Arnold Zwicky's Blog

By JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein), the New Yorker daily cartoon from yesterday:

“Personally, I worry that, with everyone wearing masks, readers won’t be able to tell who in the cartoon is speaking.”

The masks are part of daily life in plague time, and they conceal the wearers’ mouths. So in a cartoon you can’t tell who’s speaking. (In real life, there might be other clues, like vocal timbre.)

The characters in the cartoon have absolutely identical facial expressions, so no clue there. But one’s a man and one’s a woman, and the man is in the foreground of the cartoon. So some people might assume that the man is the speaker, because male characters are, ceteris paribus, more salient or significant than female characters; or because a character in the foreground is there because they’re the speaker. Or some people might assume that the woman is the speaker because she’s expressing concern for the readers and that such empathy is, conventionally, more characteristic of women than of men.

But such reasoning proceeds on the slimmest of support. We really don’t know.

Now, the subtle point. If the speaker had said readers won’t be able to tell who in a cartoon is speaking (with sg. indefinite a cartoon) or readers won’t be able to tell who in  cartoons is speaking (with pl. indefinite cartoons), then we’d just have someone talking about how people read and understand cartoons.

But instead JAK chose to have his speaker say:

readers won’t be able to tell who in the cartoon is speaking (with sg. definite the cartoon)

conveying that the referent of this NP is given in the context. The context of this utterance is in fact the cartoon it appears in, so this utterance is subtly, but significantly, meta: the characters are aware that they are in fact characters in a cartoon and they’re talking about that.

JAK could have gone for sledgehammer meta, with

readers won’t be able to tell who in this cartoon is speaking (with sg. demonstrative this cartoon)

but he did it with a much lighter hand.

This entry was posted on April 25, 2020 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Comic conventions, Definiteness, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics. 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.