Archive for the ‘Pragmatics’ Category

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Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!

April 1, 2024

šŸ‡ šŸ‡ šŸ‡ three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, šŸƒ šŸƒ šŸƒ three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and šŸŒ¼ šŸŒ¼ šŸŒ¼ threeĀ jaunes dā€™Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:


(#1) (phonologically perfect) punĀ hareĀ on modelĀ hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hairĀ as an common exemplar of theĀ stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; aĀ cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”

Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and theĀ stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.

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Posted in Art, Color, Constructions, Dancers, Formulaic language, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Puns, Signs and symbols, Speech acts, Stock expressions, Style and register, Syntax | 1 Comment »

Everyday beheadings

March 29, 2024

For some time now, I’ve been collecting examples of a scheme of English derivational morphology I’ve called beheading,Ā as in

crude (Adj) oil (N) -> crude (N), where the derived item crude ‘crude oil’ is a Mass N (like oil)

commemorative (Adj) stamp (N) -> commemorative (N), where the derived item commemorative ‘commemorative stamp’ is a Count N (like stamp)

A great many of the examples come from jargons, the vocabularies of specific occupational or interest groups, like people in the energy business or philatelists — or medical professionals (N attending ‘attending physician’), food preparers, servers, and sellers (N Swiss ‘Swiss cheese’), and so on. More generally, most beheadings are notably context-specific. But some come from everyday language and don’t need much contextual backing.

Here, after a somewhat more careful account of what beheadings are, I’ll add a few everyday beheadings to supplement the ones in my files (see the Page on this blog). Then I’ll veer all the way to the other pole and note that with enough contextual backing, completely novel beheadings can be coined and understood. Finally, I’ll cite the everyday beheading that inspired this posting: three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’, from US President Joe Biden, which I put off because some commenters took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch, a development that merited some discussion on its own. But there are plenty of cites, including aĀ NOAD entry for the beheading square; and then all those comments vanished from the net, so I had no one to bash.

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Posted in Beheading, Context, Conversion, Jargon, Language and culture, Language and politics | Leave a Comment »

Dynamic semantics wins a prize

March 19, 2024

šŸ§Ø šŸ§Ø šŸ§Ø Firecrackers! For aĀ prize from the Swedish royal academies, something Ā you might think of as a Nobel Prize’s little brother, awarded to two colleagues in linguistics and philosophy, one an old friend (and exact contemporary) of mine. From the website of the Swedish royal academies, “Science, art and music meet in the Rolf Schock Prizes 2024”, a press release of 3/14/24:

2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy is jointly awarded Hans Kamp, University of Stuttgart, Germany and Irene Heim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

ā€œfor (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.ā€

Natural languages are highly context-dependent ā€“ how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.

Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.

Kamp was born in the Netherlands in 1940. He received his PhD from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968 and has been a professor at University of Stuttgart, Germany, since 1988.


(#1) Hans Kamp (photo: Kerstin SƤnger)

Heim was born in Germany in 1954. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1982 and has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA since 1997.


(#2) Irene Heim (photo: Philipp Heim-Antolin)

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Posted in Awards, Context, Discourse, Pragmatics, Semantics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

The decade of no skateboarding

March 18, 2024

An old One Big Happy strip that’s been hanging around on my desktop for a couple of years. When you go to explain why it’s so weirdly funny, it turns out to be a complex exercise in what’s known in the linguistics trade as quantity implicature: someone uses a quantity expression, like 6 people or 18 years old, and we understand the speaker’s intentions to be to suggest exactly that quantity, or at least that quantity, or no more than that quantity — in technicalese, we take the speaker’s words to implicate one of these things — depending on the context and our assessments of the speaker’s reasons for mentioning that quantity in the context.

The standard discussions of quantity implicature are about reports of states of affairs. If, for example, a well-intentioned speaker tells you that there were 6 people at their birthday party, you take them to be conveying that there were exactly 6 people. I mean, if there were 8 people at the party, it would be true that there were 6 people; but then it would be uncooperative to say that there were 6 people, because if you knew there were 8 you should and would have said so, therefore saying there were 6 implicates that there were exactly 6. (This would be a good time to take a deep breath and rest for a moment.)

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Posted in Context, Implicature, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

On being, turning, and wearing green

March 17, 2024

(Part of this posting will dive right into gay porn for the day, with street-talk musings on man-on-man sex that’s totally off-limits for kids and the sexually modest; I’ll hold this part off until the end, so if you need to you can bail out then)

ā˜˜ļø ā˜˜ļø ā˜˜ļø It’s St. Patrick’s Day, andĀ in my e-mail: two Bob Eckstein cartoons for the day (on turning and wearing green for the day); and a Falcon Ā Studios sale on gay porn, made holiday-appropriate by the mere addition of a shamrock, but which opens the topic of gay porn with actual St. Patrick’s day themes.

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Posted in Clothing, Color, Costumes, Facial expressions, Flags, Gay porn, Hats, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Point of view, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

Indirect speech acts on the phone

March 13, 2024

To cope with a day when I’m overwhelmed with e-mail to answer, an old Calvin and Hobbes strip salted away for just such days:


They exchange greeting hellos, and then the caller, detecting that the phone has been answered by a child, shifts to an indirect speech act designed to have the child get an adult — the caller specifically asks about their mother — to come to the phone: instead of (directly) asking Calvin to call his mother to the phone, they ask (politely) if his mother is home, assuming that Calvin will understand that they’re asking this because they assume she’s home and they want to talk to her, so they want him to turn the call over to her

The overall story here doesn’t depend on the phone being answered by a kid. It’s enough that the caller recognizes that the person answering the phone is not the one they want to talk to. In which case they could ask for them indirectly: Is Marcia home / in?Ā (this being one big step of indirection beyond the conventionally indirect question May / Can I talk to Marcia?).

The crucial step in dealing with the yes-no question Is X home?Ā is recognizing that because a literal understanding of it would be bizarre — why would some random caller need to know if X is home? — the caller must have some other motive in asking it. And on from there. But that’s where Calvin runs aground.

Well, that’s a lot for a little kid to work out in less than a second on the phone (and Calvin is not a patient or especially cooperative child). I actually remember being taught, explicitly, that if a phone caller, or someone at the door, asked if my mother was at home, that meant they wanted to talk to her, so I should get her. I imagine I could have worked this out eventually, but it might have taken some misfires for me to get the point.

 

Posted in Implicature, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts | 2 Comments »

Santa sport

February 6, 2024

An old One Big HappyĀ strip that recently came up in my comics feed:


Joe writes to Santa with a very specific gift list, with an accusatory flourish at the end (presupposing that in earlier years Santa had failed to honor Joe’s requests and telling Santa that now it’s time for the old guy to get it right) in which he addresses Santa as sport

This is one of those occasions where I pose questions that I’m in no position to answer, because I don’t have the resources to pursue them. I am an address terms guy — see the Page on this blog with links to my postings on the topic — Ā but sport isn’t a term I use myself, so I have no self-report data on it; and though dictionaries have some useful information on sport, they aren’t able to describe the complexities of usage of address terms like it; and, finally,Ā sport is not one of the high-frequency address terms (like guy) that have gotten the attention of variationist sociolinguists, so we have no systematic data on the way it’s used.

Even so, my first response to Joe’s use was that it was odd. Somewhat antique, but more significantly, impertinent — treating Santa as if he were an equal, or in fact a subordinate. My impression is that Santa, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, might amiably address a little boy as sport, but little kids don’t talk to adults (especially powerful adults) that way. Such an impertinence would, however, fit right in with Joe’s challenge to Santa to get with the program of supplying Joe with the toys he’s asking for (well, demanding). Cheeky monkey.

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Posted in Address terms, Variation | 4 Comments »

Is the farmer busy or pretty?

November 25, 2023

An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question):


Ruthie is laboring at a workbook — a culture object that subjects a student to test questions, in this case a question requiring the student to demonstrate their understanding of the culturally appropriate grounds for publicly assessing the characteristics of other people: industriousness is an appropriate ground for assessing a farmer (because it’s relevant to his doing his job), while a conventionally attractive appearance is not

Even though she’s filling in questions in a workbook, Ruthie falls back on treating busy-or-pretty? as a question about her opinions, rather than her knowledge of cultural appropriateness. In fact, for all we can tell from the workbook picture, Farmer Brown might not be at all busy; he might be sitting upright in a stationary tractor, daydreaming about what’s for supper. But he could perfectly well be busy, while even if was drawn to look like a handsome film star, his looks would be culturally irrelevant to his job. (Subtle point: they would, however, be culturally relevant in general, since men judged to be conventionally good-looking have a social edge over other men in various contexts.)

Here, Ruthie personalizes her response by giving her opinions. In other OBHĀ test-question strips she looks situations from her point of view or takes her own experiences as background for answering questions. But test questions demand a depersonalized stance — and then regularly plumb very fine points of sociocultural awareness. Fine points that for the most part aren’t treated in the workbooks, aren’t explicitly taught in schools. I’ll give one further example from an earlier posting of mine below.

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Posted in Childhood, Culture, Linguistics in the comics, Questions, Speech acts, Teaching | 2 Comments »

A bulletin from Pejora, the land of derogation and insult

September 1, 2023

šŸ‡ šŸ‡ šŸ‡ rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate September, Labor Day weekend in my country, autumn in my hemisphere, and the 84th year of my life (I’m about to be — this coming Wednesday — 83, a nice prime number)

Meanwhile, a comment by Stewart Kramer on my 8/22 posting “The Jerk Fest” leads me to some reflections on where slurs — like jerkĀ approximating assholeĀ — come from. A slur like this use of jerk, or asshole itself,

— levels a culturally serious charge against its target (in the case of asshole, involving, among other things, arrogance, pretension, and rudeness)

— attributes this offense to a character flaw in the target (in Geoffrey Nunberg’s analysis of asshole, the flaw of culpable obtuseness — about their own importance, about the needs of others and the way they’re perceived by them)

— and insults the target.

The slur jerk developed from jerk referring to a fool or incompetent — what I’ll call a (mere) devaluation, meaning a term that refers to an identity regarded as of little worth. The examples that turn up in discussions of pejoration that I’ll cite involve terms referring to the devalued identities of fools and the inept (old-style jerk, dope, dummy); rustics and farm folk (hick, hillbilly,Ā hayseed); and women (chick, dame, girl), but an extended discussion would take in (at least) terms referring to oddballs and nonconformists; foreigners; members of certain racioethnic groups; the aged; the disabled; and members of sexual minorities. (Bear in mind how astoundingly culture-specific all this material is.)

The route from devaluation to slur involves elevating cultural associations with the devalued identities to connotations of the devaluation and then to its semantic content: nasty metonymy, if you will. Fools and incompetents are seen as prone to egotistical interactions with others, so that foolish jerk begins to pick up the connotations of arrogance and rudeness, which can then become conventional aspects of meaning, leading to assholish jerk. The various stages in this progression can co-occur with one another for some time, as is certainly the case with jerk as described in the pieces quoted in my “Jerk Fest” posting.

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Posted in Insults, Language and society, Language change, Lexicography, Pragmatics, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

herd it / heard it

August 30, 2023

The pay-off to an elaborate set-up tale, giving a pun on a familiar expression (in this case a song title). FromĀ Vince the Sign Guy: Vince Rozmiarek of Indian Hills CO and (from his Facebook page) “his lighthearted puns shown on local community signs”:


Phonologically, there’s a stretch of speech that’s bothĀ I herd it through the grapevines (the pun, the pay-off from the vineyard cow story) and the nearly homophonous “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (the model, the song title); semiotically, however, that stretch of speech is either about one of these situations or the other, not two nearly identical situations

Specifically, there’s no metaphorical structuring of the vineyard cow situation (in the story) on the basis of the information exchange situation (in the song). Their only relationship is phonological.

This isn’t a defect; most puns are merely phonological, and that’s fine. Vince Rozmiarek’s vineyard cow story is a great little joke, of a recognizable genre of punning: the set-up + pay-off story based on a formulaic expression — for short, a formula pun.

It’s just that a small number of puns are what I’ve sometimes called — I’ve wrestled a long time with ways of saying this — satisfying, meaning semiotically satisfying: the participants are represented as belonging to two worlds at once. They are anteaters, say, with the formicavore’s passionate hunger for the insects, but they are also diners in conventional American restaurants, insisting on specific kinds of table service and exhibiting dining quirks (like an aversion to spicy food). The first of these worlds is systematically mapped into the second, in an elaborate metaphor. (The restaurant-going anteaters are a recurring theme in Bizarro cartoons.)

From this month in my postings: onĀ 8/3 “Brief shot: cock time”, about the expression cock time:

An atrocious pun [on clock time], but satisfying in that some … item is not merely introduced into a context for a near-homophone, but participates in the world of that model expression. We see something thatā€™s a cockĀ [a man’s penis] andĀ a (kind of) clock.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Pragmatics, Puns, Semantics | 5 Comments »

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