Wednesday, January 6, 2010

A demonstration of the non-commutativity of the English language [Video]

Terry Tao writes on his What's New blog about a video he came across, which exploits a rhetorical trick he haven't seen before:

If nothing else, it’s a convincing (albeit unsubtle) demonstration that the English language is non-commutative (or perhaps non-associative); a linguistic analogue of the swindle, if you will.

Of course, the trick relies heavily on sentence fragments that negate or compare; I wonder if it is possible to achieve a comparable effect without using such fragments.


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