… as this parody of Sarah Palin’s interview style demonstrates. It generates palin-esque answers using a Markov chain based on samples of her own speech. Here’s an example:
Q: How will you fix the economy?
A: Our economy and putting it back on the war on terror. And I asked President Karzai, “Is that what President Bush has attempted to do with foreign policy and national security issues Let me speak specifically about a credential that I just gave you. But, again, we’ve got to be talking about the need to pursue those and we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we need to be considered also. But again, it’s got to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that is the taxpayers looking to bail out.
Well, I’ve been spending most of my time feeding a baby and/or reading about infant sleep lately. (Please do not point out the obvious fact that rather than reading about infant sleep I should be indulging in some of my own…) At any rate, linguistics is backburner through the rest of this summer as our family gets settled down.
In the mean time, Jason Merchant was good enough to send along this mismatch datum, one of those rare active/passive mismatches. (Passive antecedents for active targets abound, but I’ve found relatively few naturally occurring cases of the reverse.) Thanks, Jason!
“But when credit cards are handed out to unsophisticated consumers — as they often are in shopping malls, factories and university campuses in middle-income developing countries — they can pile up debts that can take years to pay off, if they ever are. ” (”Outside U.S., Credit Cards Tighten Grip”, NY Times, By MARK LANDLER Published: August 9, 2008 )
Emily is here! She arrived June 28. This is her the next day getting her hearing test. I am embarrassed to say that I was expecting someone to come in an snap a finger or bang a pot to see if she turned. (This is how we tested our cats as they aged.) Whaddaya know, they put electrodes on and monitored her brain stem response to soft clicking sounds presented through ear phones. The audiologist was none to impressed with my excitement about the procedure.
This newscast brings together two of my favorite topics: pronoun interpretation and prosody. (Warning: the story that the announcer botches is horrific.)
