Archive for the ‘Argument structure’ Category

Argument structure in porn

April 26, 2011

I take my linguistic examples wherever I come across them. In this case, the data comes mostly from porn. (Warning: a lot of sexual acts will be alluded to in very plain language in this posting.)

The story begins with a young man crying out

(1) Oh yeah, shoot my ass!

at the climactic moment of a segment in the gay porn compilation video A Bronco Named Brad (on the video, see here). The speaker is asking his partner to

(2) ‘shoot [your cum] on my ass, ejaculate on my buttocks’ [ONTO reading]

(It’s a convention of porn films, gay and straight, that the money shot must be visible to the viewer, so that guys come on someone else’s body or on their own, or occasionally on the furniture or whatever — see me on mess here. In gay porn, a fuck scene often ends with the fucker pulling out and coming on his partner’s buttocks, staying in situ but displaying his ejaculation.)

In other contexts, (1) could convey

(3) ‘shoot [your cum] in(to) my ass, ejaculate in(to) my anus’ [INTO reading]

Note the two different senses of ass here — ‘buttocks’ or ‘anus’, with the anus being the centerpiece of the buttocks, so to speak — related metonymically.

((1) on the INTO reading describes the culmination of bareback fucking, without the pull-out, so its natural home is porn writing, not porn films.)

But now for the main linguistic point, shoot ‘ejaculate’ used, exceptionally, as a transitive verb.

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Unfortunate P-drop

April 9, 2011

From the “Sic!” section of World Wide Words #731 (5/9/11):

Aoife Bairead saw a headline in the Sunday Business Post of Ireland dated 3 April: “Bishops agree sex abuse rules”.

The crucial bit of syntax — “transitivizing P-drop” (see here) for ‘agree on/to’ — is widespread in British and Irish English, but it can result in risible ambiguities, specifically when what follows agree can be understood as an object clause, as it can here, thanks to the existence of both a noun rule (what was intended in the headline) and a verb rule and to the existence of both a transitive and an intransitive verbĀ rule. All these factors combine to yield a possible, but unwanted, interpretation ‘agree that sex abuse rules’: a fine crash blossom (see here).

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most commented

April 7, 2011

It’s all over the net: references to most commented articles, stories, posts, videos, photos, and the like — meaning (roughly) ‘most-commented-on’. A truncation not quite like the other examples of P absorption and P drop that have been discussed on Language Log, this blog, and elsewhere (notably here), although it shares with these examples that the missing P “is in some sense predictable from the immediately preceding context”.

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I beg (of) you

March 5, 2010

First came one character (a well-spoken FBI agent) on the television show Criminal Minds saying to another:

I’m begging of you. [to do something or other, which was supplied from the context]

Me, I would have used the transitive variant:

I’m begging you. [to do this]

(In the simple present and with an overt complement, the intransitive and transitive variants both suit me, though they strike me as subtly different semantically, and perhaps stylistically as well: “I beg (of) you to leave immediately.”)

OED2 has the intransitive pattern BEG OF SOMEONE TO DO SOMETHING from 1604 and the transitive pattern BEG SOMEONE TO DO SOMETHING from 1675 (plus BEG SOMETHING OF SOMEONE — “beg a favor / two favors / it of someone” — from 1711), and both continue in use today, with (apparently) some variability as to who uses which patterns and in what contexts.

That was this morning. Then this afternoon, I was reading Terry Castle’s The Professor: And Other Writings, and in the title chapter (pp. 213-4) there was a reference to Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene”. Castle quoted some of the lyrics, but didn’t quote the beginning:

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
I’m begging of you please don’t take my man

(which I came across in a Criminal Minds-inspired search on {“I’m begging of you”}.)

“Jolene” has been recorded many times by many different singers, and “I’m begging of you” occurs in various other songs as well — and in plenty of writing on the net. So though it’s not something I think I would say myself, it’s out there in significant numbers.

Ain’t variation grand?