Tyler Cecil's Blog

Tyler Cecil's Blog

Let’s Come Somewhere Else

The Semantics of “Come” and “Go”

You Can Contract If You Wanna

The Story of Wanna-Contraction

Syntax textbooks everywhere love, need, and wanna explain what’s up with “wanna”.

Go C-Command Yourself!

An Introduction to Binding

When do we use “himself/herself” instead of “him/her”? It’s a more tricky story than you might think, and it all comes down to a simple (albeit unsual) relationship with trees.

May, Might, Modality

Probable Words about Possible Worlds


An introduction to linguistic modality, as modeled by possible worlds. In particular, what is the difference between the worlds “may” and “might”?

The Curious Case of Population Variance

Estimating Variance without Bias

This post is a short introduction to Bessel’s correct — an solution to an unexpected problem in statistics. As it turns out, estimating the variance of a collection of samples the way you might think will almost always underestimate the true variance!

Natural Deduction

Notation for the Uninitiated

A beginners introduction into how the hell you read those proof trees that all the scary logicians keep using. Filled with lots of exercises to keep you busy!

Winograd Schema Challenge

Going Beyond the Imitation Game


The Winograd Schema Challenge is an alternative to the Turing Test, with some very practical advantages. The test itself boils so much down into a single, simple, and well-defined linguistic function: anaphora resolution.

Language and Thought

Preliminaries on The Turing Test

Did you try and read my post on Winograd Schema, and realize you don’t understand or have never heard of the Turing Test? If so, this post is for you!

Donkey Sentences

The Limits of Lexical Scope

A very brief introduction to Discourse Representation Theory, a method of using dynamic scope to better model natural language. Featuring Russell and his donkey.

What’s In A Name?

Problems with Reference

If two things are equal, they can always replace each other, no? Well, “the number of Godfather Movies” equals “3”. My friend Alison only knows the first movie. Why is it that I might say “Alison thinks the number of Godfather Movies is 1”, but I wouldn’t say “Alison thinks 3 is 1”?

Beta für Dich

Die Ursprung des wichtigstes Worts Kletterns

A German writing exercise. Es gibt ein Wort, das man stets in der Kletterhalle hört — “Beta”. “Darf ich dir das Beta geben?” “Kann ich ein bisschen Beta bekommen?” Was hießt es, und wieso benutzen wir es überhaupt?

Words that Ever Play Well

Part II on Negative Polarity Items


In Part II we dive into the work of Anastasia Giannakidou, and come up with a new, more general, more powerful, and more correct licensing condition: the nonveridicality approach.

Words that Ever Play Well

Part I on Negative Polarity Items

“Any” is such a common word; with “for-all”-like semantic. “Any” has hardly ever troubled anyone. Then again… maybe “any” has troubled anyone.

Making make Easy

How to write more general makefiles. An “easymake oven,” if you will. Covers pointers for organizing your C / C++ projects.

Circular Programming

Or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lazy Evaluation”

Paratype

An Actor Model for Monomorphisers

A proof-of-concept experiment written in Go to understand static monomorphising. Given a program in a toy dummy language with a Haskell-like type system, Paratype will perform type inference and type checking. If type checking passed, it will generate a monomorphic code realization of the given program.