blog

Introduction

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.

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Every day on the way to work I walk by a fine establishment known as Yoshinoya (吉野家), Japan’s largest gyudon (牛丼) chain restaurant. For those of you whose lives have yet to be graced by gyudon, it’s a bowl of rice topped with beef and onions stewed in a sweet-savory soy-based sauce. Loving gyudon and being a cheapskate, I naturally noticed the recent 50 yen off gyudon promotion at Yoshinoya. The above photo is a photo of part of that sign.

Part of this sign, though, made me think about our new Ubiquity parser. In particular, it was the attachment ambiguity in the end date of the promotion. The text in the photo above literally is “April 15th (Wed.) 8PM until”. (Note that Japanese is a strongly head-final language, and that the “until” is a postposition.) There are two possible readings for this expression, as illustrated by the two composition trees below.

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In my recent quest for podcasts, I just today discovered Jerry Sadock’s Automodular Grammar lectures on iTunes U, brought to you by the University of Arizona. This is essentially the first few lectures from his Automodular course I took my last year in college, which was one of my favorite and most thought-provoking and challenging (“thought-challenging”?) courses while at Chicago. While I still feel that having visuals (slides, or his handsome face, above), you can download his talks and handouts separately from their website, linked here:

1. Automodular Grammar 1. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 18, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
2. Automodular Grammar 2. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 25, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
3. Automodular Grammar 3: The Passive. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, February 1, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)