Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
August 31, 2019
Roz Chast in the September 2nd New Yorker:
(#1)
An exercise in the semantics of N + N compounds, exploiting an ambiguity that might not have occurred to you:
in the semantics of the modifying N, N1 (here, the coordinate N bricks and mortar);
in the semantics of the head N, N2 (here, the understood N store);
and in the semantics of the relation between N2 and N1 (here, ‘N2 for N1, (specifically) N2 selling N1’, in this case ‘store selling bricks and mortar — rather than the ‘N2 (made) of/from N1’ relation in the familiar conventionalized compound brick(s) and mortar store ‘store (made) of/from bricks and mortar’.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Figurative language, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Semantics of compounds, Subsectivity | 1 Comment »
August 28, 2019
… or edible roots (with root covering any underground plant organ), or whatever you call the stuff. In the 7/30 One Big Happy, Ruthie, confronted with /hol fudz/, takes it to be just such a label, hole foods, when her mother is referring instead to a grocery store, Whole Foods:
(#1)
The conventional (semi-technical) label for the category in question is root vegetables.
(more…)
Posted in Accent, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity, Semantics of compounds, Vaginality | 3 Comments »
August 26, 2019
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo:
(#1) A parade of unidiomatic prepositional alternatives (with the P of) to the synthetic compounds cheese grater, nutcracker, meat cleaver, egg timer
(Wayno’s title: “Rhyme & Punishment”; see comments below)
To understand the relevance of these nominals, you need to know not only who Jimmy Buffett is and that his most famous song is the notoriously ohrwurmisch “Margaritaville”, you actually need to know a crucial couplet from the song:
(more…)
Posted in Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Semantics of compounds, Synthetic compounds, Understanding comics | 5 Comments »
August 18, 2019
Saturday’s Zippy takes us to southeastern Pennsylvania, the land of my childhood:
(#1)
Not in escrow, but in Hellam Township, in York County PA. Specifically, in the Haines Shoe House. Which is a house in the form of a shoe (rather than a shop that sells shoes, or a storage place for shoes, or …).
(more…)
Posted in Architecture, Art, Compounds, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
August 13, 2019
(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The bit of formulaic language for this situation is a catchphrase, a slogan with near-proverbial status (YDK, for short):
YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN
The leaves are conventionally associated with modesty, through their having been used to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden — a use that then associates the leaves with the genitals, from which the psychological contamination spreads to the entire plant, including the fruits. You don’t know where that fig has been.
(more…)
Posted in Catchphrases, Culture, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pragmatics, Proverbs, Slogans, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
August 11, 2019
Yesterday’s Bizarro, a Wayno/Piraro collabo, an homage to hats:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Wayno himself, on his Facebook page, titles this his “Sartorial Autobiography”, and provides a thumbnail of himself in the hat.
Meanwhile, I posted the cartoon on the FB page of Steven J. Levine, who is sartorially celebrated on several fronts, including his immense affection for fedora-style hats.
(more…)
Posted in Clothing, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
August 8, 2019
Two recent One Big Happy strips about the cartoon’s kids in the process of acquiring — internalizing, rehearsing, and displaying — two sociocultural complexes of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
Ruthie is learning to fit into modern American commercial culture, where she is urged to judge products not on their intrinsic qualities (such as the taste and nutritional values of breakfast cereals) but on their symbolic associations as pushed in their marketing (cartoon characters as the representatives of breakfast cereals in commercials).
Meanwhile, Joe is learning normative masculinity in modern America, absorbing the lesson that successful manhood requires the stringent rejection of everything feminine — both anything associated with girls and also anything associated with the conventional role of the mother as taming boys, civilizing them.
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
August 4, 2019
From The Economist of July 27th. Yes, it’s grammatical, but it’s fiercely hard to parse — you might feel the need to get out pencil and paper to graph the thing — and it’s also a big show-stopper flourish: stop reading the news to admire how clever we are!
In this case, the magazine has committed a nested clausal comparative (NCC), somewhat reminiscent of nested relative clauses (also known in the syntactic literature as self-embedded relative clauses) like those in the NP with head the rat modified by the relative clause that the cat that the dog worried ate:
[ the rat ]-i
… [ that [ the cat ]-j [ that [ the dog ] worried ___-j ] ate ___-i ]
(where an underline indicates a missing (“extracted”) constituent, and the indices mark coreferential constituents). Both nested relatives and NCCs require the hearer to interrupt the processing of one clause to process another clause of similar form.
(more…)
Posted in Comparison, Formulaic language, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Processing, Semantics, Syntax | 4 Comments »
(#1)
