Archive for the ‘Phonology’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

toss salad, fry shrimp, and other t/d ~ ∅

November 14, 2017

Mike Pope on Facebook 9/29/17 (yes, I am many hundreds of postings behind), with this menu photo:

toss salad, like grill cheese, old-fashion, whip cream, ice tea, etc. Final t/d ~ ∅, aka t/d-deletion. In honor of Mike’s example, I have created a t/d-deletion Page on this blog, inventorying Language Log and AZBlog postings on the topic, with extensive quotations from the postings.

Then a bonus: though the menu listings above have fried shrimp, the shorter fry shrimp is also attested, as on this site of stock drawings, including doodles of fried shrimp, some labeled fried shrimp, but a number labeled fry shrimp.

(more…)

Posted in Phonology, Variation | Leave a Comment »

The silence of the H’s and the nastiness of the narg

November 9, 2017

Two recent One Big Happy strips on linguistic themes, one phonological / orthographic, the other semantic / pragmatic:

(#1)

(#2)

(more…)

Posted in French, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Puns, Semantics, Spelling, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »

Wild Asia in Sonoma

September 14, 2017

Tuesday morning on KRCB (NPR station in Sonoma CA), a brief piece about the Quarryhill Botanical Garden there and a forthcoming Quarryhill lecture by Andrea Wulf, author of a recent book on Alexander von Humboldt. The garden was new to me, as was the book, and both are fascinating, but what mostly got my attention was the reporter’s pronunciation of quarry — with accented æ, to rhyme (in my variety of English) with Larry, Harry, carry, and marry.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Dialects, Language and plants, Phonology | Leave a Comment »

Words. words, words

May 7, 2017

From a King Features Comics Kingdom posting on the 3rd, “Ask a Cartoonist: Words to Live By” (by tea), three cartoons on words in comics: a Dustin on adolescent sniggering over potential double entendres and two Zippys about repeating words for sheer pleasure.

(more…)

Posted in Dialects, Double entendres, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Psychology of language, Word aversion and attraction | Leave a Comment »

Interactions of phonological rules

April 13, 2017

Tomorrow’s colloquium in the Stanford Linguistics Department (3:30 in Margaret Jacks Hall, if you’re local and interested):

A set-theoretic typology of phonological map interaction, by Eric Baković, UC San Diego (with Lev Blumenfeld, Carleton University). Beginning of the abstract:

Theories of generative phonology assume that, in general, morphemes have unitary underlying representations and that systematic variations in the surface pronunciation of morphemes in different morphological contexts result from the application of a complex, context-sensitive transformation – a phonological grammar – to those underlying representations. A phonological grammar is thus a complex map from underlying representations to surface representations. Theories differ on the details of what the phonological grammar is comprised of, but it is commonly assumed that it can be broken down into a set of simpler maps – intuitively, individual phonological processes – that make particular changes in particular contexts.
The question we ask in this work is: what is the set of possible interactions among the individual maps that constitute a phonological grammar?

(more…)

Posted in Linguistic theory, Phonology | Leave a Comment »

Ruthie copes

March 28, 2017

Two recent One Big Happy strips, featuring Ruthie: the sign strip and the ladder strip

(#1)

(#2)

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Pragmatics, Sociocultural conventions | Leave a Comment »

Books from Stanford

February 13, 2017

Recent books from Stanford-connected authors, some my colleagues, some my former students (so I have warm feelings). Two in sociolinguistics / educational linguistics, one on the (gasp) morphosyntax-phonology interface.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Language in education, Linguists, Morphology, Morphology and syntax, My life, Phonology, Phonology and Syntax, Sociolinguistics, Stanford, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Two in One Big Happy

January 27, 2017

Two recent One Big Happy strips: one with an outrageous pun from Ruthie and Joe’s father, one with Ruthie once again attempting to engage the neighbor boy James on his grammar:

(#1)

(#2)

If you’re a bit puzzled by James’s “Ain’t nobody going!” in #2, you have a right to be.

(more…)

Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Puns | Leave a Comment »

True Confessions Ripped from the Tabloids

November 6, 2016

(Well yes, men’s bodies, and lots of gay innuendo, but nothing to frighten the horses.)

Headline in The Gaily Male:

“How Giacomo ‘Giacco’ Giaccone’s
SuperSnapJock made me into a sniveling bitch”

  (#1)

Big
Jimmy ruled the
Gym with a thumb of
Steel – one
Snap of his
Strap made the
Strongest man
Kneel

(more…)

Posted in Captions, Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Music, Names, Phonetics, Phonology, Slang, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Two cartoons for month’s end

October 31, 2016

.. and Halloween, though, pleasingly, neither has anything to do with All Hallows’ / All Souls’ / All Saints’. A One Big Happy that’s a study in American (and Antipodal) phonology; and a Zippy with a fallen roadside fiberglass hero, the Green Giant of Pahrump NV:

(#1)

(#2)

(more…)

Posted in Dialects, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »