Archive for the ‘Modifier attachment’ Category

Briefly noted: the lure of Low Attachment

July 21, 2024

Caption on a photo on the front page of today’s New York Times:

A Somber Procession
First responders at the funeral of a father of two killed in the attack on NN

(where NN stands for the name of 45, TFG, the Orange Menace, Helmet Grabpussy; the attack was an attempted assassination). In principle, the PSP (past participial) phrase at the end of the caption — killed in the attack on NN — could be parsed with the preceding material in (at least) four different ways, as a predicative or in one of three ways as a modifier (which I’ll label VHA (very high attachment), HA (high attachment), and LA (low attachment). I doubt that either of the first two parsings would occur to any normal reader (though a mechanical parser would entertain them), but the last two are more imaginable.

To look ahead: ceteris paribus, LA is the favored parsing, but plausibility in context is a powerful effect and often favors HA. I was lured into understanding the caption with LA and had a lot of trouble shaking that parsing, despite its incongruity with the facts of the situation as I knew them and the real-world unlikelihood of this understanding.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Modifier attachment, Parsing, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax | 2 Comments »

Moose attachment

June 27, 2024

A follow-up to my 6/25 posting “Dogs on wheels”, about the ambiguity between low attachment (LA) and high attachment (HA) of modifiers, as exemplified in a memic joke about a dog chasing people on a bicycle (in the LA reading, people on a bicycle are chased by the dog; in the HA reading, the dog chasing people is on a bicycle):


(#1) One version of the dogs-on-wheels joke

In that posting, I complained:

I was … sure that I’d seen a version of [the “dog chasing people on a bicycle” meme] and had posted about it; but then I couldn’t find it on any of my blogs or in the “to blog”  files on my computer or in the “to blog” images on my desktop or in my stored albums of images. Much annoyed growling.

I surmised that I had indeed saved it for later posting, but then deleted the image and my notes on it in one of the necessary periodic purges of my “to blog” material.

Then, yesterday, I noticed an oddly named image on my desktop display of images (which, even pared down, is still sizable): MooseAttachment.jpg. This turned out to be a different memic joke exploiting a LA / HA ambiguity:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Memes, Modifier attachment | 7 Comments »

Dogs on wheels

June 25, 2024

Well, it’s about attachment ambiguity, in a family of memes about dogs chasing people on two-wheeled vehicles (mostly bicycles). Along the way, I’ll use this opportunity to expose some of the complexities of my blogging life.

The story begins on 6/23, with a message from Ellen Kaisse — a regular on this blog — offering me this memic wheel-dog joke that turns on an ambiguity between low and high attachment of the modifying PP on a bicycle:


(#1) Did the neighbo(u)r report that some people on a bicycle were being chased by the dog, or that the dog was on a bicycle in pursuit of some people? The human in the photo cartoon supposes the former, the dog the latter

In the human’s report, the PP is intended as a modifier of the head N people within the direct object NP of the verb chasing (low attachment (LA), which you could also think of as narrow attachment); but the dog’s response makes it clear that it understands the PP as modifying the VP are chasing people (high attachment (HA), which you could also think of as wide attachment). (There is a Page on this blog about my postings on modifier attachment, including lots of cases of potential LA vs. HA ambiguity; there’s some overall preference for LA, but how things are understood in actual usage depends very much on the plausibility in context of the two understanding.)

The text in #1 has the BrE spelling neighbour, but there are otherwise identical versions out there with the AmE spelling neighbor, plus otherwise identical versions in which the cycle in the text is a motorcycle rather than a bicycle. And then there are further variations, lots of them, on both image and text (a couple of them reproduced below).

In any case, EK cautiously added the note, “You’ve probably seen this before” — her caution the product of previous occasions on which she sent me some cool example and I told her that I’d posted an analysis of it in 2008 or 2015 or whenever. This time, I was in fact sure that I’d seen a version of #1 and had posted about it; but then I couldn’t find it on any of my blogs or in the “to blog”  files on my computer or in the “to blog” images on my desktop or in my stored albums of images. Much annoyed growling.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Modifier attachment, Style and register, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Classic joke #444

July 22, 2022

We might as well just give them numbers. (This particular joke is 2/3 of a devil.) From Verdant on my Twitter on 7/15/22, this old Shoe strip:


(#1) Body-location (of the tattoo) vs. event-location (of the tattooing); Verdant provides this as a comment on my 2/27/19 posting “Body-location, event-location”, where #444 appears in a One Big Happy strip and is traced back at least as far as the antique Joe Miller’s Jest Book

To which Verdant adds yes-I-said-yes Molly Bloom’s:

confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Modifier attachment, Possession, Semantics, Syntax | 1 Comment »

Ripped from the headlines

April 3, 2021

Well, actually, the headline — from CNN Politics, “Gaetz showed nude photos of women he said he’d slept with to lawmakers, sources tell CNN” by Jeremy Herb, Lauren Fox and Ryan Nobles yesterday — isn’t problematic, but very early in the body of the story, we get this:


(hat tips to Mike Pope and Michael Covarrubias on Facebook)

Which is.

I was (actually) shocked at the idea that congressman Matt Gaetz (R of FL) — admittedly, an extraordinarily arrogant bully with the contempt for ordinary people and customary social conventions so often displayed by children of privilege — would have sex with women on the floor of the US House of Representatives. Then I saw the ambiguity in modifier attachment and realized that what was alleged was merely deeply boorish behavior: passing around, wink wink nod nod, naked photos and videos of his sexual conquests to other legislators and their staffs.

Now, about that modifier attachment…

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Posted in Ambiguity, Modifier attachment, Semantics, Syntax | 2 Comments »

Treading down the thorny path

March 16, 2021

Two evergreen topics in grammar and usage: so-called “split infinitives”, where some usage critics have insisted that they must always be avoided, however unnatural the results of this avoidance are; and modifier attachment, where jokes are often made about one of the potential attachments, however preposterous the interpretation associated with this attachment is.

The two topics are connected through their unthinking devotion to dogmas of grammatical correctness: avoid split infinitives, avoid potential ambiguity. A devotion that leads adherents down the thorny path of usage rectitude to using unnatural syntax and entertaining preposterous interpretations.

But first, the thorny path. The (tough) counterpart to the (easy) primrose path.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Modification, Modifier attachment, Movies and tv, Peeving, Plays, Split infinitives, Stock expressions, Syntax, Usage advice, Usage attitudes | Leave a Comment »

Ask not for whom the reaper scythes

December 20, 2018

Two Grim Reaper memic cartoons: today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collab, and a Harry Bliss cartoon in the current (12/24&31) New Yorker, both requiring signficant background information for understanding (beyond recognizing the figure of Death with his scythe):

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Modifier attachment, Movies and tv, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Attaching an 8-page essay at Wheaton College

September 30, 2018

Reported back on the 19th, a stunner of a 2017 headline about Wheaton College (IL) events dating back to 2016. First, the story from a source other than the one that produced the remarkable headline: from the Daily Mail (UK) by Jennifer Smith on 2/14/18: “Christian college ‘punished’ football players who ‘kidnapped, beat and sexually assaulted’ freshman in brutal hazing ritual by asking them to write an eight-page essay and complete community service”:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Modifier attachment, Parsing, Psycholinguistics, Relevance | Leave a Comment »

The news for shoes

September 17, 2018

… and toucans, but not, surprisingly, pandas, despite the brand name.

Originally encountered in ads from the Footwear etc. stores (a California chain with a store on University Ave. in Palo Alto): Wanda Panda,

We Are Wanda Panda

Shoes, ankle boots and sandals for women. Made in Spain. [The company’s headquarters are in Alicante, on the Costa Blanca]

Hours of attention: Monday to Thursday, 9:00 – 13:00, 16:00 – 18:00, Friday 9:00 – 13:00 [notably Spanish hours]

Phonemically /wandǝ pændǝ/ in English, apparently involving the bamboo-eating bear Ailuropoda melanoleuca (I have two friends with the panda as a very serious totem animal, so I’m alert to pandas) — but phonemically /wanda panda/ in Spanish, with no allusion to (el) panda ‘panda’ at all; instead the reference is to (la) panda ‘gang, crowd, group of friends’ (in European Spanish slang). And the Wanda Panda mascot is a cartoon toucan (tucán in Spanish):

(#1)

Some notes on the shoes. And then a digression on why Wanda and panda don’t rhyme in English (though they do in Spanish).

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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Language and animals, Modification, Modifier attachment, Spanish | 2 Comments »