As you have used the PhraseWorthy application, you might have asked yourself, “How can a computer come up with wordplay like this?” PhraseWorthy is only able to do what it does because it is structured around linguistic patterns, formulas, and principles that researchers have discovered. In this post, we will introduce you to the linguist responsible for bringing together the research that makes PhraseWorthy possible—Dr. Dallin D. Oaks.
Dr. Oaks is a linguistics professor at Brigham Young University, Provo. He has always been interested in language, and as a child he did local performances as an amateur ventriloquist. Dr. Oaks studied English teaching at BYU and earned a Ph.D. from Purdue University with a specialty in English linguistics.
Dr. Oaks is an expert on structural ambiguity in the English language. He authored the two-volume book, Structural Ambiguity in English: An Applied Grammatical Inventory. (This book was included in the Oxford Bibliographies, which curates only the most significant scholarship from the last few decades.) Dr. Oaks has given numerous presentations on the topic of structural ambiguity in language and has even been featured on several radio programs.
Understanding linguistic rules about topics like idioms, phonology, and particularly ambiguity is what allows PhraseWorthy to generate catchy slogans and puns. Dr. Oaks had the idea to take the linguistic formulas that he discovered and to turn them into a program that anyone could use. And that’s how PhraseWorthy got its start!
March 7, 2019
Have you ever before had problems with your hosting? I’m
open for recommendations as my webhost is horrible currently.