Archive for the ‘Syntax’ Category
May 24, 2023
(Note: in this posting I’m going to be unrelentingly careful about the way I frame descriptions of linguistic phenomena (not falling back on the descriptive language of school grammar, which would be familiar to readers but which I believe to be fucked up beyond repair). So there will be a lot of technical talk here; please try to play along, but I don’t think there’s any way to do this right without re-thinking everything from the ground up.)
This is about a perfectly common expression — Who am I kidding? — that went past me in a flash on Facebook this morning but caused me (as a student of GUS — grammar, usage, and style / register) to reflect on the pronoun case in it. On the interrogative human pronoun, appearing here in what I’ll call its Form 1, who, rather than its Form 2, whom.
The pronoun in this expression is the direct object of the verb in the expression, KID, appearing in sentence-initial position (appearing “fronted”) in the WH-question construction of English. There’s nothing at all remarkable about this: in general, both forms of this pronoun are available as syntactic objects (of verbs or prepositions) in the language, differing only in their style / register (very roughly, formal whom vs informal who), with the special case of an object pronoun actually in combination with its governing preposition, which is obligatorily in Form 2:
Who / Whom did you speak to? BUT *To who / ✓to whom did you speak?
So there’s nothing remarkable about Who am I kidding? It’s just informal.
What’s remarkable is the unacceptability of Whom am I kidding? The stylistic discord between the formality of object whom and the informality of the idiom WH-Pro am I kidding? is unresolvable. To put it another way, the choice of the Form 1 pronoun here is part of the idiom. Just like the choice of the PRP form of the verb KID, conveying progressive aspect: Who do I kid? lacks the idiomatic meaning.
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Posted in Idioms, Pragmatics, Pronoun case, Speech acts, Style and register | 2 Comments »
May 18, 2023
In my 5/10 posting “No clitic allowed”, a report on a PUT YOUR CLITICS IN SECOND POSITION t-shirt that I designed. It has now arrived, and I have modeled it, out in my little patio garden, among the blooming cymbidiums and in front of the ivy-covered wall, displaying a copy of:
Approaching Second: Second Position Clitics and Related Phenomena, ed. by Aaron L. Halpern & Arnold M. Zwicky (CSLI Publications, 1996)
Photo by Erick Barros:
The cymbidiums are rapidly reaching the end of their season, now that the days are actually hot. One of their flower stalks withers away every day and is chopped up to become compost on the garden. (The plants will then go into dormancy, meanwhile creating new rhizomes for next year’s blooms; during the hot dry season they will serve as handsome foliage plants — and require constant watering).
Posted in Books, Clitics, Clothing, Language and plants, Syntax | 2 Comments »
May 10, 2023
On Facebook yesterday about the on-line word game Spelling Bee:
— Polly Jacobson: on a free version (spellsbee) it wouldn’t accept ‘clitic’. (but oddly accepted ‘clit’)
— John Beavers > PJ: I am still annoyed about clitic.
— PJ: oh I got ‘clitic’ rejected in a slightly different game. I guess they all have the same word list!
— AZ > PJ: As the author of “On Clitics” [Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club, 1977] and other works on clitology [see my survey paper, “What is a clitic?” (in Nevis, Joseph, Wanner, & Zwicky, Clitics Bibliography, 1995)] (and the proud owner of a Put Your Clitics in Second Position t-shirt), I would like to protest this enormity in the strongest of terms. … I see that my old t-shirt eventually devolved into rags after years of hard use. I have ordered a new, spiffier version, to be unveiled when it arrives in a week or so. Watch this space.
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Posted in Clitics, Clothing, Language play, Syntax | 2 Comments »
April 11, 2023
This paper from 40 years ago:
A.M. Zwicky & J.M. Sadock. 1984. A reply to Martin on ambiguity. Journal of Semantics 3: 249-256. DOI: 10.1093/Jos/
As I wrote yesterday (in my posting “In search of a paper of mine”), my own copy of this paper was inadvertently destroyed a few years ago, and I now wanted to add it to my extensive collection of my writings available through this blog. Specifically, my writings on the distinction between ambiguity and underspecification, a recurrent topic in my work in linguistics.
Several readers were able to more or less instantly extract pdf files of the text from their university libraries; Steve Anderson, using the Yale library, got in first; his is the one I reproduce below. I had hoped to use the Stanford library this way, but I’m an adjunct, not a real faculty member, here, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
(No doubt there are tricks to do this; please do not write to tell me how. I’m just barely getting from day to day, so I’m going to take any easy way out, which in this case was appealing to my colleagues. Who responded splendidly. I should add that quite a few of my readers offered to get hold of physical copies one way or another, scan them in for me, and then e-mail me the files, — very sweet offers, but clearly hugely more onerous than downloading a file.)
The text, below. I will add a link to this posting in my “publications (in .pdf files)” Page on this blog.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Ellipsis, Resources, Semantics, 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.
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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.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Negation, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
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.
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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 »
August 15, 2022
My intention was to get on with Cats 4, about naming cats for / after famous cats — in particular, famous fictional cats; in further particular, cats in cartoons and comics. If I name my cat Stallone (after the actor) or Rocky (after the fictional pugilist), I’m fame-naming a cat; if I name my cat Cheshire (from Alice in Wonderland) or Pyewacket (from the Salem witch trials and then various films, for example the wonderful Bell, Book and Candle (1958)), I’m cat-fame-naming my cat; if I name my cat Garfield or Sylvester, I’m cartoon-cat-fame-naming my cat. This is intricate, but pretty straightforward. And the topic of Cats 4 will in fact be the cartoon-cat-fame-naming of cats.
Fame-naming is a special case of after-naming. I am named after my father (Arnold Melchior Zwicky), and he was named (in a complex way) after his father (Melchior Arnold Zwicky), but no famous persons or characters were involved in these namings. On the other hand, my grandfather was named after one of the Three Wise Men, or Magi (Melchior; and his brothers Balthasar and Kaspar were named after the other two); this is fame-naming.
Meanwhile, my daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, is named after two forebears: her mother’s mother, Elizabeth Walcutt Daingerfield; and her father’s great-aunt, Elizabeth Pickney Daingerfield. That’s just after-naming. On the other hand, according to her mother, my mother Marcella Zwicky was fame-named (not merely after-named) for the fictional character Marcella in the Raggedy Ann books for children.
I was about to go on to compare schemes for the naming of pets (in modern American culture) to those for the naming of children — given our attitudes towards pets, the two are unsurprisingly similar — when I went to get illustrative material about Marcella and Raggedy Ann and discovered that, sadly, my grandmother’s story about my mother’s name could not possibly be true.
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Posted in Argument structure, Books, Etymology, Memory, My life, Names, Participant roles, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
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 »
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.
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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 »
