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0 pointssmallnamespace5y ago0 comments

Are modifiers an actual issue for many applications?

"This isn't a terrible horrible restaurant that nobody should ever go to" seems like 1) it doesn't mean it's actually a good restaurant either 2) the writer might be joking and sarcastic and 3) this will be very rare in actual reviews.

Put another way, certain modifiers contextually go with certain words and sentiments, so why shouldn't state of the art systems lean on that fact, notwithstanding the strict application of grammar?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

ben_w5y ago· 2 in thread

There was a story that a language lecturer had just explained how double-negatives were a sometimes a positive and sometimes an emphasised negative, and that likewise some languages used a double-positive to mean an negative. He claimed that English was not such a language, using double-positives only for emphasis, to which one of the students said “yeah yeah”.

thrownagain905y ago

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

(https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/double-positive.h...)

gillesjacobs5y ago

To be fair, "yeah, right" is a sarcastic statement and linguistically the two words do not scope eachother so the positive statement is produced at the pragmatic level, double negatives are syntactico-semantic.

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