agree with the indicated intuitions.  So I'm not sure that the laziness or "delete stuff that's clear from context" story is going to work.  Clearly there's some difference between 'to be sick' and 'to be sleeping', but now you're going beyond the "just laziness" story and starting to build up a theory of what's actually going on.  And, again, I'm not sure "laziness" explains the (I suspect near) uniformity of judgements.

(Notice too that the ungrammatical one is completely comprehensible.  If a foreigner or something produced it you'd have no difficulty understanding what they meant.  So comprehensibility doesn't entail grammaticality.) 

I see where you're coming from, and sure in terms of actual language use you'll always have some kind of context.  But I wouldn't agree that it's impossible to remove sentences from any (relevant) context.  I think the example does exactly that.  Sure there's a meta-linguistic context "here's a neat observation about English", but there's no context that bears on the choice of interpretation.  Again, if it's a fact that one or the other interpretation is preferred, that's also interesting and something you'd want to explain, but you want to make sure that that explanation doesn't wrongly lead to the prediction that the other interpretation should be impossible.

Last edited by sellew (2013-11-07 14:00:51)

You need this shirt:

Well, you know me.  Fighting, films, cooking, parenting, buddhism, nerd shit, Civil War History, and Polynesian culture are pretty are pretty much all I do.  So with that in mind, here's a little untold tale of World War 2 that I've been adapting into a Historical based Graphic Novel Script.

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetective … -incident/

Speakers up

http://lolkant.ytmnd.com/

Bringin' it back.

Long story short, wireless electricity is close to becoming a thing. And when that happens, it'll change the world. Forget just never having your cell phone run out of charge. We'll be able to drive all-electric cars with charging stations placed regularly along roads, with no need for gasoline at all. We'll be able to have drones deliver mail constantly recharging from stations below. The implications and possibilities are damn near endless. Of course, it won't happen without corporations doing their damnedest to stop it, but still. Fuck that's cool.

Yikes. That's...I don't even have words for how unfortunate that is.