Archive for the ‘Negation’ Category
July 5, 2023
A very much not-dead-yet posting to hold this space while I cope with an avalanche of posting material, plus my suddenly much improved medical condition (which is totally exhilarating). In any case, an old One Big Happy cartoon (originally from 9/4/14) in which Ruthie asks her defiantly working-class neighbor James to name something that comes in pairs, but James hears the homophone pears (both nouns pronounced /perz/ in my variety of English) and just can’t get shift his perspective:
Note James’s multiply non-standard negative existential construction in his ain’t no shoes
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Negation, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
January 19, 2023
In yesterday’s installment, the two kids of the Lombard family in the comic strip One Big Happy, Ruthie and Joe, advance a devious — and transparently malicious — idea about the pragmatics of conversation. As a slogan,
Two nasties make a nice.
That is, saying two nasty things about someone counts as saying a nice thing about them, yuk yuk. We-e-ell, the kids maintain, with impish speciousness, that that’s just a special case of the general principle that
Two negatives make a positive.
First thing: such a slogan is a highly abbreviated formula in ordinary language of some significant technical principle, the virtue of the slogan being that it is striking and memorable; it’s an aide-memoire. But it’s just a label, and labels are not definitions.
Second thing: the kids’ version exploits a massive ambiguity in the adjectives negative / positive, and a corresponding ambiguity in the verb make. To which I now turn.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Compositional semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Negation, Opposition, Semantics, Syntax | 5 Comments »
January 18, 2023
Two One Big Happy strips on double negatives, in which Joe and Ruthie take the slogan Two negatives make a positive into fresh territory. Today, I’ll give you the two strips, with my complete commentary on this blog for the first of these strips, and put off until tomorrow a broad-scale analysis of what’s going on here.
(more…)
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Negation, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
June 17, 2020
(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook comment of mine a while back. Some coarse sexual language, notably from American newsmakers, but also enough about sexual bodies and mansex from me to make the posting dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)
Every so often, MSNBC commentator Ali Velshi tartly notes — alluding to the Imperator Grabpussy’s smears of President Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya — that he is a Muslim who was born in Kenya (though he grew up in Canada).
There’s a linguistic point here, having to do with relevance and implicature. Why does Velshi say this? Yes, it’s true, but then “The freezing point of water is 32F” is true, but if Velshi had said that it would have been bizarre, because it would have been irrelevant in the context. So Velshi’s religion and nativity are relevant in the context. Cutting through a whole lot of stuff, I would claim that Velshi is implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from Muslims born in Kenya, and I know that Barack Obama is no Muslim born in Kenya”. And THAT brings me to a piece I’ve been wrestling with some time, about Grabpussy Jr. jeering at Mitt Romney, taunting him by calling him a pussy. (I have a Velshian response of my own to that.)
Hang on; this will go in several directions.
(more…)
Posted in Childhood, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Implicature, Insults, Masculinity, Metaphor, Negation, Relevance, Taboo language and slurs, Toys and games, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »
June 9, 2020
Background, from my 3/12/20 posting “Higashi Day cartoon 1: grim Bliss surprise” about the series of 6 cartoon postings (of which this is the 3rd)
to celebrate March 15th: Higashi Day, formerly known in these parts as (spring) Removal Day, marking the day when, for roughly 10 years in the fabled past, Jacques and I set off to car-trek east, from Palo Alto (and Stanford) to Columbus OH (and Ohio State).
The Frazz strip of March 8th:
(#1) School custodian Edwin “Frazz” Frazier and 8-year-old bored genius Caulfield take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
In more or less reverse order: (a) the positive anymore of Caulfield’s
(ex1) Anymore, I just believe what rhymes
in the last panel; (b) the song and some of its most famous performances; and (c) the quote in the first panel,
(ex2) Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear
(more…)
Posted in AAVE / Black English, Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Negation, Quotations, Syntax, Variation | Leave a Comment »
January 4, 2018
The 12/5/17 One Big Happy, which came by in my comics feed a few days ago:
(#1)
Three things here: Ruthie’s eggcornish reshaping of the unfamiliar word census (ending in /s/) as the familiar senses (ending in /z/); her tooken as the PSP of the verb take; and (in the last panel) her use of take ‘tolerate, stand, endure’ (here with the modal can of ability and also negation; and with the pronominal object this).
(more…)
Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Idioms, Inflection, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Negation | Leave a Comment »
July 24, 2017
Also no blue jays, but the three-NP version has the best music.
This is mostly about pests and my life, but there’s language and music in there too. Also a pro wrestler performing angry rejection:
(#1) Daniel Bryan of WWE’s SmackDown show
I’ll start with my pests (in more or less chronological order) and go on to uses of negation.
(more…)
Posted in Formulaic language, Language and animals, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Negation | 4 Comments »
November 19, 2016
The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:
“Two negatives make a positive” is one way to state a principle of logic, that the negation of the negation of X is equivalent to X. The principle is irrelevant to an account of the syntactic phenomenon that’s popularly called “double negation” (or more generally, “multiple negation”) — often labeled negative concord by linguists — according to which all susceptible elements in a negated clause themselves appear in a negative variant (I didn’t see nobody nowhere, corresponding to standard English I didn’t see anybody anywhere); in languages or varieties or styles with negative concord, two negative elements are just the expression of one negation.
But Joe takes us into new territory, with his novel interpretation — actually, willful misinterpretation — of the principle of logic (or of algebra, as her father puts it): according to Joe’s interpretation, saying two negative (that is, deprecatory or insulting) things counts conversationally as saying something positive (that is, favorable or complimentary). All to take the opportunity to double down on nastiness.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Negation, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
October 7, 2016
A recent One Big Happy has Ruthie, once again, coping with an expression unfamiliar to her — the negative polarity item (NPI) have the vaguest idea, under the scope of negative n’t in doesn’t have the vaguest idea — by interpreting vaguest as a phonologically close item familiar to her from watching daytime television: Vegas, short for Las Vegas.:
(more…)
Posted in Idioms, Initalisms, Linguistics in the comics, Negation | Leave a Comment »
