There was this paper of mine (“Jottings on Adpositions, Case Inflections, Government, and Agreement”), originally from 1988 but not properly published until 1992 (in The Joy of Grammar: A festschrift in Honor of James D. McCawley), that I wanted to quote from in an on-line discussion a week ago, only to discover that after the great dispersal of almost all my books and files some years back, I had no trace left of the thing, no copy of any kind (this sort of thing keeps happening to me). I couldn’t find a way to get a copy on-line, but in a stroke of luck it turned that Benjamins was selling off its remaining stock of the paperback edition of Joy at a price I could actually afford, so I bought their last copy and had it mailed to me next day delivery. This morning I created jpegs of all 15 pages (369 through 384); the quotation I need is on the first page, but now I can add this posting of all 15 pages to the little set of publications of mine available on-line.
Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
Adpositions and case inflections, from 1988
January 20, 2025In the can
May 30, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro takes us to the world of talking tennis balls, where one of them commits a bathroom pun on the noun can ‘cylindrical metal container’:
(#1) Cylindrical metal containers are highly salient to tennis balls, because such cans are how they’re sold (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Meanwhile, Wayno’s title for #1 — “Today’s Ballsy Cartoon” — offers a different pun, on (tennis) balls, a mildly raunchy one: ballsy ‘tough, courageous”, a derivative in –y (tricky < trick, mushy < mush, etc.) from crude slang balls ‘testicles’. And my title for this posting (“In the can”) offers another pun on cylindrical container can; from NOAD:
phrase in the can: informal on tape or film and ready to be broadcast or released: all went well, the film was in the can.
Now for some details.
THE shirts
October 7, 2023… for THE Ohio State University. A posting inspired by this Facebook posting by Scott Schwenter (who is, among other things, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio), on 9/16:
(#1) SS — with Tammy Anderson, to whom he is married — before an Ohio State football game they were going to
SS is wearing a scarlet THE shirt for the occasion, TA a scarlet and gray shirt of her own, scarlet and gray being the school colors. For what is about to come, you also need to know that the school mascot is the buckeye, the nut of the Ohio buckeye tree Aesculus glabra, and that school teams are known as the Buckeyes; Ohio State fans like TA and SS are also known as Buckeyes, as indeed are natives of the state of Ohio. (I am not making any of this up.)
Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.
Death of an instar
June 7, 2023Yesterday’s — 6/6 — Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: “Today’s Theatrical Cartoon”, as Wayno’s title has it:
(#1) An outrageous — I hesitate to say brutal — pun, also learnèd, drawing on the technical terminology of zoology and the rather elevated locution the stage for acting, not to mention knowledge of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
(the) Batman
October 4, 2015This posting is about arthrousness in proper names, specifically the choice between anarthrous Batman and arthrous the Batman in the 2012 movie The Dark Knight Rises, which I viewed on tv last month. But first I need to give some background about the movie.
(Note: I have now created a Page (on this site) with an inventory of postings about arthrousness; it’s a subPage under “Linguistic notes”.)
Dead Tongues
July 15, 2015News from the 2015 Linguistic Institute (at the University of Chicago), from Stephanie Shih: a performance yesterday by Dead Tongues, the (un)official band of Stanford Linguistics. Plus a stunning Lingstitute2015 logo for the band by Stephanie:
(#1)
Cue the Rolling Stones.