I recently have begun giving serious thought to what command chaining might look like in Ubiquity and the various considerations which must be made to make it happen. The “command chaining,” or “piping,” described here always involves (at least) two verbs acting sequentially on a passed target—that is, the first command performs some action or lookup and the second command acts on the first command’s output.

A few days ago I penned some initial technical considerations regarding command chaining. In this post I’ll be point out some linguistic considerations involved in supporting a natural syntax for chaining.

Simple syntaxes: sequential vs embedding strategies

When it comes to creating a natural language interface, there’s always a decision to make between requiring a certain kind of input, or working a little harder to understand the user’s natural input. From an implementation point of view, adopting certain programmatic conventions is of course simpler and to this end, there have been a couple different “unnatural” command chaining syntaxes suggested. While these both go against Ubiquity’s basic tenet of natural syntax — that is, to not introduce rules which contradict the user’s natural language — which gives Ubiquity its strengths of usability and memorability, I’ll entertain them here as they illustrate two different structural relationships that we will want to consider.

The first suggestion is to adopt the shell pipe (|), which would lead to input such as

1

translate hello to Spanish | email to Jono

While this itself is pretty unnatural unless you speak shell, note that this syntax is similar to the more natural “, and” syntax, yielding translate hello to Spanish, and email to Jono, which we will consider below. I’ll refer to this strategy as the sequential strategy.

Another very interesting proposal by Alex Fritze is to embed each subordinate computation into an argument position, marked by parentheses. This could also be parsed relatively straightforwardly by writing a noun type which first checks for parentheses and then runs the content of the argument through another ParseQuery.

2

email (translate hello to Spanish) to Jono

I’ll refer to this pattern as the embedding strategy.

Sequential and embedding strategies in natural language

What’s interesting about the two proposals above is that both strategies are seen in natural language. The sequential strategy could correspond to the following linguistic phenomena:

1. coordination: a non-hierarchical joining of two or more clauses, often marked by a conjunction. Here’s an example from English:
   • “[I made a sandwich] and [you will eat it]” where [] represent clause boundaries. Here, “and” is the conjunction.
2. serial verb and converb constructions: a joining of multiple verbs or verb phrases within a single clause, with shared subject and tense/aspect values, with no particular conjugation or delimiter between them. Such constructions are common in many African and east Asian languages. Here are two examples:¹
   

• A converbal construction in Japanese:
  

  3 4 5

  僕は サンドイッチを 作って 食べる boku-wa sandiʔchi-o tsuku-ʔte tabe-ru I-TOP sandwich-ACC make-CON eat

  
  “I (will) make a sandwich and eat [it].” (Here, `TOP` = topic, `ACC` = accusative, `CON` = converbal ending)[^3]
• A serial verb construction in Mandarin Chinese:
  

  6 7 8

  我 作 三明治 吃 wǒ zùo sānmíngzhì chī I make sandwich eat

  
  “I (will) make a sandwich and eat [it]” or “I (will) make a sandwich [in order to] eat [it].”

Note that in both the converb and serial verb construction, the second verb (eat) takes shares its object (sandwich) with the first verb and there is no need for a pronoun such as “it” to introduce that argument as it is with coordination, above.²

The embedding strategy is observed in natural language as well, in the form of the following phenomena:

1. embedded clauses: a sentence is itself the argument of another verb. Example:
   

• “John says [he likes sandwiches].”

Embedded clauses, however, clearly have no relation to command chaining and does not require our attention. 2. relative clauses: a partial sentence³ is attached to a noun in order to describe it or distinguish it from other possible referents. Example:

• “You ate the sandwich that I made” where “sandwich” is called the “head” of the relative clause, and “I made” is what I here call the “partial sentence” (see footnote). The “relative clause” is used here to distinguish “the sandwich that I made” from other sandwiches.

The natural syntax of chaining

So which strategy is used in complex natural language commands: the sequential strategy or the embedding strategy? Both the sequential strategy and embedding strategy can be involved with commands:

9
10

[Make a sandwich] and [eat it]!
Eat (the sandwich that I made)!

These two commands do not mean the same thing, though, and only (9) is the kind of command we would want to give Ubiquity. The problem with relative clauses, as in (10), is that it presupposes the existence of the sandwich in the context. If we both know you just made a sandwich, saying (10) is perfectly appropriate, but out of the blue it doesn’t make sense. For this reason, only the sequential strategy is used in the natural syntax of chaining.

Parsing the sequential strategy

In natural language, unlike the initial simple proposals laid out above, there is often no clear delimiter marking the boundary between the two parts in a sequential relation (e.g. examples (3) and (6) above, particularly given that neither Japanese and Chinese normally break words with spaces). How would we parse a sequential string of commands?

Let’s assume for our purposes here that we can identify find all verbs within the input string.⁴ Parsing a sequential strategy string is not particularly difficult if we can also assume that the verb in any particular language is either always verb-initial or always verb-final. Let’s look at both cases:

• Always verb-initial: Mandarin Chinese:
  

11
12
13

翻譯       hello 到  西班牙語   送    給  Juanito
fānyì     hello dào xībānyáyǔ sòng gěi Juanito
translate hello to  Spanish   send to  Juanito

“Translate hello to Spanish [and] send [it] to Juanito” 1. find every possible verb:
翻譯hello到西班牙語送給Juanito 2. as every verb marks the beginning of a sentence, we now have our two commands: “翻譯hello到西班牙語” (translate hello to Spanish) and “送給Juanito” (send to Juanito). * Always verb-final: Japanese

14
15
16

helloを スペイン語に 訳して Juanitoに 送って
hello-o supeingo-ni yakus-ite Juanito-ni oku-ʔte
hello-ACC Spanish-DAT translate-CON Juanito-DAT send-CON

“Translate hello to Spanish [and] send [it] to Juanito” 1. find every possible verb:
helloをスペイン語に訳してJuanitoに送って 2. as every verb marks the end of a sentence, we now have our two commands: “helloをスペイン語に訳して” (translate hello to Spanish) and “Juanitoに送って” (send to Juanito).

For languages where there is a clear conjunction between the two commands, such as English “and”, we can also use that conjunction as a delimiter as well. We then simply execute the first command and then execute the second with the first command’s output in its interpolation context. This way the output of the first command will be picked up both by an overt pronoun such as “it” in the second command and without it, such as in the Chinese and Japanese examples above.⁵

The only potential problem with this approach is in the case of languages where some commands are verb-initial while others are verb-final. I note that such languages do exist in a previous blog post, Where’s The Verb. In these languages, commands can be expressed by more than one verb form (such as infinitive, imperative, subjunctive, etc.) and some of those verb forms are sentence-initial while others are sentence-final. Here’s one such example from German:

“search hello with google” (German) 1. Infinitive: hello mit google suchen 2. Imperative: suche hello mit google

Here the verb for “search” is “suchen” (infinitive) or “suche” (imperative). I know that this same type of phenomena occurs in other Germanic languages such as Dutch with infinitive and imperative and also other languages such as Modern Greek with infinitive and subjunctive forms. If you are a speaker of one of these lanuages (German, Dutch, Greek, etc.) I would love to know whether you can chain verb-final and verb-initial commands together.

Conclusion

In this blog post I examined command chaining in natural language, focusing on data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese, which exhibit three linguistically different approaches to chaining. What we found is that the sequential strategy—that of listing the commands one by one, in order of execution—is what is used in natural languages, rather than any sort of embedding. This fact, combined with the fact that our parser can recognize every available verb, offers a simple approach to doing a naive parse of natural command chains in most languages, even without explicit delimiters.

In a final installation of this series on “exploring command chaining,” I hope to consider how the Ubiquity interface itself could present command chains and aid in its input.

Related posts:

1. Exploring Command Chaining in Ubiquity: Part 1
2. Command Chaining with Oni?
3. Ubiquity in Italian

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.

I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

The event also coincided with Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane Asia tour, attracting even more interest to the event. In the end it was the largest Tokyo 2.0 event ever.

As I leave Tokyo next month, I’ll be sad to not be able to continue to be a part of Tokyo 2.0. I’ve met a lot of fascinating people and learned a lot at the monthly events. I’ll definitely make sure to schedule them in in my future travels back to Japan and I highly recommend any of you who travel to Tokyo do so as well.

Related posts:

1. Changes to Ubiquity Parser 2 and the Playpen
2. Foxkeh demos Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation
3. Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

昨日は文部科学省の先端ITスペシャリスト育成プログラムの学生の為に講義をしました。ちょっと長めの時間だったので、二つのトークに分けてみました。第一部は「オープン」と言うアイデア、特にオープンなデザイン過程の利点について。第二部は未来のインターフェースと国際化とUbiquityの紹介でした。スライドをここにslideshareにあげておきました。

Design processes in the open-source era オープンソース時代のデザインプロセス

Ubiquity: Interfaces and Internationalization インターフェースと国際化

Related posts:

1. Notes from BarCamp Tokyo 2009
2. This week on Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation
3. Ubiquity presentation at Tokyo 2.0

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

When we execute a command in Ubiquity, in very simple terms, we’re hoping to do something (a verb) to some arguments (the nouns). Every sentence in every language uses some method to encode which arguments correspond to which roles of the verb. Here are a couple examples:

1
2

He sees Mary.
彼が Maryを 見る。 (Kare-ga Mary-o miru.)

As speakers of English, you can read sentence (1) above and know exactly who is doing the seeing and who is being seen and speakers of Japanese can get the same information from (2). How do different languages code for arguments in different roles? There are, broadly speaking, three different ways:

We’ll take a brief look today at these three different strategies, all of which a localizeable natural language interface will surely encounter.

Word order

In many languages, the position of the arguments relative to one another and to the verb determine the roles which each argument will play. Mandarin Chinese is a good example of such a language:

3
4

他 喜欢 Mary (Ta xihuan Mary)
Mary 喜欢 他 (Mary xihuan ta)

Here, sentence (3) says “he likes Mary” while sentence (4) says “Mary likes him”. Simply reversing the positions of “he/him” and “Mary” we’re able to flip the roles that they fill in the sentence: that of the person who does the liking and the person who is being liked. Now take a look at sentence (5) which means “John says ‘hello’ to Mary.”

5

John 告诉 Mary "你 好" (John gaosu Mary "ni hao")

We note here that, while in English we used a different strategy of marking one argument (we marked the “hello” argument with “to”), Chinese doesn’t mark either of the arguments. There is, however, a clearly defined order to the arguments, which you might encode this way:

say [who you're speaking to] [what you're saying]

If you swap the order of the two objects in this sentence, it becomes ungrammatical. (Note: the asterisk * here means the sentence is ungrammatical.)

5

* John 告诉 "你 好" Mary (John gaosu "ni hao" Mary)

Here, the word order dictates that “你好” must be “who you’re speaking to” and “Mary” must be “what you’re saying,” but that doesn’t make sense, so the sentence is ungrammatical.

Marking the arguments

Another possible strategy is to mark each argument (or some of the arguments) so that each argument’s role is clear. In many languages this is done with case marking. Take for example this Ancient Greek sentence with its English gloss on line (6). Here, NOM refers to nominative case and ACC refers to accusative case.¹

5
6

ho  didaskal-os  paideuei to  paidi-on  (SVO)
the teacher -NOM teaches  the boy  -ACC

This sentence means “the teacher instructs the boy.” While sentence (5) is in Subject-Verb-Object order, any of the six possible orderings of {subject, verb, object} are also grammatical and mean the same thing:²

7
8
9
10
11

ho didaskalos to paidion paideuei (SOV)
paideuei ho didaskalos to paidion (VSO)
paideuei to paidion ho didaskalos (VOS)
to paidion ho didaskalos paideuei (OSV)
to paidion paideuei ho didaskalos (OVS)

Many languages also use adpositions (prepositions and/or postpositions) to further clarify the role of an argument in addition to case (like English does) or in lieu of case marking altogether. The idea is the same, though: you want to clarify the roles of the arguments so you morphologically mark the arguments with their roles.

Marking the verb

Many languages mark the verb with some information about the argument in a certain role, so that we can properly identify the argument’s roles. This kind of phenomenon is called agreement.

The most common type of verbal agreement is subject agreement, where the verb is marked by a specific form depending on some features of the subject. Anyone who’s taken French 101 will recognize this verb conjugation paradigm:

With this paradigm, if you hear or see “suis” in a French sentence, you immediately know that “je” (I) must be the subject and if you see “sommes,” “nous” (we) is the subject, etc. Standard Average European languages tend to exhibit this sort of subject-verb agreement.

Features of the subject position aren’t the only thing that can be marked on the verb, though. Hungarian, for example, has a type of object agreement. Specifically, the verb marks whether the object is definite or not (in linguistics lingo, “the verb agrees with the object’s definiteness feature”).

12
13
14
15

John lát  egy almát.
John sees an  apple
John látja az  almát.
John sees  the apple

Notice that in sentence (12) (glossed in (13)) the verb for “see” is realized as “lát,” while in (14) it’s “látja.” A speaker can use that agreement to see whether the object is definite or not and thus limit the possible object arguments out of all the nouns in the sentence.

All of the above

Most languages do not use only one of these strategies, but a combination of them. English is a very good example. In a sentence like (12) below the main coding of grammatical roles seems to be word order alone. By reversing the word order into (13), we can effectively swap the argument’s roles.

12
13

John likes Mary.
Mary likes John.

However, this doesn’t work with pronominal arguments. Swapping the arguments in (14) yields (15) which is ungrammatical due to the case marking on the pronouns.

14
15

He likes her.
* Her likes he.

In addition, the verb in English must agree with the subject’s number (singular or plural):

16
17
18

John likes them.
* They likes John.
They like John.

In this way, English exhibits all three strategies: word order, case marking, and agreement, although often only word order is actively used to disambiguate the roles of arguments.

Question: What strategies are used by your language to mark the roles of different arguments?

Related posts:

1. Contribute: how your language identifies its arguments
2. Writing commands with semantic roles
3. Ubiquity in Firefox: Focus on Japanese

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Here’s a picture of an ad for Gaba, a big English conversation school in Japan, I snapped on a train recently. I felt the English sentence about Gaba’s satisfaction was extremely awkward, so I put it up on twitter to check with some other native speakers. My friends concurred. What do you think?

I personally think the sentence would be improved by removing the “the” in “the satisfaction.” Others offered “continues to rise” as possibly preferable to “continually rise.” English articles, especially the definiteness of abstract nouns, is very difficult for many non-native speakers. That being said, it’s sad for a sentence of such questionable acceptability to come from a company which, in theory, prides itself in its English ability and surely hires many native speakers. Gaba, shame on you.

Related posts:

1. Three ways to argue over arguments

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

• 回収 may take things away from others when collecting while 収集 does not have that implication.
• Things that you 回収 may have been previously distributed by the actor themself while 収集 does not have that implication.¹

Not content with armchair theorizing, however, I decided to take advantage of one of the largest corpora in the world: Google.² To test my hypothesis, I chose two “objects of collection”, one you can take away (and often is distributed first) and one you can’t take away: アンケート (ankēto “survey,” from the French enquête) and 意見 (iken “opinion”). I then took the four resulting collocations³ on Google in quotes (“•”) and recorded how many hits there were.

A better way to organize this data is as follows:

This data clearly supports the hypothesis I laid out above: アンケート, which can be taken away from people and is often distributed first, occurs much more likely with 回収 than 収集. 意見, on the other hand, which crucially cannot be taken away when collected, occurs much more likely with 収集 than 回収.

While this one example doesn’t prove anything in and of itself, it does help clarify with data a nuance between two near synonyms. While my hypothesis was borne out here, native speaker intuitions on word nuances and distinctions can be unreliable.⁴ This type of quick test can be very helpful for language learners and instructors alike.

Languages very often have words which vary in very subtle ways. Just this Tuesday I went to a Tokyo Language Exchange Meetup, a great meetup which brought together various language learners and enthusiasts. A hot topic that night was words with very similar meanings—near synonyms. A few English learners were lamenting sets of words like {see, view, watch} and how difficult they are to learn. I myself have had the same experience studying Mandarin.

I noted that these difficulties in offering contrasting definitions often are due to the fact that word meanings are not just “what the word points to” but also the implication of “what it relates to”.⁵ For example, “unborn baby” and “fetus” may point to the same thing, but are used in different contexts, in contrast to different other terms, for differing effect. Similarly “Death Tax” and “Estate Tax.” “Kneel” and “genuflect.”⁶

The concept of word meanings being “what it points to” and “what it relates to” also helps explain why certain words are difficult to translate. Fillmore uses the Japanese example of ぬるい (nurui) which is the de facto translation of “lukewarm.” However, some Japanese speakers will only use ぬるい in contrast with “hot,” i.e., hot tea can become ぬるい over time but ice water does not become ぬるい. In contrast, English “lukewarm” can be used to describe things that are initially or prototypically hot or cold. “What the words point to” in this case is the same but “what it relates to” or, here, “what it contrasts with” is different, making it an imperfect (though very close) translation.

Every language has near synonyms which vary slightly in nuance but this nuance or “feeling” is borne out objectively in data. Looking at what words certain terms relate to in real usage is often the key to getting a richer understanding of vocabulary.

Related posts:

1. Contribute: how your language identifies its arguments
2. Ubiquity i18n: questions to ask
3. Testing Google’s Language Detection

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Christmas Day in Nanao was decisively un-Christmas-like. It was quite sunny this morning, with a fox’s wedding. Personally, I really miss the snow. I saw a picture of someone on a white mountain and was really excited, but it was explained to me that the mountain was covered in salt, not snow.

We had a Christmas event at Penglai this morning so all the class Christmas tree got lined up in front of the school tree.

Some kids performed The Gift of the Magi as a skit, then each grade went up to perform an English song and dance. They were adorable, and they all worked so hard on the performances.

At the end the principal dressed up as Santa and threw candy at the kids.

… and when I say throw, I’m serious.

Merry Christmas!

Related posts:

1. The Gift That Keeps On Giving
2. English Easy Go!
3. Field trip: Guang-xing Farm

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The conference was held at the Chien Tan Youth Activity Center which has a beautiful pond and great view of the Grand Hotel, on the site of an old Shinto shrine.

As I recently did a little editing for a journal on English teaching here, I was invited to the presenters’ dinner Saturday night. While it was slightly awkward at first, not being a presenter myself, I soon met two representatives from the Korea and Philippines TESOL organizations who were very kind to me and we had some great conversations and laughs. (They are the two on the right in the first photo. The second photo is with the Filipino representative, Bernard Spolsky and me.)

I stayed overnight Saturday at the Eight Elephants hostel. Less than a year old, Eight Elephants is stylish, clean, and comfortable, though not the cheapest hostel in town. My experience there was great… I made a friend, a student of Special Education from Kaohsiung, and we went out to the nearby Shida night market. After randomly running into Kate who was in Taipei with her host family, she took me to a cafe she knew and we had a great time talking. While her English is great as well, we were talking completely in Chinese. After spending the day thinking about comprehensible input, it was great listening to her, understanding about 80%, and chiming in once in a while. As her interests were teaching and learning languages (including Japanese), we hit it off well with some great conversation. I look forward to seeing her again when I visit Kaohsiung in the near future.

On Sunday morning I saw another talk by Andrew Cohen, had lunch, and met up with a couple of the interns at the Fulbright Taiwan foundation who showed me around Taipei. We went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and randomly ran into Dr. Wu Jing-jyi, the director of the Foundation, on the plaza. We then went to check out the Taipei Modern Art Museum (with the first .museum address I’ve ever actually seen), which was super cheap and very enjoyable, albeit being relatively small. (The last photo below is at the Taipei Story House, which is a historic building—we just took a picture outside without going in.)

We had some Hong Kong-style 燒臘 preserved meat for dinner. I came back to Nanao Sunday night feeling fulfilled and blessed by the people I’d met all weekend, at the conference, at the hostel, and around the city.

Related posts:

1. Linguistics in 嘉義
2. Weekend update: 師大 café, 南方澳, and 淡水
3. Krashen The Party

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Krashen is kind of like the Chomsky of language acquisition and teaching—a huge and controversial (some may say incendiary) figure who you can love or hate, but can’t ignore. Last Wednesday in our weekly workshop, Dr. Collins delivered a chronological run down of Krashen’s theories.¹ As an entertaining aside, one task given to us was to draw a schematic diagram of Krashen’s view of language acquisition and production. Below is Dale’s drawing, which eerily reflects the geography of the brain… the input comes in through the ears (or eyes, at the back of the brain), then hits the Affective Filter (the amygdala), goes to the Language Acquisition Device (the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), then the output is filtered by the Monitor—a product of conscious learning—(the frontal lobe). Pretty creepy.

Krashen’s talk² was fascinating, albeit not what I expected: given that the workshop’s focus was on the teaching of reading and that he himself has been a big advocate of recreational reading for language learners, I expected more on teaching English reading as to non-native speakers. The majority of the talk, though, was on writing and the composing process: “reading more makes you a better writer, but writing more makes you smart.” He talked about how the act of (regular) writing clarifies and organizes our thoughts, and advocated for a writing process which involved much revision as, “every time you have to revise, it means you’ve become smarter,” and building relaxation (to allow for eureka moments) into the process. His conclusion and analysis are important for first-language speakers just as much as the second-language learner, and the talk did feel more like a writing seminar than a pedagogical one. Krashen is an engaging and entertaining speaker, using many examples from famous writers and common experience to draw his conclusion.

The intensity with which he spoke and the passion for thinking about thinking reminded me of Sally’s Honors Analysis class, which was as much about thinking as it was about mathematics. Sally once told us that, when we’re stuck on a problem, we should find someone just about as smart as us and just explain the problem to them. He claimed that the majority of the time, the simple process of explaining the problem outloud and answering clarifying questions would make the solution come to us. It’s a powerful technique that I’ve used many times at Chicago and elsewhere, and Krashen’s analysis of what happens when we write thus struck a chord with me.

Afterwards I was fortunate enough to go out to dinner with the speakers, some of our advisors, and some faculty from the Institute that hosted the workshop. I had some great conversations about my background, where my future directions may lie academically, and of course the ideas. ^^ It reminded me of dinners with linguists back at home, after a workshop or CLS. I realized I miss the fraternity of academia—the sense of mutual respect and interest academics have for each other’s work and ideas, even if the “other” is only 22 years old.

Related posts:

1. ETA-ROC and Another Weekend in Taipei
2. Gaba, Shame On You
3. Co-schooling in Dongshan

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A group of 11 6th graders from Penglai have been practicing for the song competition for the past month or so under my co-teacher Jennifer’s direction. They sang and danced to the Fiona Fung song “Proud of You.”

The military guy and I met the kids at the train station at 7AM.

The kids liked playing with my camera and abusing me.

The competition was held at 凱旋國小, a huge elementary school.

We first practiced downstairs a few times and hung out. They were all wearing little angel crown-ish things, black t-shirt with a gold “belt” of tape, and bells on their wrists.

Our school was the third group in the later-morning performance group. They were not at all nervous and did fabulously!

All of us ETA’s were of course all there with our respective teams. In the photo below Katie is videotaping another school’s choreographer standing in the back of the crowd dancing with/directing the kids. He had this whole face, haircut, and outfit that screamed “I am a choreographer.”

Then we came home. A great time was had by all. ^^

Related posts:

1. The Gift That Keeps On Giving
2. I’m Seriously Dreaming of a White Christmas
3. Buklavu

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

While I originally thought he might have mispronounced “today,” he obviously knows that word… I believe he was trying to say “我忙死了,” a Mandarin resultative construction which could be translated “I’m busy to the extent that I will die.” Obviously this is not literal… V+死了 compounds are a common form of exaggeration. It was a neat instance of grammatical transfer, though.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.