Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In my e-mail this morning, two linguistic comics: a One Big Happy and a Mother Goose and Grimm:

(#1)

(#2)

In #1, Ruthie’s struggles with the formulaic expressions of English continue, as she’s faced with the rare lexical item beholder and does her best to make sense of it.

Then in #2, Grimm does his best with an imperative that’s ambiguous in speech, as between a structure with a vocative boy and one with a fore-stressed N+N compound stick boy. Mother Goose intends the first, Grimm understands the second.

This entry was posted on June 17, 2015 at 9:07 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Errors, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Parsing. 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.