Conversations among linguists may sometimes be interesting to non-linguists for reasons that are not entirely the same as those that appeal to insiders. As an example, I present without further comment a recent back-and-forth on Facebook between Linguist X and Linguist Y, slightly redacted to preserve anonymity.
X (Posts George Carlin's 2010 comments on Lance Armstrong.)
Y: A jerk Lance Armstrong surely is, but he provided the ABC news with a reason to produce a naturalistic example of a construction I wrote about in ____: "self-confessed arrogant prick with a win at all cost attitude" where self-confessed is an 'inner' intentional adjective taking scope out of two 'outer' extensional ones (syntactically ambiguous in the case of the with-PP, but the context forces into scope under self-confessed, I think).
X: This fits an analysis I proposed (not the scope but how to handle the adjective) a few years ago.
X: Your scope prediction sounds a lot more interesting.
Y: Adjectives are a garden of weird stuff. And as far as I can make out, GB/MP principles aren't really very helpful in dealing with them, in spite of their prevalence in the literature; the key insights I believe were attained by Terry Parsons and Hans Kamp extending Montague, and have been steadily cultivated by the formal semanticsts ever since. The first example in Pesetsky's plenary talk, for example, is a pretty natural consequence of the Parson-Kamp idea, and to present it he had to ignore antisymmetry and its consequence of 'rollup movement', which people in that framework seem to spend a lot of time struggling with.
Y: My main current project is a rewrite of some the analysis in my 1999 book with ___, using glue and some other tricks to eliminate the need for the 'spreading projections', which don't appear to have been very popular; there will be some adjective stuff in that.
Z: Only you guys can take the word fuck and make it complicated.
Y: Don't get me started on that one - I have a theory about what it means!!
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