Apropos of nothing, here is a blog post with this week’s suggested readings for a class that I’m teaching. Some of them are quite interesting and not at all technical. In particular, the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax piece by Geoffrey Pullum talks about issues that have come up multiple times in the Comments section of this blog, and the Social stratification of (r) in New York City department stores piece by William Labov is quite fascinating if you’re interested in language and society.
Suggested readings for Weeks 2 and 3, natural language processing
English notes
apropos of nothing: used to introduce a new topic that isn’t related to anything that’s previously been under discussion. Examples:
Today squats are dedicated to the random gym bro who apropos of nothing invited me to bible study to get eternal life then gave me his num?? pic.twitter.com/CbrypBeIJX
— orcbrand consulting (@Ctrlorcbrand) January 16, 2017
Apropos of nothing, I love this wallpaper. pic.twitter.com/ZNzDViro7A
— Based Mom (@CHSommers) January 15, 2017
@Elizabeth_Calo apropos of nothing, Anna Wintour was almost our ambassador to the UK
— nba draft dodger (@AllezLesBoulez) January 15, 2017
How it was used in the post: Apropos of nothing, here is a blog post with this week’s suggested readings for a class that I’m teaching.
Zipf's Law 
The two “syntactic ambiguities” are for me blatant errors in French writing ( if I was a teacher of French in France), or at least heavy weaknesses of style . Same thing for the coreferential ambiguities, except the second one, made on purpose . It’s different for lexical and phonological ambiguities, that are mostly deliberate wordplays which I’m particularly fond of, especially when they can convey a deep or a funny meaning .
LikeLiked by 1 person