From Chris Waigl (in Fairbanks AK), two photos of Arctic ruminants:
LARS is the Large Animal Research Station at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Photo by Chris.
This photo is on a card from Greatland Graphics in Anchorage. The linguistic hook comes in the text on the card:
Posted in Inflection, Singular & plural | 5 Comments »
This time (earlier, here and here) in the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness (hat tip to Jeff Shaumeyer in Facebook):
A note about the webcomic, and then some notes about the idiom everybody and his brother.
Posted in Agreement, Conditions in conflict, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Singular & plural, Syntax, Technology, These modern times | 5 Comments »
The English word buttocks presents a problem for speakers: in the standard language, it’s both formally plural (with final /s/) and grammatically plural (rejects singular determiners like a, takes plural verb agreement: *a buttocks, Kim’s buttocks were/*was perfectly symmetrical). However, buttocks plays a double role semantically:
it denotes a matched pair of body-parts (NOAD2’s definition for buttock: “either of the two round fleshy parts that form the lower rear area of a human trunk”; buttocks gets only a subentry here: “the rump of an animal”); this is buttock, roughly ‘ass-cheek’, seen in left buttock vs. right buttock
and it denotes the two as a unit — roughly, ‘ass, butt, bottom, behind, backside, rear end, …’ (for which I’ll use the gloss ‘butt’) — in which case it acts somewhat like a plurale tantum (cf. pants), plural formally and grammatically, but singular in reference, and somewhat like formally plural singular nouns (shingles the disease, linguistics, etc. — there are several subtypes of these, well studied)
How to reconcile this double role?
Posted in Inflection, Morphology, Singular & plural | 7 Comments »
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