Archive for the ‘Constructions’ Category
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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Posted in Agreement, Constructions, Gender and sexuality, Modification, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Agreement, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Constructions, Count & mass, Dialects, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Art, Color, Constructions, Dancers, Formulaic language, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Puns, Signs and symbols, Speech acts, Stock expressions, Style and register, Syntax | 1 Comment »
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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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Constructions, Emoji, Lexical semantics, Semantics, Signage, Slogans, Slogans, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Ambiguity, Anaphora, Compositional semantics, Constructions, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | 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 »
July 31, 2022
On this blog, a Bob Richmond comment on my 7/29 posting “Many a pickle packs a pucker”, with an old dirty joke that turns on the line “I stuck my dick in the pickle slicer” — with Bob noting, “I’m sure Arnold can provide an appropriate grammatical analysis”. The hinge of the joke is a pun on pickle slicer, which is ambiguous between ‘a device for slicing pickles’ and ‘someone who slices pickles (esp. as a job)’. You don’t need a syntactician to tell you that, but what I can tell you is that this isn’t some isolated fact about the expression pickle slicer, but is part of a much larger pattern that a linguist like me can bring to explicit awareness for you, so that you can appreciate something of the system of English that you (in some sense) know, but only tacitly, implicitly.
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Posted in Alliteration, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Jokes, Language play, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Morphology and syntax, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Syntax, Synthetic compounds | 9 Comments »
March 27, 2022
I had two postings in preparation about moments of great joy from yesterday: one from the music that greeted me on awakening in the morning; the other from the plants in Palo Alto’s Gamble Gardens, visited yesterday morning on my first trip out in the world for many weeks.
Then fresh posting topics rolled in alarmingly, and a search for background material led me by accident to a great surprise, a link to a tape of a public lecture (a bit over an hour long) at Iowa State University on 4/11/90, 32 years ago. Title above. The subtitle: Thinking about language theoretically.
I listened transfixed as the lecturer, speaking to a general university audience, took his listeners into the wilds of modern theoretical syntax, along the way deftly advancing some ways of thinking that guided his own research. An admirable bit of teaching, I thought. With some pride, because that lecturer was, of course, an earlier incarnation of me.
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Posted in Acting, Constructions, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Teaching, Writing | Leave a Comment »
July 30, 2021
The last in the series of pairings of my new buzzcut with impudent gay t-shirts new to my wardrobe (earlier: BIG FAG on a pink shirt, rainbow FAGGOT in block letters, and, yesterday, a rainbow tyrannosaurus):
(#1) Posed in front of part of the Zwicky GSU (Grammar, Style, & Usage) collection, now housed in my condo, where the piano used to be, and supported by my indoor walker (which sports new purple walker balls, not illustrated here)
The t-shirt is a new version — bigger, bolder, more intense — than my first GAY AS FUCK shirt, below, which has worn over time until the colors are muted and delicate and the fabric is pleasantly soft. I see fatal holes in its near future.
(#2) Catalogue photo, not of me. With an (entertaining) asterisking strategy for taboo avoidance, unlike the flat-out FUCK of #1
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Posted in Clothing, Constructions, Gender and sexuality, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
January 18, 2019
The title of a remarkable paper in Journal of Linguistics 55.1 (Feb. 2019) — published on-line on 1/3/19 — by an international panel of 11 authors, realizing a plan of the senior author, my Stanford colleague Ivan Sag, who died in 2013 before the project could be completed.
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Posted in Constructions, Linguists, Syntax | 1 Comment »
