Transformational syntax Puns

I've forgotten most of what I learned about generative syntax in college, but something that has always bothered me about the theory of "movement" is the fact that speakers seem to put together sentences on the fly, having already spoken part of them without knowing how they're going to finish them.

For instance, let's take a half-sentence like "What did she... (pause for thought)." Wh-movement has already occurred, but the part of the sentence that "what" is said to have moved from, the complement of the VP, doesn't exist yet in the mind of the speaker.

Background: I just finished my B.A., majoring in linguistics (and philosophy), but my school didn't have much of a department. I took a syntax course, which had a "mainstream" approach using Andrew Carnie's book. However, the faculty seemed mostly unconvinced by transformational syntax and UG, and their interests were more in typology and sociolinguistics.

The Question: I want to get a better grasp on where "Chomskyan" syntacticians stand these days. More specifically, I want a better understanding of the relationship between what are called "Principles and Parameters," "Government and Binding," and "Minimalism." I have some understanding of the details of P&P from reading "The Atoms of Language" by Mark Baker, but I'm uncertain where it stands in relation to these other frameworks/theories/whatever.

I know all these theories have been widely criticized by functionalists and non-transformational syntacticians, but I'm more interested right now in what these theories claim and how they relate to each other rather than the merits of these claims.

Has anyone analysed why GPT-3 seems to master the syntax of languages nearly perfectly as opposed to not having a perfect understanding of higher-level aspects of cognition?

It could be a simple answer, that syntax is less of a complex system/pattern/structure than conceptual understanding of the world.

But I feel like there is something more interesting to be said.

For example, it seems like the bigger the model, the smarter it becomes.

Is AI as simple as, we have a structure (a neural network) that can intuitively understand any system or phenomenon because it finds some kind of model for it, a layered series of weights corresponding to some conceptual hierarchy. It just depends what order the phenomenon is. A hyper-complex phenomenon needs 100 layers, or whatever. A simple one only needs 3. In either case, there is conceivably nothing a neural network cannot eventually understand.

Is this true? If so, it’s a pretty wild notion to contemplate.

I'm working on syntax-rules for my Scheme interpreter and I've simplified the code in my unit test that is disabled:

(define-syntax foo
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((_)
     (let ()
       (define-syntax %foo
         (syntax-rules (foo)
           ((_ foo)
            "foo")))
       (%foo foo)))))

This macro is valid and works fine in Guile, but it fails in my interpreter. The way I handle syntax-rules is I traverse the code and rename taken symbols and create a new expansion environment for new values. I was reading somewhere that renaming is the simplest way to create hygienic macros (I'm not sure where and I'm not sure if that was related to Scheme) and this is what I used for my implementation. I've implementation everything myself and it works pretty well, there are a lot of unit tests that pass only a few that are disabled including this one.

So to the point. Here the problem is that in the expression (%foo foo) symbol foo is also a name defined in the environment, it's a macro itself. That's why it got replaced into #:foo and it fails to mutch the syntax because the syntax uses foo constant.

If I name the macro like this:

(define-syntax bar
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((_)
     (let ()
       (define-syntax %foo
         (syntax-rules (foo)
           ((_ foo)
            "foo")))
       (%foo foo)))))

It suddenly works, because there are no longer conflicts foo is not defined anymore. Note that my macros don't process variables inside the code (like let, lambda etc.) only traverse it and do the dumb replacement, but it works pretty well.

So my question is how can I make this work. Are macros expanded in kind of deep first order? Or maybe if Scheme finds that %foo is a macro it passes the symbols as is?

The problem is that there are really not that many deep dive resources about hygienic macros like with lisp macros that shows every detail of how they work (mainly Bawden paper about quasiquote) The create unit tests for my syntax-rules I need to search a lot of places and there are no simple articles that you can refer to if you want to implement syntax-rules yourself.

Hello,

I recently became interested in linguistics and would like to read some of Chomsky's work. I'm wondering which book/paper would be a good place for me to start. My background is in software development and I have some familiarity with formal languages from a computer science perspective. Thanks in advance!

I have inherited a large, legacy project, that has a combination of brace-style conditional syntax as well as the alternate colon-style syntax. I'm trying to normalise the code and wondering if there is an automated way that I can leverage to tackle this — a plugin perhaps?

To clarify…

Looking to take code with syntax like this:

<?php
foreach (range(1,10) as $i):
  echo $i, PHP_EOL;
endforeach;
?>

…and convert it to syntax like this:

<?php
foreach (range(1,10) as $i) {
  echo $i, PHP_EOL;
}
?>

I am building a new project using C# (I am more JS/TS developer so far) using DDD and the object initialization syntax makes me worried (especially that this is going to be an open-source project, so people will be allowed to contribute), as due to that, I cannot enforce the use of custom constructor with some domain rules inside etc.

How do you approach it usually in C#?

I have only a small understanding of universal grammar (basically I've read the first two small books he wrote and 150pgs of LSLT), but I still hope that this question can be answered for me.

Is it just:

1. Do paired utterance tests

2. Compile a list of 'grammatical sentences'

3. Theorize which rules you could add that would cover everything you've observed

Or is there something more to the process? I'm assuming that there is a strong empirical aspect to the investigation.

We may be anonymous strangers on the internet, but we have one thing in common. We may be a world apart, but we're here together!

Welcome to the 24 hour pledge!

I'm pledging myself to not drinking today, and invite you to do the same.

Maybe you're new to /r/stopdrinking and have a hard time deciding what to do next. Maybe you're like me and feel you need a daily commitment or maybe you've been sober for a long time and want to inspire others.

It doesn't matter if you're still hung over from a three day bender or been sober for years, if you just woke up or have already completed a sober day. For the next 24 hours, lets not drink alcohol!

This pledge is a statement of intent. Today we don't set out trying not to drink, we make a conscious decision not to drink. It sounds simple, but all of us know it can be hard and sometimes impossible. The group can support and inspire us, yet only one person can decide if we drink today. Give that person the right mindset!

What happens if we can't keep to our pledge? We give up or try again. And since we're here in /r/stopdrinking, we're not ready to give up.

What this is: A simple thread where we commit to not drinking alcohol for the next 24 hours, posting to show others that they're not alone and making a pledge to ourselves. Anybody can join and participate at any time, you do not have to be a regular at /r/stopdrinking or have followed the pledges from the beginning.

What this isn't: A good place for a detailed introduction of yourself, directly seek advice or share lengthy stories. You'll get a more personal response in your own thread.

This post goes up at:

• US - Night/Early Morning
• Europe - Morning
• Asia and Australia - Evening/Night

A link to the current Daily Check-In post can always be found near the top of the sidebar.

Good morning, SD. : )

Yesterday was Thor's Day and here we are at last at Frigg's Day (here she is, spinning the clouds). The Norse goddess Frigg is often associated with love, as is Venus, the planet after which is named the fifth (or sixth, depending on your count) day in most Romance languages (vendredi in French, venerdì in Italian) as well as in Japanese (きんようび, kinyōbi) and Hindi (शुक्रवार, shukravāra).

I've always been fascinated by the days of the week, by the very fact that days have names and we repeat these names over and over again

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

I'm trying to define a macro to save myself some typing. I want to be able to define a shorthand for syntax rules that lets me quickly say "Replace this identifier with this other identifier". I based it on the examples on https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/pattern-macros.html.

[define-syntax-rule [alias from-id to-id]
  [define-syntax [from-id stx]
    [syntax-case stx []
      [from-id [identifier? [syntax from-id]] [syntax to-id]]]]]]

[alias S list]
[alias L lambda]
[alias Sf build-list]

[define n3 [S 1 2 3]] ;-- S: bad syntax in: (S 1 2 3)

but, it's not working, and I don't know why. The Macro Stepper hasn't been able to help, since as soon as I try to expand S it gives that error

Recently, 🤗 Hugging Face people have released a commercial product called Infinity to perform inference with very high performance (aka very fast compared to Pytorch + FastAPI deployment). Unfortunately it’s a paid product costing 20K for one model deployed on a single machine (no info on price scaling publicly available) according to their product director.

Transformer-deploy is an open source alternative build over enterprise-grade softwares:

• Inference server: Nvidia Triton (it takes queries and passes them to an engine, plus adds features useful for inference like dynamic batching, or multi inference engine dispatching)
• Inference engines: Microsoft ONNX Runtime (for CPU and GPU inference) and Nvidia TensorRT (GPU only)

It appears that without much effort, it was easy to match the very few HF Infinity public benchmarks.

But there was still an opportunity to push inference performances further that, AFAIK, is not yet leveraged by any other OSS project: GPU quantization for all Transformer models!

Please find below our measures on Roberta-base, seq len 256, batch 32, MNLI dataset (classification):

https://preview.redd.it/hv87lknscf881.png?width=585&format=png&auto=webp&s=db52143c1d108aa026ca847d02c64625dec2375e

Source code: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/quantization/quantization_end_to_end.ipynb

repo: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy

Performing GPU quantization requires modifying model source code (to add some specific nodes called QDQ on costly operations like matrix multiplication), which is both error prone, boring and a good generator of technical debts (you maintain yourself the source code of your modified model). We have done that work manually for several models, and it appeared to us that it can be made automatically by just patching the model module abstract syntax tree (aka the source code).

On the user end, performing basic quantization of a model on the GPU looks like:

https://preview.redd.it/j6ip416qcf881.png?width=843&format=png&auto=webp&s=bee70158f20785f76b9f2c1000878f41be5aa280

As shown in

I am new to coding. I have a math background (up to Diff EQ and LA). I want to learn the basic idea behind all programming languages. The idea of Syntax, how things operate, the different types of programs. Just a review of how programming works.

I know nothing. I need to understand it for my physics major. I learn best by theory and having a foundation of the most basic principles and abstract terms (nothing specific or applied at first).

Do any of you know any good websites or videos that describe the idea of programming? (I would prefer relation to math terms like “function” or “linear” or “transformation” or a set of axioms or system that can be diagramed).

I want to understand the process and the terms before learning code.

Do your worst!

JSX is the starting point

React uses JSX to make things easier for the developers. So when you write something like this.

<div id="foo">
  Hello!
</div>

Babel with a react preset transforms it to this.

React.createElement("div", {
  id: "foo"
}, "Hello!");

Check out this example in Babel REPL. React.createElement is a function that creates a virtual node. It's a well-known fact, and you probably already know it. So what's the point?

Preact way

If you've used Preact before, you may notice it has an unobvious export in its source code.

export {
  createElement,
  createElement as h,
} from './create-element';

To make things clear, the createElement function from Preact serves the same needs as React.createElement. So the question is, why is it exported as h as well?

The reason is dead simple. It's exported as h because it's a hypescript function. So what exactly is hypescript?

Hyperscript is the key

Hypescript is a kind of language to create HyperText with JavaScript and was started by Dominic Tarr in 2012. He was inspired by markaby, the "short bit of code" to write HTML in pure Ruby. Markaby allows doing things like that.

require 'markaby'

mab = Markaby::Builder.new
mab.html do
  head { title "Boats.com" }
  body do
    h1 "Boats.com has great deals"
    ul do
      li "$49 for a canoe"
      li "$39 for a raft"
      li "$29 for a huge boot that floats and can fit 5 people"
    end
  end
end
puts mab.to_s

And the h function allows doing essentially the same thing, but with different syntax.

h = require("hyperscript")

h("div#foo", "Hello!")

It also supports nesting and CSS properties.

h = require("hyperscript")

h("div#foo", 
  h("h1", "Hello from H1!", { style: { 'color'

The one thing I disagree with EGS on is the semi recent definitions of Male/Female vs Masculine/Feminine. And it’s entirely a semantic problem.

The comic has started using the words Masculine/Feminine for transforming from one gender to another, in place of male/female forms which is what it had been using. And it feels like this was in response to how the LGBT+ community uses those labels? Maybe? Or maybe its just Dan overthinking things?

Specifically I am talking about this page https://www.egscomics.com/comic/party-151

You see why I say semi recent, seeing as it was posted on May 4, 2020. But hey, just like the comic, my brain works on a sliding timescale too!

In any case, in my opinion that’s backwards. For me, the definition of Male and Female are biological states. The physical manifestations of gender. Where as the definitions for Masculine and Feminine are looking or acting in a way that is in line with the public perception of a man or woman respectively. Most dictionaries seem to agree with these definitions.

So to me calling what the TF gun, or in this case, what the wand does a masculine/feminine form seems inaccurate. Like, during the birthday party, the gun did not turn Sarah into a more masculine looking woman, it turned her into a male. On the other hand, in my opinion, what the Female V5 beam does to people who are already women could be considered making them more feminine, since it exaggerated features that are typically associated with being a woman.

Now in the comic the whole reason it gets brought up is due to a concern of confusing physical states with gender identities which... fair, but again, this is a semantic debate and in general I think using Male or Female both for physical gender and gender identity is super confusing as well. In my opinion, it is probably a significant contributor to why there is so much confusion over transgender and non-binary people from people who aren't part of the LGBQ+ community.

Honestly, with gender identity being relatively new to the public view, I would argue it needs new words, or new syntax to make it more clear when people are talking about gender identity vs physical state. I agree with that page that English is bad at gender identity. But in my opinion using words that already have given meanings isn't the solution.

So... yeah. Thoughts? Arguments?

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

does it have to do with level of abstraction or specificity? thanks for answering!

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

They’re on standbi

Because she wanted to see the task manager.

Pilot on me!!

94/100

So I recently started DMing a D&D campaign for a few of my friends. In the most recent session, they visited a magical city with all sorts of odd arcane items scattered around the various shops in town.

One of the players found a magic book that allows them to basically learn something new every time they study it that usually relates to duck language. I need help brainstorming different things that could happen.

Basically nothing game-breaking, mostly things for flavour that don’t hinder the player too much.

1- you learn a few greeting words in duck, such as “hello”, “good morning”, “welcome”.

2- the book glows with a golden aura and you gain 1d10 temporary hitpoints for the next 1d8 hours.

3- audibly annoyed, the tome emits a loud “QUACK!” sound and you are thrown backwards, taking 1d8 force damage

4- you learn a few goodbye words, such as “goodnight”, “see you around”, and “bye”

5- the book glows an unearthly purple and you see hallucinations of spirit ducks walking around you. Anyone nearby can hear these ducks, but can’t determine where the noises are coming from.

6- as you read the page, hundreds of soft duck feathers fall from above, landing softly on your head and shoulders.

7- you learn some basic phrases

8- the tome quacks again, in a more cautious tone, and you learn a few curse words in duck.

9- That night as you dream you are visited by a giant duck floating on a lake that looks at you and says “you are the one duck” [u/Spriteknight99]

10- You learn some slang words that are exclusive to certain breeds and not others, and to tell which breed a duck belongs to based on the way it speaks [u/AsymmetricalLuna]

11- You learn a couple words you think are in duck... but they're actually in platypus [u/AsymmetricalLuna]

12- You gain the ability to understand what ducks say (but still can't speak their language) until the next dawn [u/AsymmetricalLuna]

13- You gain advantage in Persuasion and Intimidation checks made to persuade ducks [u/AsymmetricalLuna]

14- You learn a couple soft-sounding words in duck that turn out to be very easy to misinterpret as insults if you aren't careful about the context you use them in [u/AsymmetricalLuna]

15- You learn how to properly pronounce duck names [u/AsymmetricalLuna]

16- Your pronounciation skills in duck go up several notches, making it so that ducks that can hear you without seeing you could easily mistake you for one of their own [u/AsymmetricalLuna]

17- You learn a couple flir

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.