Archive for the ‘Constituency’ Category
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.
(more…)
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
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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
(more…)
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
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Constituency, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Parsing | 5 Comments »
April 6, 2017
The U.S. has such a thing, and its name is a compound with three possibly relevant parsings into constituents (for in the glosses conveys something like ‘to investigate’):
(1) [ Congressional ] [ [ Brain Injury ] [ Task Force ] ]
‘ a task force, associated with Congress, for brain injury‘
(2) [ [ Congressional Brain ] [ Injury ] ] [ Task Force ]
‘a task force for injury to the Congressional brain‘
(3) [ [ Congressional ] [ Brain Injury ] ] [Task Force ]
‘a task force for Congressional brain injury‘
(1) is the intended reading. (2) has an entertaining sense involving a Congressional brain, a brain that Congress has (or is otherwise associated with). (3) involves (a) brain injury that is associated in some way with Congress. I’m much taken with readings (2) and (3), especially (2), which reminded me of the October 1980 Doonesbury sequence “The Mysterious World of Reagan’s Brain”.
The intended reading is entirely clear, but sportive readers will play with the alternatives
(more…)
Posted in Compounds, Constituency, Language and medicine, Morphology | Leave a Comment »
January 22, 2011
In the “reduced coordination” construction known as Right Node Raising (RNR), a constituent on the right (final) end of a clause is combined with a loose coordination of two non-constituents, while being interpreted as being in construction with each of them. A simple example:
Kim discovered, but Lee publicized, the Disappearing Cat Effect.
The Disappearing Cat Effect is the shared constituent on the right. The two preceding conjuncts, Kim discovered and Lee publicized, are not themselves constituents; each is a clause missing a direct object.
RNR examples have different prosodies, and some are much more syntactically complex than this one. Today’s datum, from a KQED-FM begathon in which the announcer was asking people to phone in pledges to volunteers:
That’s what they came here, and that’s what they gave up their Saturday morning for.
Here, the shared constituent on the right is the single P for, the whole sentence being understoood as ‘That’s what they came here for, and that’s what they gave up their Saturday morning for’. You have to wait a long time for that for.
So, grammatical, but notable.
Posted in Constituency, Coordination, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
