Arnold Zwicky's Blog

We might as well just give them numbers. (This particular joke is 2/3 of a devil.) From Verdant on my Twitter on 7/15/22, this old Shoe strip:

(#1) Body-location (of the tattoo) vs. event-location (of the tattooing); Verdant provides this as a comment on my 2/27/19 posting “Body-location, event-location”, where #444 appears in a One Big Happy strip and is traced back at least as far as the antique Joe Miller’s Jest Book

To which Verdant adds yes-I-said-yes Molly Bloom’s:

confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child

The 1/31/19 OBH #444 from that earlier posting:

(#2) [2019 caption:] Body-location where (Joe’s intended interpretation) vs. event-location where (Ruthie’s perceived interpretation)

The ambiguity is pervasive in adverbials of location; from the 2019 posting:

OBH has been here before, at least once — in this 2/17/16 strip, the subject of my 3/8/16 posting “Where?”:

(#3)

Anthony’s place adverbial in two places can have either of two interpretations: as referring to two locations on his arm, or as referring to two locations where the arm-breaking event took place. Anthony intends the first (the body-location interpretation), Ruthie gets the second (the event-location interpretation).

Intuitively, the adverb has narrower scope in the first interpretation, wider in the second, and this intuition corresponds to what happens when a clause has adverbials of both types: when the adverbials are tightly adjoined to the remainder of the clause, the body-location adverbial comes first, inside, closer to the verb, with the event-location second, outside, further from the verb

Another way to think of the ambiguity is as involving inalienable location (for body-location adverbials, bodypart nouns being, with kinship nouns, canonical examples of inalienably possessed nouns) vs. alienable location (for event-location adverbials). See my 7/27/18 posting “Are You My Bottom?”, with a section on alienable vs. alienable possession

#444 is most wonderfully exemplified in the cleverly enjambed lines in the title of my 4/16/19 posting “She got pinched in the As … tor Bar” (body-location the ass, event-location the Astor Bar). And that posting has a link to my 4/5/19 posting “Science, Charity, and adverbial ambiguity”, which starts with this (lame in two senses) joke exchange:

(Patient) I broke my leg in three places — (Doctor) Then don’t go to those places

Yes, #444 is everywhere. For all I know, it occurred in ancient Greek inscriptions about where some warrior was wounded.

But for a bit more about the syntax and semantics of the joke, see those four earlier postings, with pointers to the technical literature.

— Who knows what ambiguity lurks in the heart of joke #444?

— the Linguist knows

This entry was posted on July 22, 2022 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Modifier attachment, Possession, Semantics, Syntax. 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.