LINGUIST List 3.106

Tue 04 Feb 1992

Disc: Is, is, Finite-Sets

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Geoffrey Russom, Re: 3.93 Is, is
2. , 3.93 Is, is
3. Richard Sproat, is, is hypercorrection
4. "Wlodek Zadrozny", finite, non-well defined sets, non-standard set theories

Message 1: Re: 3.93 Is, is

On "What the best avenue for pointing this out is, however, unclear":
I don't this is hypercorrection to avoid the "is is" construction we've
been discussing. It looks more like the sort of syntactic haplology
that arises in many constructions, e.g. "He's the kind of guy you can
go (to) to help you with your problems." One of the interesting things
about the "is is" construction is is that it goes counter to the
haplological tendency.

 -- Rick

My office mate said a few days ago:

"Is all we're doing is putting this in logical form,"

When confronted about this, he said that it sounded like something he
would say (ie he didn't perceive it as a performance error)

I myself sometimes find myself saying something like:

"All's we're doing is <infinitive or gerundive phrase>"

I don't have any hypotheses about these constructions, but they do
exhibit an extra copula. At least I think so. I'm not sure what the
"'s" is in my "all's". Could be possessive or a dialectal variant or
a strange plural of some kind. I certainly don't THINK I say, "All is
we're doing is ..."

		Steve Helmreich (shelmreinmsu.edu)

Alex Monaghan points out that I hypercorrected in the sentence:

 What the best avenue for pointing this out is, however, unclear.

And hypercorrect I did. I even remember thinking about this one and
choosing, it would seem, wrongly.

Oh well. All I can say is that if there hadn't been all this
discussion this never would have happened (hee hee). It's sort of like
the observation (?) that discussion of speech errors makes people more
prone to make them.

Richard Sproat
Linguistics Research Department
AT&T Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Avenue, Room 2d-451
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
tel (908) 582-5296
fax (908) 582-7308
rwsresearch.att.com

In a reply to recent discussion about whether the set of primes known
to Manaster-Ramer is well defined, I'd like to note that it is
very likely possible to model such sets by the techniques
described in my paper:
 "Cardinalities and well oderings in a commonsense set theory"
 Proc. First. Intern. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge
 Representation and Reasoning.
 Edited by Ronald J. Brachman, Hector J. Levesque, and Raymond Reiter.
 Pub.: Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA. 1989.
 pp.486-497

I show there that it is possible to have finite well orderings
without cardinalities, and finite sets which cannot be well
ordered.

The motivating examples are a set of dots which we do not have time
to count (or the set of letters on the line above, about which
we know that it is finite, but it doesnt' have cardinality, unless
we put some effort and count the letters); and a set of balls in a
box, which is finite, but, intuitively, not well ordered.

I don't have time now to try to model the set of M-R's primes,
but perhaps some interested reader will try it.