Archive for the ‘Syntax’ Category

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Monday morning delight

July 22, 2024

For Pied-Piping Day — see my 7/23/13 posting “Pied-Piping Day”, on 7/22 as Ratcatcher’s Day (cue the Pied Piper of Hamelin), with a discussion of pied-piping in syntax — the wonderful French-English pun Philippe Philoppe:


(#1) Punnng on flip-flop ‘a light sandal, typically of plastic or rubber, with a thong between the big and second toe’ (of imitative origin) (NOAD) — currently being passed around on Facebook (I got it first from Susan Fischer yesterday)

As a jokey bonus, the image is a portrait of an actual Philippe — Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans [known as le Petit Monsieur or simply Monsieur] (from Wikipedia: (21 September 1640 – 9 June 1701) the younger son of King Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria, and the younger brother of King Louis XIV) — as painted by Pierre Mignard (from Wikipedia: (17 November 1612 – 30 May 1695) … a French painter known for his religious and mythological scenes and portraits).

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Posted in Art, Compounds, French, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

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 »

New preposition in town

July 1, 2024

Posted on the LINGTYP (Linguistic Typology) mailing list today, reproduced in this posting to illustrate one of the ways linguists play around with data and ideas as they try to figure out what’s going on on some specific case — looking for inspiration in (roughly) similar cases in other varieties of language.

If  that’s what you want to do, you want to go where the linguistic typologists hang out. On LT, from Wikipedia (very briefly):

Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world’s languages.

LTists have a society, the Association for Linguistic Typology (webpage here), which organizes meetings, publishes a journal, and sponsors that mailing list, for open discussion of typological matters. Like the one I brought up today:

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Posted in French, Language change, Languages, Linguistic diversity, Poetry, Syntactic categories, Variation | 1 Comment »

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 »

Queens Pride

May 31, 2024

To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:


Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that

Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Color, Homosexuality, Language play, Memes, Modification, Puns, Rainbow, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

The marine biologist on duty

May 25, 2024

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a little treasure chest of interesting morphosemantics, all from a pun on marine biologist, whose everyday use is to refer to a scientist specializing in marine biology:


But instead we get, unexpectedly,  a biologist who is a marine, assigned to duty monitoring aquatic animals (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

The pun has the USMC noun marine; its base has the sea adjective marine. But that’s just the beginning of the fun.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Morphology and syntax, Puns | 3 Comments »

Into the N1 of N2 rat’s nest

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 »

N1 of N2

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 »

The pictures of Dorian Todd Yeager

April 3, 2024

[Sexy guy. scarcely clothed, so not to everyone’s taste.]

Visual artists — at least those who think of themselves as Artists, creating fine art (for its own sake), in the art world — tend to be elusive folk: hiding behind pseudonyms, performing elaborate presentations of themselves, concealing biographical information in the belief that they should be judged on their art alone, producing accounts of what their art is about that are either bafflingly abstraction-laden or sophomorically jokey, giving their works unhelpful titles, making information about their works hard to come by, and so on. (In my experience, illustrators, cartoonists, and craft artists are considerably more approachable.)

Which brings me to the subject of my 3/27 posting “With hooves and horns” (assembled after considerable wrangling with sources), which looked at

the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager … Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images …, male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples …. Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile. ..:


(#1) Self-portrait in jockstrap and boots (not dated)

The painting shows a young man I judge to be in his 30s. Meanwhile, the young man categorization comes from Yeager writing about himself in the Advocate magazine website on 2/16/21  — only three years ago — in “Spring Brings Hooves and Horns From Todd Yeager”:

Todd is a working artist in New York City who has been exhibiting in galleries for a surprising number of years considering what a young man he is.

But then the age thing started to unravel.

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Posted in Argument structure, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Lives | 2 Comments »

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