Archive for the ‘Use and mention’ Category
September 5, 2022
From my 8/15 posting “Fame-naming and family history”:
My intention was to get on with Cats 4, about naming cats for / after famous cats — in particular, famous fictional cats; in further particular, cats in cartoons and comics. If I name my cat Stallone (after the actor) or Rocky (after the fictional pugilist), I’m fame-naming a cat; if I name my cat Cheshire (from Alice in Wonderland) or Pyewacket (from the Salem witch trials and then various films, for example the wonderful Bell, Book and Candle (1958)), I’m cat-fame-naming my cat; if I name my cat Garfield or Sylvester, I’m cartoon-cat-fame-naming my cat. This is intricate, but pretty straightforward. And the topic of Cats 4 will in fact be the cartoon-cat-fame-naming of cats.
This is Cats 4. Where you could, if you were so moved, name your cat Garfield:
(#1) A lined notebook / journal for cat lovers (available via Amazon)
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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Language and animals, Language and the law, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Terminology, Use and mention | 2 Comments »
May 10, 2019
Today’s notable NomConjObj, from MSNBC reporter Garrett Haake in Clyde OH (a Whirlpool appliance company town), talking about the effect of tariff increases on appliance dealers, with reference to:
… the price disparity between they and their competitors
Oh my, a nominative conjoined object about as far from the central examples of the construction as you can get (so not in my selective NomConjObj files): 1-3P between they and their competitors (pronoun in 1st position, 3rd person pronoun, singular pronoun) rather than the very common 2-1S (as in between my competitors and I). One for the files!
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Posted in Pronoun case, Use and mention | 3 Comments »
August 20, 2018
From Larry Horn on ADS-L yesterday under the subject line “Navigating those islands”, noting that in this case “the relevant islands are (i) in Florida and (ii) in the morphosyntactic context below”:
Background: a(n adulterous) couple lands at Tampa Airport en route to a supposed “ecotourism” adventure-cum-real-estate promotion (i.e. scam) through the islands of the Everglades and stop at the bar for a drink…
The landing in Tampa was bumpy. At the airport, Eugenie Fonda charged into the first open bar in the concourse. “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one. — Carl Hiaasen (2006), Nature Girl, p. 116 (beginning of Chapter 11)
That’s ONE-anaphora “going into” the complex proper name Margaritaville (the name of a song) to find its antecedent, the common noun margarita:
noun margarita: a cocktail made with tequila and citrus fruit juice. (NOAD)
The anaphor takes a moment to process and strikes most people as a joke (Hiassen’s novels are wryly jocular, though not usually in this particular way).
I’ve posted about one related example, on 8/11/12 in “Proper anaphoric islands” (discussion to follow). And in e-mail discussion an informal group of anaphoric islanders (researchers on the phenomenon) has invented a series of further examples of anaphoric elements that find their antecedents inside proper names — examples that go one step beyond the ordinary anaphoric island examples (which can usually be contextualized) by playing on the use of the antecedent expression (to refer to a kind of cocktail, as in There was a margarita mixologist behind the bar, so she ordered one) vs. its mere mention (as in the Hiassen example: “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one.).
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Posted in Anaphora, Language play, Music, Semantics, Use and mention | 2 Comments »
March 1, 2018
The Mother Goose and Grimm, from February 21st:
(#1)
A joke playing on use and mention: Grimmy mentions the name of the Oscar-nominated movie Call Me by Your Name, but Ralph understands him to be using the expression call me your your name, so he calls Grimmy Ralph.
That leads us to the movie and so to a thicket of issues about language, sexuality, gender, and the law.
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Posted in Art, Books, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Language and sexuality, Language and the law, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, My life, Technical and ordinary language, Use and mention | 5 Comments »
November 22, 2017
“New Sentences: From Duolingo’s Italian Lessons” by Sam Anderson, in print in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday the 19th:
‘Gli animali rimangono nello zoo.’ (‘The animals remain in the zoo.’)
— From Duolingo, a “science-based language education platform” available on Apple, Android and Windows smartphones and online.
Language-learning sentences are always slightly funny. They exist to teach you linguistically, not to communicate anything about the actual world. They are sentences that are also nonsentences — generic by design, without personality or ambiguity: human language in merely humanoid strings. [They are, as the philosophically inclined among us sometimes say, mentioned, not used.] The subtext is always just “Here is something a person might say.” It’s like someone making a window. What matters is that it’s transparent, not what is being seen through it.
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Posted in Humor, Language learning, Translation, Use and mention | 1 Comment »
April 3, 2016
Dinner Friday with Amanda Walker at Three Seasons (fusion Vietnamese), with wonderful plants (especially orchids) and cut flowers all over the place. Which moved Amanda to ask me (as a plant person) about a flowering shrub used in plantings on the Google campus: “It looks like a bottle-brush”, she said. “Oh, that would be a bottle-brush plant”, I replied. She stared at me for a moment, until she realized I was not just repeating her description, but was in fact offering a common name. She searched for it under that name on her iPhone, and was immediately rewarded with a photo of a Callistemon in flower, along the lines of this bottlebrush, the Callistemon citrinus variety ‘Spendens’:
(#1)
The probkem is that the common name for the plant is also a pretty good brief description of it, so there’s room for uncertainty as to whether you’re being offered a name or a description.
The problem arises especially with people who aren’t well-acquainted with the culture the common names come from: tourists and recent immigrants. In at least two cases in my experience (both involving birds rather than plants) some confusion has arisen for such speakers, who were inclined to see what was offered as a name as instead a puzzling repeat of a description they had just given.
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Posted in Language and plants, Names, Use and mention | 3 Comments »
February 23, 2016
This is a tribute to the associative abilities of the human mind. When I woke this morning, my iTunes was playing what I recognized as comic songs by Gracie Fields, and what came into my mind was a bit of imagined comic dialogue:
(1) A to B: Say hello to the kids. B: Hello to the kids.
in which there’s a quotational scope ambiguity, over how much of what A said is used and how much mentioned.
I quickly figured out the route from Gracie Fields songs to (1): from Gracie Fields to Gracie Allen (both comic actors with the first name Gracie) to this famous but (as it turns out) apocryphal exchange:
(2) Burns to Allen: Say good night, Gracie. Allen: Good night, Gracie.
to (1) as a new variant of the joke in (2). But this path was beneath the level of my consciousness, producing an almost instantaneous short-circuiting from the music to (1).
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Posted in Actors, Ambiguity, Humor, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music, Use and mention | 1 Comment »
