Archive for the ‘Phonology’ Category
July 6, 2019
(Much about men’s bodies and mansex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest; also about military displays for Independence Day, but that comes after the raunchy stuff — Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.)
So we have the 4th of July as a celebration of commercial mansex (every holday is a sales opportunity): selling premium men’s underwear by hawking men’s bodies; and offering gay porn sales, usually with a holiday-themed image (naked bodies wrapped in the flag are a conventional presentation, but there are many other possibilities). From this year’s rich crop of ads, I’ve chosen one of each type: a holiday ad for DJX homowear in the Trough line; and an ad for the political-satire gayporn film Cauke for President from TitanMen.
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Posted in Facial expressions, Flags, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, History, Holidays, Language and politics, Phonology, Poetry, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 2 Comments »
March 27, 2019
The 2/26 One Big Happy, riffing on /sɛns/, in idioms with sense (common sense, horse sense, nonsense), in incense, and in cents (also in an idiom, two cents):
(#1)
Which, of course, leads us inevitably to the psychedelic days of 1967, with their whiff of incense and peppermints (plus some pot).
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Posted in Dialects, Idioms, Language and culture, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phonetics, Phonology, Rhyme | 5 Comments »
March 21, 2019
From Karen Chung on Facebook a while back, this complex pun in the 9/25/15 Bizarro, illustrating (among other things) a nice contrast in accentual patterns: front stress (or forestress), the default for N + N compounds, in MOVING sale; back stress (or afterstress), the default in Adj + N nominals, in moving SALE:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
So the hinge of the pun is the ambiguity of moving: as N, (roughly) ‘the act or process of changing residence’; or as Adj, (roughly) ‘causing strong emotion, esp. of sadness’ (both senses are ultimately semantic developments from the simple motion verb move, intransitive or transitive; but they are now clearly distinct lexical items). Then from the difference in syntactic category follows the difference in accentual pattern.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Common vs. proper, Compounds, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Phonology, Pop culture, Semantics, Syntactic categories, Variation | 3 Comments »
March 20, 2019
… in a One Big Happy cartoon (in auditorium) and in the title of a 1998 movie (the nickname Paulie): in American English, unrounded [ɑ] for rounded [ɔ], collapsing the distinction between the phonemes /a/ in cot and /ɔ/ in caught.
(#1) Discomfort in the low back region: Polly on the left, Paulie on the right
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Posted in Eggcorns, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Nicknames, Phonetics, Phonology, Taboo language and slurs, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
March 4, 2019
Adventures in cross-dialect understanding in the One Big Happy strips of 2/1 and 2/2, both featuring Ruthie and Joe’s playmate James:
(#1)
(#2)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Errors, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Phonetics, Phonology, Pop culture, Usage attitudes, Variation | 1 Comment »
February 19, 2019
That, at least, is where it started, with this bit of playfulness on Facebook:
(#1)
One among a great many available versions of Wading for Godot (like this one, hardly any have an identifiable origin, but just get passed around on the web, along with jokes, funny pictures, and the like: the folk culture of the net). I’m particularly taken with #1, as a well-made image and as a close reworking of lines from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:
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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and medicine, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Parodies, Phonetics, Phonology, Puns, Snowclones | 1 Comment »
February 16, 2019
A bit of personal and intellectual history, having to do with the fact that there was a period of years when on the Friday before Presidents Day my husband-equivalent Jacques Transue and I would drive from Palo Alto to Berkeley for the annual meeting of the BLS, the Berkeley Linguistics Society, then held in Dwinelle Hall at UCB over the three-day weekend. (It has since moved its dates to less crowded times during winter quarter.)
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Posted in Academic life, Death notices, Linguistic theory, Morphology, My life, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, Syntax | 1 Comment »
December 3, 2018
3 x 3: three cartoons of linguistic interest for the 3rd of December: a Dave Blazek Loose Parts with merged phonemes; a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with an ambiguity; and a Zits with an onomatopoeia.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Beheading, Clipping, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Onomatopoeia, Phonology, Puns, Truncation | 3 Comments »
October 6, 2018
Previously on this blog:
on 9/30, “AZ on imperfect rhyme” (part 1 of a series): an inventory of publications of mine on half-rhyme and phonological similarity
on 10/1, “Imperfect rhyme, part 2”: an inventory of postings on this blog that discuss particular examples of half-rhyme
And now, part 3, the last: an inventory of publications that cite the papers of mine on imperfect rhyme in part 1 — mostly the first, the 1976 rock rhyme paper.
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Posted in Phonetics, Phonology, Poetic form | Leave a Comment »
