Archive for the ‘Word order’ Category
December 6, 2017
Though today is one of the dark days of early December alluded to in my recent posting — it’s Mozart’s death day, a sad occasion indeed — it’s also St. Nicholas’s day (gifts!), and Chris Waigl’s birthday (eggcorns, remote sensing of wildfires in the Arctic, Python, knitting, and more, in three languages!), and Independence Day in Finland. As Riitta Välimaa-Blum reminds me, this year’s Independence Day is something spectacular: the centenary of Finland’s declaration of independence from Russia.
(#1) The Finnish flag
So raise a glass of Lakka (Finnish cloudberry liqueur) or Finlandia vodka, neat, to honor that difficult moment in 1917 — the year should call to your mind both World War I (still underway then) and the Russian revolution, and these enormous upheavals were in fact crucial to Finland’s wresting its independence from Russia.
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Posted in Art, Bilingualism, Books, Constructions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Pragmatics, Prosody, Syntax, Word order | 3 Comments »
May 5, 2017
Today’s Rhymes With Orange.on love and conjunct order:
So: in coordinated pairs of names, which comes first, and why?
In the case at hand, whoever creates the coordination (here, carving it into a tree) will almost always put their own name first; people are strongly inclined to take themselves to be the measure of all things. Similarly, if you’re referring to a couple of people and one of them is a friend of yours while the other is someone you know mostly through your friend, you’ll probably put your friend’s name first. But beyond that, there’s a complex set of factors that tend to favor one order of names over the other. It seems that these factors conspire in (now well-studied) ways to favor — wait for it… — Guys First.
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Posted in Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Word order | Leave a Comment »
October 13, 2015
A meme-slogan card passed on by Bert Vaux on Facebook:
(#1)
The person who composed this (more on the composition process below) was seriously confused about what active and passive clauses are: the text on the card is an active clause, and all the Yoda sentences I’ve seen are in fact active (though a fair number had no passive counterpart, because the verbs in them were intransitive, like the verb in #1).
I’m guessing that the creator of #1 thought that
(A) Talk in active voice I do not.
was a passive sentence because it had non-default syntax (from the point of view of standard English). But the syntax is non-default because of the fronting in it, not because of the status of the clause as active or passive.
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Posted in Active and passive, Captions, Penguins, Syntax, Word order | Leave a Comment »
June 15, 2014
An unusually big crop of cartoons this morning, including one (a Rhymes With Orange) on stereotypes about men’s tastes (for Fathers Day). Plus another Zits with the stereotype of chatty teenage girls; another strip (a Mother Goose and Grimm) on Yoda’s syntax; a Zippy on synonyms for disapproving; and a Bizarro on the extension of metaphors to simulacra.
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Posted in Idioms, Language and food, Language and gender, Language of teenagers, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Synonyms, Syntax, Word order | Leave a Comment »
August 16, 2013
Today’s Zippy, on Dingburger hair styles, with an outrageous pun in the middle of it:
Requires topknots Dingburg. Rejects other hair styles the law.
VOS word order — attested, but rare. Certainly harsh for speakers of English.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Syntax, Word order | Leave a Comment »
December 4, 2012
A cartoon on George Takei’s website, passed on by Susan Fischer and Asya Pereltsvaig:
The cartoon is from German cartoonist and illustrator Miguel Fernandez (German Wikipedia entry here). This one works because the initials on the tombstone can be taken to represent Latin words from a familiar Latin expression; it’s I P R in English as well, but would be I F R in German.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Syntax, Word order | Leave a Comment »
(#1) The Finnish flag
