An invitation on Facebook on 12/13 from linguist Jennifer Arnold, performing her musical role (crucial phrase underlined):
If you like to sing, come to the Chapel Hill Messiah open sing tomorrow evening! I’ll be in the viola section.
My response:
I had a confused moment when I thought you’d be singing the praises of the Messiah of Chapel Hill (whoever he is; I’m woefully out of touch with things, and thought I must have missed the rise of a Prince of Peace in the New South).
Ambiguity is everywhere, especially if you become unmoored from assumptions about real-world likelihood and reasonable judgments about the intentions of the person producing the material in question. As I apparently did in this case, at least temporarily. In that momentary lapse, a whole family of real-world unlikely readings for Chapel Hill Messiah open sing emerged.
The phrase has two parts, two constituent phrases; so an initial question is how the four words (taking Chapel Hill to be a single word, a complex proper placename) group into two parts, which then comes down to whether Messiah is grouped with the following open sing (what JA intended) or with the preceding Chapel Hill (what AZ heard). And then, as is common with alternative constituent structures, the alternatives also differ semantically, in the semantics of the component elements (in this case, the noun Messiah) and in the semantic relationships between the parts.
Summarizing much of this:
The top structure has NOAD‘s sense 1 of messiah, used as a proper name (of a musical composition):
1 (the Messiah) [a] the promised deliverer of the Jewish nation prophesied in the Hebrew Bible. [b] Jesus regarded by Christians as the Messiah of the Hebrew prophecies and the savior of humankind. [AZ: Handel’s oratorio Messiah is about sense 1b]
The bottom structure has, instead, NOAD‘s sense 2:
2 a leader or savior of a particular group or cause: the team’s supporters have been tempted to regard him as a messiah rather than a manager. [AZ: a metaphorical extension of sense 1, so sometimes capitalized]
Correspondingly, in the top structure, the singing of Handel’s Messiah is located in Chapel Hill.
The bottom structure has a N1 + N2 compound Chapel Hill messiah (with N2 head messiah ‘a savior’), capable of a range of interpretations, of which two (Object ‘a savior of Chapel Hill’ and Source ‘a savior from Chapel Hill) immediately occurred to me. And then in turn Chapel Hill messiah is N1 in a larger N1 + N2 compound, with the artistic-creation nominal open sing as its N2 head, and it too has a range of interpretations, of which two (Audience ‘a performance for the messiah’ and Topic ‘a performance about the messiah’) came to my mind quickly. (Note the specialized semantic relationships for head nouns of artistic creation, like play, poem, picture, symphony, song, singing, (theatrical) happening, (comedy) sketch.)
December 16, 2024 at 11:26 am |
Fuckaduck– we could have gone, but probably would not have.
December 16, 2024 at 11:51 am |
And missed your chance to meet JA (who’s a Stanford PhD; years of e-mail confusion over people who sent stuff to arnold@stanford, thinking it would go to me, but I am zwicky@stanford).
December 16, 2024 at 11:28 am |
UNC-CH needs a messiah since the fascist government of NC gutted DEI programs and deserving minority applicants are being turned away.
December 16, 2024 at 11:47 am |
Well, since UNC was one of the defendants in the case that went to the Supreme Court, I doubt that the state government had much say in the gutting of the DEI programs.