Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Three e-cards. The first is one in a long series illustrating the perils of going without punctuation — in this case, without commas that mark off syntactic constituents (in a way that receives expression in speech as well as on the page):

(#1)

Then two versions of essentially the same joke, turning on spelling and apostrophes:

(#2)

(#3)

There is, of course, a syntactic difference in the pairs your shit / you’re shit and your nuts / you’re nuts — NP vs. Clause, to start with — a difference that is not reliably distinguished in pronounciation, since your (the possessive pronoun) and you’re (subject pronoun + auxiliary verb) are homophonous.

This entry was posted on October 14, 2013 at 10:22 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Punctuation, Spelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.