pragmatics

Poetry and a cup of coffee

Poetry is a complex genre of literature, and it is often something that we wouldn't expect computers to be able to understand. Poems play with the language by intentionally breaking its structure and by expressing meaning in figurative language such as metaphors. A lot of the expressive power of poetry lies in its ability of provoking certain imagery, certain emotions, in the reader. 😌 As it turns out, it is possible to analyze Finnish poetry automatically in Python. 😃

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a drawn lost cat sign

Oh, sarcasm, sarcasm. The thing that puzzles us so much. It takes some knowledge of the person to know if he is being sarcastic or not. Regardless of how sarcastic we were ourselves. But is there any science behind it? As it turns out, there is, and I wrote my MA thesis about it in Spanish. But if you don't have time to read it, just read this post instead. 😅 (more…)

A newspaper, eyeglasses and a phone

When we communicate, the most important thing our words seem to convey is a meaning of some sort. It's quite easy for us to intuitively understand what words such as dog 🐕 or cat 🐈 mean. But for a linguist, it's a whole different story. (more…)