Archive for the ‘Discourse organization’ Category

Swim Meat, the video

October 30, 2024

(Publicity for a gay porn video, entertaining in its way but absolutely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)

🎃 🎃 🎃 three jack-o’-lanterns for penultimate October, Halloween Eve (that is, the day before the day before the day of the dead) — in my house, the day when the pussyboys go out to seek their phallic prey

Into this scene comes this morning’s e-mail from the Falcon | NakedSword Store, offering:

Hot House movie download discounts — full movies $11.95 each

With, right at the top, the crudely pun-titled video Swim Meat and its cover illustration, offering four fine pieces of swim meat, one (Johnny V’s) just barely concealed by his swimwear; plus three proudly jutting tubesteaks that I’ve had to suppress for WordPress modesty (but here you can view the uncensored cover, along with the publicity text):

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Posted in Compounds, Discourse organization, Gay porn, Holidays, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »

The three Larrys

March 16, 2024

A complex tale that begins with a follow-up to my 3/1 posting “The grace of lovers”, about the sharing of enthusiasms with my first male lover, Larry (the pseudonymous Danny Sparrick in my writings about my sexual life). That’s Larry1. There are gripping stories about our time together and his life now, but the tale of the three Larrys is fabulously intricate as it is, so I’ll put off posting about these parts of Larry1’s life for another time. And focus on our exchange of enthusiasms, which will lead, circuitously, to Larry2 (in NYC, some years after Larry1). And then, a recent posting about a French conference on interjections, in which a 1982 dissertation on discourse particles I directed at Ohio State brings us Larry3, who wrote it.

There is still more, a epic of geographical (and social) wandering for both Larry1 and me; he grew up in Del Mar, a beach community in San Diego County, and ended up in provincial Japan; I grew up in little suburbs of Reading, in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, and ended up on the San Francisco peninsula; in between these terminal points, he and I more or less wandered the world (we both taught in China along the way, but not in the same place or at the same time; we both lived in England at one point and were able to get together in London then; and once we rendezvoused in Washington DC). Perhaps these odysseys will make another posting — but, again, too much for today.

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Posted in Books, Discourse organization, Gayland, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Interjections, Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Vote for me!

May 13, 2022

From yesterday’s posting “Three responsibilities”:

I voted today in Palo Alto — in the primary election whose official date is 6/7; official results are to be reported by 7/15, and then the top two candidates in each contest will stand opposed in the general election whose official date is 11/8.

… As it happens, my grandchild Opal is about to vote for the first time, and they have been astounded by the candidates’ statements in our [Santa Clara County] voter information guide

Now, about the statements (and the way candidates have had themselves listed on the ballot), focusing on the language used in the statements and the way the candidates present themselves there as gendered.

I’ll do this page by page, picking out highlights and adding my own comments as I go.

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Posted in Discourse organization, Greetings, Language and gender, Language and politics, Masculinity, Pragmatics, Pronouns | Leave a Comment »

An Obama periodic sentence

January 14, 2021

(Another item in my posting queue from a while ago.)

As suits his complex life history, Barack Obama commands a wide range of rhetorical styles and is adept at shifting from one to another according to the context: American “plain style” used to convey sweet (but lawyerly) reason, distinct echos of black pulpit style, and much more. Including, from a speech to students at the University of Illinois on 9/7/18, a striking periodic sentence. (The whole speech can be viewed on the media space Illinois site, “President Barack Obama Speech at the University of Illinois”.)

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Posted in Discourse organization, Style and register | 5 Comments »

Sports commentary

December 20, 2018

Thanks to Facebook friends who provided a link to an xkcd cartoon from way back (5/27/11): #904 Sports:

The point is that sports color commenators treat essentially random day-to-day fluctuations as indicators of trends — because they have lots of time to fill and not a lot of substance to fill it with (play-by-play coverage is something else), and because like all of us they are narratophiles (lovers of story) and seek to find a coherent narrative in pretty much anything that happens. Meanwhile, color commentators can fall back on all that accumulated data, to wield fan statistics as another time-filler.

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Posted in Discourse organization, Linguistics in the comics, Stories, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

hyperbaton, hypermasturbation

March 11, 2017

The Dinosaur Comics from the 3rd, in principle about hyperbaton:

But hypermasturbation (which sounds sort of like hyberbaton) intrudes in the conversation.

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Posted in Discourse organization, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Word order | 2 Comments »

“depriving healthcare for millions”

March 8, 2017

Noted by Wilson Gray on ADS-L on Monday, from his reading on Facebook. Wilson commented:

Remember the days of yore when people wrote: “depriving  millions of health-care”?

The implicit analysis here is that the ordinary argument structure (hereafter, argstr) for the verb deprive has a Direct Object referring to a POSSESSOR in an act of deprivation, and an Oblique Object (marked by the P of) referring to a POSSESSION in this act. In abbreviated form: deprive has the argstr:

(1) SU: AGENT, DO: POSSESSOR, OO(of): POSSESSION

with the semantics that AGENT causes POSSESSOR to come to no longer have POSSESSION.

But the Facebook sentence has an argstr with a Direct Object referring to a POSSESSION and an Oblique Object (marked by the P for) referring to a POSSESSOR:

(2) SU: AGENT, DO: POSSESSION, OO(for): POSSESSOR

with the same semantics as in (1).

Now, alternative argstrs for the same verb are very common; the question is which verbs have which structures. Wilson’s judgment (which I share) is that deprive is fine in structure (1) — deprive millions of health-care — but not in structure (2) — deprive health-care for millions. (Divest is similar to deprive here.)

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Posted in Argument structure, Discourse organization, Syntax, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Who is Alice? What is she?

February 21, 2016

From yesterday’s NYT, a long obit by William Grimes, with two different heads

(on-line) Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89

(in print) Nelle Harper-Lee, 1926-2016: ‘Mockingbird’ Author, Elusive Voice of the Small-Town South

In the print edition, the story begins on p. 1, continues on p. 14, and continues further on p. 15. Lee’s sister Alice is mentioned in passing on p. 14 (details below), and then 20 sizable paragraphs later, on p. 15, we get:

[Ex] She lived with Alice, who practiced law in her 90s and died in 2014 at 103.

And of course I totally failed to recognize who Alice was — to me she was a new character who just dropped out of the sky — so I had to track back through the story to find her introduction. The practice of newspaper journalism that caused my problem could be called No Recharacterization: people in a story are named and characterized at first appearance, but thereafter are referred to only by a short-form name (Prefix + LN, LN alone, or in certain cases FN alone), with no re-description or re-introduction. As I wrote in an earlier posting on journalistic conventions, this practice

diverges from the usual practices of story-telling (also adopted by many writers of non-fiction), where people are re-introduced into the discourse if they have dropped from topicality.

The addition of the two words her sister to [Ex] would have averted the problem, but (as I noted in the earlier posting, many newspaper people regard No Recharacterization

as absolutely [inviolable]: it’s what newspaper writing requires.

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Posted in Death notices, Discourse organization, Language in the media | 5 Comments »

Journalistic conventions

June 23, 2015

Practice 1. Newspaper and magazine stories often have a human-interest lead-in, about a specific person or group involved in the story; that’s designed to engage the readers’ interest, before the real subject of the piece, the hard news or analysis, kicks in.

(I’m not sure how old this practice is, but it’s now very common, even though some critics find it objectionable.)

Practice 2. A convention of newspaper journalism is that on first appearance, someone is introduced with a full name and and a brief characterization (“john Smith, the victim of the crime”), but that later mentions will use Prefix + LN (or just LN), with no recharacterization (“Mr. Smith”, “Professor Smith”, “Smith”). This convention is designed for economy (“Omit Needless Words”), but it diverges from the usual practices of story-telling (also adopted by many writers of non-fiction), where people are re-introduced into the discourse if they have dropped from topicality,

The two practices taken together can make newspaper stories hard to follow. A case in point, from “The right choices: America’s bloated prison system has stopped growing. Now it must shrink” in The Economist of 6/20.

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Posted in Discourse organization, Reference, Writing | 2 Comments »