Anoop Sarkar at Special Circumstances answers Geoff Pullum's question about how a part-of-speech tagger would deal with verbless English. The result: pretty good performance, and at least one amusing error:
a word of gratitude to Thaler -- otherwise an unimportant screwball DT NN IN NN TO VB -- RB DT JJ NN
POS tags are documented at the end of Anoop's post, but these are DT=determiner, NN=common noun, IN=preposition, TO="to", VB=bare verb, JJ=adjective.
Ignoring punctuation, this sequence is analogous to a string like "a plan of action to arrange carefully a lovely bouquet". As if.
[Update: Michael Leuchtenburg emails:
When I saw the title of your post on Language Log, I at first thought that you were suggesting naming the practice of writing without verbs - or perhaps without any one part of speech - "thalering". It seems a fitting tribute to an author who writes without verbs to turn his name into a verb.
Indeed. Though Thaler already has a distinguished etymological history in English, via the (literal, silver) coinage of St. Joachim's Valley; the OED cites:
1864 CARLYLE Fredk. Gt. XVII. v. IV. 571 'Let my ducat be a Joachimsthal one, then!'.. 'a Joachimsthal-er'; or for brevity, a Thal-er; whence Thaler, and at last Dollar.
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