Archive for the ‘Syntax’ Category

Into the N1 of N2 rat’s nest

May 2, 2024

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s posting “N1 of N2”, where my central point was about two English NP constructions of the form N1 of N2; I claimed to be providing only

a compact [account] that covered the important facts [relevant to the example a variety of celebrations] but didn’t wander into the rat’s nest of related matters

Today is rat’s nest day. The fact is that English has a whole heap of constructions of the form N1 of N2, but only a few are relevant to that example; however, the number of relevant constructions is (by my current reckoning) four, not two; and some of these are related by the processes of historical change.

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N1 of N2

May 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 from my 5/1/20 posting “Trois lapins pour le premier mai”:

It’s the first of the month, which I have learned to greet with three rabbits — by starting the day saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit”. More than that, it’s the first of May — by some cultural reckonings the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere and also (in some countries) International Workers Day, so: dance around the maypole, set bonfires for Beltane or Walpurgis, prepare for outdoor bo(i)nking (rabbits again!), break out the lilies of the valley (muguets pour le premier mai), cue the choruses of L’Internationale, and march in solidarity with the workers. (Feel free to choose from this menu, as your taste inclines and your schedule allows.)

But enough of lapins; time to attend to our moutons, the sheep of the day being English NPs of the form N1 of N2 (like bouquet of flowers and tons of stuff) and how they work as subjects of clauses. These sheep came to us on 4/29 from Steven Levine, who wrote on Facebook:

Here’s a sentence I just came across that seems odd to my ears:

By the mid century a variety of celebrations was engaging morris dancers.

I know that the subject is variety [AZ: no no no; the subject is a variety of celebrations; this is important] and the verb is was, and yet it seems off to me — I was expecting were. I’m not asking for a grammatical analysis, I’m asking if this would stop you for a second if you were just reading along.

To which I wrote:

Steven said he didn’t want a grammatical analysis, but here it comes anyway.

I warned you.

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The pictures of Dorian Todd Yeager

April 3, 2024

[Sexy guy. scarcely clothed, so not to everyone’s taste.]

Visual artists — at least those who think of themselves as Artists, creating fine art (for its own sake), in the art world — tend to be elusive folk: hiding behind pseudonyms, performing elaborate presentations of themselves, concealing biographical information in the belief that they should be judged on their art alone, producing accounts of what their art is about that are either bafflingly abstraction-laden or sophomorically jokey, giving their works unhelpful titles, making information about their works hard to come by, and so on. (In my experience, illustrators, cartoonists, and craft artists are considerably more approachable.)

Which brings me to the subject of my 3/27 posting “With hooves and horns” (assembled after considerable wrangling with sources), which looked at

the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager … Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images …, male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples …. Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile. ..:


(#1) Self-portrait in jockstrap and boots (not dated)

The painting shows a young man I judge to be in his 30s. Meanwhile, the young man categorization comes from Yeager writing about himself in the Advocate magazine website on 2/16/21  — only three years ago — in “Spring Brings Hooves and Horns From Todd Yeager”:

Todd is a working artist in New York City who has been exhibiting in galleries for a surprising number of years considering what a young man he is.

But then the age thing started to unravel.

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Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!

April 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’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) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a 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 the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.

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Stand Up To Hate

April 1, 2024

That’s what the fuzzy sign said that was being passed around on Facebook, in appreciation of its unintended ambiguity: it’s supposed to be exhorting us to oppose hate (with noun hate), but it could be telling us to do our hating on our feet (with verb hate); consider some parallels in which the N and V readings are pulled apart:

Stand Up To Hatred [N reading]  OR  Stand Up To Execrate [V reading, with understood object]

Stand Up To Yelling [N]  OR  Stand Up To Yell [(intransitive) V]

Stand Up To Urination [N]  OR  Stand Up To Urinate [ (intransitive) V]

I’ll look at the ambiguity in detail in a little while. But first some words about slogans, like the one on that fuzzy sign.

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E-mail queries

March 11, 2024

I’m inundated by queries about my (many) published articles and (gigantically many) postings, queries that are variously self-serving, malicious, and, yes, seeking understanding. But I can’t possibly reply to everyone who has questions about things I’ve written; I pretty much confine myself to short responses to people I know well and replies to people writing theses (undergraduate honors theses, MA theses, and PhD theses), and even these must be brief, given the demands of my life.

And so a story, in which I explain some things that might be useful or illuminating to other readers. It begins with e-mail I got some time back from a purported graduate student — call them GS — in a European university — call it EU — who said they were writing a thesis on English syntax in which the notion of head within NPs and VPs plays a significant role. Our exchange as it unfolded …

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Howdy

March 8, 2024

Under the header “Howdy” (a folksy salutation I rarely encounter), this e-mail from 3/4 (somewhat edited):

I was in your syntax class at Stanford in the late 80s …

Recently had a colleague [who] said he was basing [a] clitics and circumclitics paper on your theories! So, thought I’d say hello and thank you for not flunking me.

Now, I get an unbelievable amount of ill-intentioned mail from trollers, spammers, and seekers of commercial deals; now that these annoying entities have access to impressive AI programs, their junk e-mail regularly makes reference to details of my published work and is generally pretty sophisticated in its attempt to gain my confidence. That “Howdy” really was a red flag; also, although Howdy Boy wouldn’t have been the first former student to thank me for not flunking him, it’s a rare event, and might just have been a clever stroke to catch my attention.

On the other hand, his colleague’s paper was said to be about the language Miluk (a language I don’t recall having heard of before; it’s an extinct Coosan language of Oregon), and his e-name was miluk — two things lending some verisimilitude to him. And then his signature was

Troy Anderson, ‘89/‘90

which would put him at Stanford when I taught my really big Intermediate Syntax course, Linguistics 121, in winter quarter 1989 (more on this course in an appendix to this posting; but it’s relevant here that enrollment in the course was unexpectedly gigantic, requiring the last-minute hiring of a raft of additional grading assistants, who I then had to co-ordinate and manage, and making my memory of individual students quite hazy). But then “Troy Anderson” is the sort of everyday name that trollers and spammers make up.

Alas, my net experience includes astonishingly inventive malicious trollers, whose only purpose is to demonstrate their cleverness by deceiving otherwise intelligent people and wasting their time; and, a few months back, being disastrously defrauded by people who did a remarkable job of creating detailed counterfeits of a series of commercial websites. So I’m really really cautious. (Yes, this is a truly grotesque way to have to live.)

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It’s a mystery

March 2, 2024

Very much a MQoS Not Dead Yet posting, as I’m barely functioning after one of those stunning drops in air pressure. Hanging around on my desktop for just just an occasion, this mystery-pun Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 2002 featuring Pig and Goat:


Pig, who has the personality of a trusting (but sometimes ignorant) child, assumes Goat doesn’t know the title of the book he’s reading — so does everything but point to the front of the book, to show that title.

Goat’s reply in panel 2, It’s a mystery, is ambiguous. Notably because mystery is ambiguous in this sentence. But so is it. And these two ambiguities are linked, by virtue of an ambiguity as to the construction they’re in. Now I’m going to cut a lot of corners in my discussion, because I’m barely able to get this posting done

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The unfortunate pivot

January 25, 2024

From the annals of astounding coordination, this head-scratcher reported to me yesterday by Ellen Kaisse.

— EK: See bold-face below. I had to read it twice to see why I was having trouble parsing it.

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Packing Extreme Meat

December 18, 2023

(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom King pounds Leonardo Bravo”, out last Friday (12/15), is described in one section of my 12/16 posting “Christmas days at the gay porn factories”. Before going on to an analysis of the movie’s title, I’ll unload some of the Lucas p.r. for the flick, and provide a sweet shot of the young Argentinean bottom LB in its first scene; this stuff is all about men’s sexual parts and man-on-man sex, in crude street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. After that, you’ll get some sexual slang, though treated analytically; mostly there will be a lot of technical linguistics, but I’m trusting you to handle this material like adults. Relax, you can do it (as Frankie Goes to Hollywood didn’t quite say).)

Part the First: four guys with big dicks. The Lucas Entertainment press release for the whole film, in gayporntalk:

Release Date: Mar 01, 2024

Performers [alphabetically ordered by first name]: Austin Ponce, Craig Marks, Dom King, Jacob Lord, Jeffrey Lloyd, Kosta Viking, Leandro Bravo, Sean Xavier

Some guys have such huge dicks that they can barely keep them under control… that’s when you know they’re PACKING EXTREME MEAT! Dom King unleashes his huge cock on Leandro Bravo and pounds him bareback. Kosta Viking and Jacob Lord suck and fuck until they nut. Sean Xavier slams Craig Marks with his enormous piece of man meat. And Jeffrey Lloyd funds Austin Ponce with his fat uncut dick!

[Linguistic note. Most of this is familiar ornamental gayporntalk: pound and slam ‘fuck’, nut ‘ejaculate, come, shoot’. But fund (with) used like award or bestow (with) as yet another way to convey ‘fuck’ (fucking as figuratively giving your dick to another man, bestowing it on him, bestowing him with it) is new to me. Promoted no doubt by the orthographic / phonological similarity between FUND and FUCK.]

From the first-released segment, I give you, not the big-dicked muscle-stud topman DK, contemptuously pounding Argentinean ass, but his lean, hairy, and very hot, novice pussyboy LB (as a receptive / bottom, long retired from active service, I note that I view the label pussyboy as playful and celebratory):


On the beach: Leandro Bravo in basic black

Part the Second: based on a hot-cock POP. This section is about the title Packing Extreme Meat, which is a pun on Packing Extreme Heat, so I turn now to the VP pack extreme heat. Which is an unusual (but attested) type of POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau). Whose contributing phrases are figurative expressions, one conveying ‘having a big penis’, the other ‘being sexually arousing’. And whose shared (overlapping) material — heat — has different senses in the two contributors, so that the portmanteau is also a pun, a punmanteau, if you will.

Yes, it’s complicated. It just has to be unpacked bit by bit. Stay with me.

I’ll start with two general observations about POPs, one about their form (about where the shared material comes in the two contributors — in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end), the other about their interpretation (about whether the shared material has the same meaning or different meanings in the two contributors — in what I’ll call vanilla POPs vs. pun POPs). There will be generous collections of examples from real life; don’t be alarmed by all this abstract description.

— Where does the shared material come? In your everyday POP, the shared material comes in the middle, but the beginning and the end are other possibilities:

medial sharing: A B C = (A B) + (B C) — sweet tooth fairy = sweet tooth + tooth fairy; Chia pet cemetery = Chia pet + pet cemetery; Home Birth of Venus = home birth + Birth of Venus; Billy Zane Grey = Billy Zane + Zane Grey (almost all POPs are of this form)

initial sharing: A (B + C) = A B + A C — paranormoralegal = paranormal + paralegal (a minority option)

final sharing: (A + B) C = A C + B C — L. Ron Mother Hubbard = L. Ron Hubbard + Mother Hubbard (another minority option)

— Is the meaning of the shared material constant or divergent in the two contributors? There are many vanilla POPs, like sweet tooth fairy, Chia pet cemetery, and Home Birth of Venus above. But there are also a ton of pun POPs, along the lines of:

snow border collie = snowboarder + border collie; Edgar Allan po’boy = Edgar Allan Poe + po’boy

similarly: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Frankenstein, Fleetwood Macchiato, Half a Key Largo, Pacific Rim job, iPad Thai

Yes, the really memorable pun POPs tend to be pretty outrageous; they figure in elaborate pun jokes.

Now: pack extreme heat. This is a final-sharing pun POP:

pack extreme heat = pack heat + extreme heat, with contributors:

— pack heat, a verb + object idiom (meaning ‘carry a gun’), with the slang noun heat ‘weaponry; weapon, gun, pistol’ as object

— extreme heat ‘high temperature’

On its face, that would yield an expression meaning something like ‘carry a gun that’s hot to the touch’. But then both contributors are understood figuratively, and sexually; remember that we’re working our way up to the title of a vehicle to (in elevated language) aid gay men to achieve ejaculation through masturbating to the filmed performances. It’s a gay jack-off flick, people, so its title pretty much has to be a dirty play on words; that’s why both parts now acquire dirty figurative senses: the gun of pack heat can be taken as a sexual metaphor, for a (big) penis, so that the phrase can convey ‘have a big cock / dick’. Meanwhile, there are also sexual metaphorical uses of heat, referring to sexual receptivity, sexual arousal, or the quality of being sexually arousing. so that extreme heat can convey high sexual involvement (in mind and/or body).

Voilà! Packing Extreme Heat, an excellent title for a gay porn movie: easily understood as satisfyingly down and dirty (even if you don’t understand the linguistic mechanisms that make it work); admirably raunchy, without using any off-color vocabulary at all (unlike, say, the Treasure Island Media gay porn flick Ruin the Cunt — which, like the Lucas film, is largely focused on bareback anal sex between men.)

Hold that thought about admirable raunchiness. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

But first I’ll do my duty as a linguist to fill in some of the lexicographic details on pack heat from standard sources, rather that just spouting glosses off the top of my head. (Extreme heat is, I think, entirely straightforward.) From NOAD:

phrase pack heat: North American informal carry a gun: he was busted at JFK for packing heat.

And from GDoS:

noun heat: 4 (US) weapons, arms [AZ: this is the M[ass] use, which might be better glossed as ‘weaponry’; but the entry also has C[ount] uses, glossed as ‘pistol’]

One last turn of the sexual screw. Ok, in Packing Extreme Heat, the Lucas Entertainment people had a fine title available to them. But they then decided to gild this lily with a paint gun, pushing the big-dick image hard by punning on pack extreme heat with the off-color pun meat ‘penis’ for the more innocent-seeming slang noun heat. Bringing us Packing Extreme Meat, for the holiday jack-off season (and on until March 1st, when the whole work will be officially released).

I know, I know, subtlety is not their strong point.