Archive for the ‘Constituency’ Category
December 27, 2024
🎁 Boxing Day 🎁 — also St. Stephen, with his feets uneven — coming a day late, because life has been very difficult for me, and postings have piled up so high I’m not sure I can ever get to them, so I’ve picked something I know I can get done, so that this dark, rainy, and excruciatingly painful low-air-pressure day will not be a total loss
I bring you an e-mail message from Victor Steinbok on 12/25, about this ad for Spice Tribe (website here), a San Francisco-based on-line spice store dedicated to mindful cooking:
(#1) VS wrote: Facebook has offered another example of what I used to refer to as parenthetical ambiguity. Is it [aged anchovy] [salt] or [aged] [anchovy salt]. From a culinary perspective, the latter makes no sense (aging salt doesn’t change it). But that doesn’t mean there’s no built-in ambiguity.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constituency, Holidays, Language and food, Parsing, Semantics of compounds, Taste | 8 Comments »
December 16, 2024
An invitation on Facebook on 12/13 from linguist Jennifer Arnold, performing her musical role (crucial phrase underlined):
If you like to sing, come to the Chapel Hill Messiah open sing tomorrow evening! I’ll be in the viola section.
My response:
I had a confused moment when I thought you’d be singing the praises of the Messiah of Chapel Hill (whoever he is; I’m woefully out of touch with things, and thought I must have missed the rise of a Prince of Peace in the New South).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constituency, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Music, Semantics of compounds | 4 Comments »
August 19, 2024
On Facebook recently, Alessandro Michelangelo Jaker remarked on a product label he found at the Hy-Vee supermarket in Watertown SD:
(#1) [AJ:] Canadian friends 🇨🇦: please explain this. What is a Canadian steak 🇨🇦🥩 supposed to taste like?
FB posters seem to have disregarded AJ’s little joke, which turns on parsing CANADIAN STEAK SEASONING as
[CANADIAN STEAK] SEASONING ‘seasoning for Canadian steak’
— a parsing strongly suggested by the font sizes on the label — rather than
CANADIAN [STEAK SEASONING] ‘type of seasoning for steak, associated with Canada’
— which is what the company is actually selling, and which posters went on to describe (as I will myself, in a little while, since this sort of meat rub will not be familiar to many of my readers). I note that this reading of CANADIAN STEAK SEASONING is probably a mischievous willful misparsing on AJ’s part, since he’s accustomed to doing fieldwork in Canada and would likely be familiar with the product. And, since AJ is a friend of mine, I know and appreciate his wry sense of humor.
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Posted in Compounds, Constituency, Language and food, Modification, Parsing, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »
September 12, 2023
(some explorations in sexual slang, with some street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “down there”, on male-genital down there, with a section on locational down there in Christopher Isherwood’s title Down There on a Visit (which comes with a strongly sexual tinge) — effectively ‘being down there’. An e-mail comment from Victor Steinbok:
oddly enough, going down there doesn’t have the [AZ: oral sexual] meaning of going down
To which I replied:
Well, it can, with enough context — I can certainly construct the examples, which have going down as a constituent (with an oblique object marked with on), rather than down there as a constituent — but without such context, yes.
Of course, I’ve now gone on to supply an example, with some context supplied. And some comments on ambiguity.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Constituency, Idioms, Language of sex, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
August 14, 2023
What her mother says to Ruthie in a vintage One Big Happy comic strip that came up in my comics feed some time ago:
How to understand the sentence (X) You look pretty dirty? Ruthie’s mother intends X to be understood as something like ‘You look rather dirty’, while Ruthie understands X as “You look pretty when you’re dirty’ — no doubt a willful misunderstanding, finding a compliment in her mother’s words — and responds accordingly
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Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Constituency, Constructions, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Relevance, Semantics, Syntactic categories, Syntax | 2 Comments »
August 17, 2022
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, at the grocery store:
(#1) Wayno’s title: Joint Replacement (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
So: let’s start with elbow macaroni and go on from there.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Categorization and Labeling, Constituency, Italian, Language and food, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, My life, Names, Naming, Parsing, Syntax, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
July 26, 2022
… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
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Posted in Alliteration, Books, Child language, Comic conventions, Constituency, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nonsense, Parody, Phonology, Poetry, Syntax, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »
May 31, 2022
The Mother Goose and Grimm strip for 1/29
turns on an ambiguity in the VP, which is of the form:
want/need + NP1 + in NP2
The ambiguity appears more generally, in VPs of the form:
want/need + NP + PredicativeComplement
The ambiguity involves two different constituent structures for the VP, with concomitant differences in the argument structures, and indeed, in the semantics of the primary verbs of desire, want and need: desiring a thing — the much more common semantics, seen in Mother Goose’s assertion:
I want that dress in the window
— versus desiring a change of state (an inchoative ‘I want that dress to be in / get into the window’ or causative ‘I want that dress to be put into the window’ reading), presupposed by Grimmy’s objection:
But that dress is in the window
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Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Constituency, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Syntax | 1 Comment »
April 5, 2019
Through a chain of people on Facebook, who passed it from one hand to another, this painting (captioned by an unknown wag):
(#1)
Ah, in a different genre of art, a version of this joke that I’ve posted on a couple of times:
(#2) A One Big Happy strip
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Constituency, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Parsing | 5 Comments »
