Archive for the ‘Pragmatics’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Los Angeles looterers

January 11, 2025

Heard on MSNBC on 1/9, a reporter on scene at the Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles, noting that looterers had become a problem — using, not the agent noun looter, based on the established verb loot, but the agent noun looterer, based on the innovative verb looter (a verbing of the noun looter). A looterer is someone engaged in lootering, which is a kind of looting.

The question is why the reporter went for the elaborate innovative noun looterer rather than the simpler established noun looter. In the context, it was clearly not a mistake, and the reporter repeated it. And then it turns out that the usage wasn’t her invention on the spot; the verb looter and its derived agent noun looterer are attested from others. Even with reference to the Los Angeles fires; from the iHeart podcasts about the fires:

2 days ago — That’s just the estimate. Speaker 2 (00:43): So the Los Angeles Police arrested a possible arson suspect … twenty looterers have been arrested

(more…)

Posted in Connotation, Conversion, Derivation, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Pragmatics, Variation, Verbing | 1 Comment »

Alaskan prime

January 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025

From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):

Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud café, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?

The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?

(more…)

Posted in Context, Errors, Holidays, Mishearings, Misreadings, Perception, Psycholinguistics, Salience | Leave a Comment »

Sweatless in the poolside sun

November 24, 2024

(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning)

From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to be quite a pleasant diversion:


(#1) Screen shot from the video, which you can view here

A shirtless young man in ripped denim shorts playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No.2) on a fancy grand piano (with a mirrored fallboard, as in the finest piano lounges). alongside the pool at at what looks like a tropical oceanside resort. (For a bit of extra sexiness, those shorts are down far enough in the back to expose the waistband of his black Calvins; here the girls and the gay boys swoon.)

(more…)

Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Context, Conversion, Derivation, Language and the body, Language of medicine, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Music, Portmanteaus, Technical and ordinary language | 4 Comments »

A dozen (or so) senses of the C-word

November 22, 2024

(Well, consider the title if this posting, which tells you that it’s going to get into some vivid descriptions of sexual parts and sexual acts — plus a photo that’s just barely WordPressable — and you’ll see that it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; and from here on, you’re going to get the C-word raw and unconcealed, but your enthusiasm for this dirty talk will probably be diminished when it turns out that this posting is mostly about lexical semantics)

(more…)

Posted in Address terms, Context, Dialects, Gay porn, Insults, Language and the body, Language change, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Personification, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | 6 Comments »

An underwater Psychiatrist cartoon

October 17, 2024

… in yesterday’s (10/16) Bizarro (Wayno’s title: “Subaquatic Psychology Session”):


All about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set, but it’s way more complex than that, and the joke turns on one of those complexities (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

The relevant complexity becomes clear when you look at some explicit superlatives, in questions like these:

Who is the biggest? What is the best?

These are baffling out of context. Because they are consistent with so many different contexts. But these aren’t differences in what the questions mean; dictionaries wouldn’t have different entries for the many kinds of being the biggest or the best. In technical talk, the questions aren’t many-ways ambiguous, but are instead, neutral, or unspecified, with regard to the different kinds of being biggest or best.

It’s much the same for the implicit superlatives, in questions like:

Who is your favorite? What is my favorite?

There are so many kinds of favorite things (try not to think of The Sound of Music). Favorite places, favorite friends, favorite songs, and on and on. Favorite children and favorite foods, in the case of the cartoon. If your mom tells you you’re her favorite, and you’re a fish (of a race of talking fish, from CartoonWorld), then either of those is a genuine possibility — but of course maybe she’s saying you’re her favorite tennis partner or her favorite artistic swimmer or whatever. Neutrality all the way. (Though the more you know about the context, the narrower the range of understandings becomes.)

(more…)

Posted in Comic conventions, Context, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Pragmatics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

You’ve gotta eat your Froot Loops, kid

October 13, 2024

The cartoon. Today’s Zippy strip is a translation of an everyday family drama into a surreal Dingburg version, in the household of Zippy and Zerbina and their children, the boy Fuelrod and the girl Meltdown:


“Eat your Froot Loops, Meltdown, or th’ force field will remove your topknot”

Just think of that as how Dingburgers say “Eat your spinach, kid, or the lack of iron will make you weak” — but much much more dramatically. Or as the song “You’ve Gotta Eat Your Spinach, Baby” (from the 1936 movie Poor Little Rich Girl) puts it:

You’ve gotta eat your spinach, baby
That′s the proper thing to do
It’ll keep you kind of healthy too
And what it did for Popeye it’ll do for you

(more…)

Posted in Acting, Conversation, Implicature, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

Pablo, the drug-sniffing dog

September 13, 2024

A delightful old Pearls Before Swine strip (from 12/27/07) that Jeff Bowles posted on Facebook this morning:


Pig understands drug-sniffing dog (as will most of us reading this) to refer to a dog that sniffs out drugs, detects / discovers them by its sense of smell, so as parallel to cadaver-sniffing dog; but it turns out that the dog in question actually sniffs — inhales — drugs to get high on them, so that Rat’s use of drug-sniffing dog is parallel to, say, glue-sniffing teenager (glue sniffing ‘the practice of inhaling intoxicating fumes from the solvents in adhesives’ (NOAD)) or snuff-sniffing aristocrat

So drug-sniffing dog is ambiguous — with two different meanings for the PRP-form synthetic compound drug-sniffing — and the strip plays with the ambiguity.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics of compounds, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

Birthday toes

September 7, 2024

From the annals of birthday greetings, as I struggle to provide at least a minimal response to the over a hundred people who have wished me happy birthday, in one way or another (several offering accompanying flower photos, knowing these would give me pleasure; my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez gave me an actual bouquet, an impressive assortment of white flowers).

(more…)

Posted in Greetings, Holidays, Language and the body | Leave a Comment »

Making room for new construction grammarians

August 29, 2024

In my mail this morning, from Research Gate, the text of Laura A. Michaelis’s long and rich “Staying terminologically rigid, conceptually open and socially cohesive: How to make room for the next generation of construction grammarians”, in the John Benjamins journal Constructions and Frames 16.2 (August 2024) — in part an homage to Chuck Fillmore (Charles J. Fillmore, 1929 – 2014), but primarily a development of his ideas. And there, in the middle of the abstract, was a reference to my 1994 Berkeley Linguistics Society paper “Dealing out meaning”  (available on-line here), which LM calls my “classic paper” in her article (Chuck himself liked it a lot, but mostly it seemed to have gone without citation, so I thought it had been largely forgotten).

(the Research Gate PDF of LM’s text can be accessed here)

The abstract:

(more…)

Posted in Constructions, Linguists, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntactic theories, Syntax | 2 Comments »

Said the hip flask to the lab flask

August 14, 2024

Today’s Wayno /Piraro Bizarro:


A flasky put-down pun, from the hip flask to the lab flask (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

First, the pun: in the adjective hip ‘following the latest fashion, especially in popular music and clothes’ (NOAD), punning on the bodypart noun hip in hip flask. Now, all the lexical flask stuff.

(more…)

Posted in Furnishings and tools, Insults, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »