Continuing my 1/23/18 posting “Syntax assignments from 20 years ago”, now with a section of these materials on some basic concepts in syntax.
Archive for the ‘Terminology’ Category
Syntext: basic concepts
February 10, 2018lucanicophilia, peniphilia, and all that
August 19, 2017On Facebook, the following exchange:
Amanda Walker: Useful term of the day: “ventepølse”, (Norwegian: “waiting sausage”), the sausage you eat off the grill while waiting for your steak to finish cooking.
Jeremy Bornstein: I was hoping it meant something like “someone whose highest purpose would be to become someone else’s sausage”
AMZ: You are my sausage, my only sausage / You make me happy when skies are gray / You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you / Please don’t take my sausage away
It’s all about love of sausage(s) — Würste of many sorts, wieners, frankfurters, hotdogs, bangers, all of them. About what I’ll call lucanicophilia ‘love of sausages’ < Lat. lucanica ‘sausage from Lucania’, in Gk. lukaniko (λουκάνικο). Plus the phil– ‘love’ root.
On the table: the song “You Are My Sunshine”, love of sausage(s), love of penises (peniphilia — sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, but sometimes it’s also a penis), and the terms lucanicophilia and peniphilia.
Magrittean disavowals
August 19, 2017
About the terminology Magrittean disavowal / Disavowal, not the phenomenon. Mike Pope suggests that the terminology may be original with me, and that might be so. But the phenomenon has been around since Magritte’s 1929 painting — the famous pipe image captioned Ceci n’est pas une pipe — and similar examples have been around for longer than that, in apparently paradoxical sentences like the one above (or its French equivalent Ceci n’est pas une phrase), in a sign that announces This is not a sign (French: Ceci n’est pas un panneau), and, more distantly, in the ancient Liar Paradox, with a number of variants: I am lying – Everything I say is false – This sentence is false.
On the who/whom front, and AZ terminology
November 4, 2015Caught in the NYT Book Review feature “By the Book” on Sunday (November 1st), in an interview with Gloria Steinem, three questions from the interviewer, questions with Acc whom beginning a WH, or constituent, question:
(1) Whom do you consider to be the best contemporary feminist writers?
(2) Whom do you consider the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present?
(3) Whom would you want to write your life story?
The WH element in all three questions is “extracted” from a position that requires an Acc —
(1′) You consider him / *he to be the best contemporary feminist writers.
(2′) You consider him / *he the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present.
(3′) You want him / *he to write your life story.
and so Acc whom is prescriptively correct. My own usage has who in all three of these examples; I found the interviewer’s whoms to be stiff, over-formal (even prissy), and old-fashioned — but that’s a matter of taste.
Terminology: snowclonelet
October 24, 2015I advance very slowly on the project of looking at terminology that I might lay some personal claim to. Now: snowclonelet, which I note on the occasion of my having assembled a “Snowclonelets” Page (under the “Linguistics notes” heading), listing postings on the topic from Language Log and this blog.
More to come.
paracuses?
June 8, 2015In my “Mishearings” posting yesteday, I quoted Oliver Sacks:
I carefully record these in a little red notebook labeled “PARACUSES” — aberrations in hearing, especially mishearings.
Readers on Facebook were unable to find a reference on the term paracuses and entertained the possibility that Sacks had just made it up. As it turns out, no, or at least not entirely. The beginning of understanding is that the term is plural; it’s Sacks’s learnèd plural of the Greek-derived technical term paracusis. And that we can find in dictionaries.
A little more on dog whistles etc.
April 7, 2014In the previous installment (4/4/14, here), Geoff Nunberg was looking for a good term to use for a particular class of racially coded vocabularly, for a discussion on public radio: dog whistle, euphemism, whatever. He makes the point that the purpose of this vocabulary is crucial.
On the next day, on ADS-L, from Geoff:
the figure is designed to avoid unambiguously suggesting certain social attitudes to listeners who disapprove of them (as distinct from euphemisns, which enable the speaker to avoid uttering a coextensive term that some listeners find unsavory). “Obliquity” conveys one part of this, and “conivinutation” nicely conveys the other, though neither is a word they would let you use on public radio.
Obliquity, though rare, is not unattested. But conivinutation?
We don’t need no steenkin’ land lines
November 7, 2012Today’s Zits returns to a familiar topic on this strip and on Zippy: changes in how we communicate across a distance:
Once we wrote letters by hand; then we had the telegraph for important messages; then for quick everyday communication we had phones with dials and (later) phones with buttons; then came cellphones (making us mobile) and e-mail (combining the speed of phones with the asynchronous advantages of letters); and then texting, social media, and tweeting. Who uses which modes of communication for which purposes changes, and very different styles of using the technologies emerge.
Jeremy is so over land lines.