Language Log

Today's Doonesbury Flashbacks, 35 years ago (July 30, 1977): Trudeau here has made clever use of the fact that normally, with VP-ellipsis, the presuppositions of the antecedent VP are preserved …

Today's xkcd:

[Background: in inventorying postings with linguistically interesting cartoons, for a Language of Comics project at Stanford (directed by Elizabeth Traugott and me), the project intern has been unearthing postings from Language Log Classic whose image links no longer work. Here's one of Mark Liberman's from 2005 — "Illustrations" of 8/2/05, with two Get Fuzzy strips. I'm reproducing the posting here, with fresh, working links.

Back in 2005, we didn't have comments open on postings. But I've opened them now. Just remember: This posting is by Mark, not me. I'm just a typist.]

Yesterday's SMBC:

Today's Scenes from a Multiverse:

A recent New Yorker cartoon, courtesy of Paul Kendall:

The most recent SMBC:

Today's SMBC starts with a little lesson in phonetic dialectology:

Wondermark #829, 4/20, "In which pepper is explained":

The most recent Scenes From a Multiverse cleverly combines the intelligent design controversy with (an indirect form of) the Cretan liar's paradox:

In the most recent Between Failures, an nice example of a non-restrictive relative clause (or a supplementary relative clause, as Geoff Pullum would prefer) introduced by that rather than which:

From the most recent SMBC — the symptoms:

According to Claude Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Bell System Technical Journal 1948:

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer  to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic  aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual  message is one selected from a set of possible messages.

Rather than abstracting away from the fact that communicated messages may have meaning, this recent xkcd strip explores the idea that the "message selected at another point" may have little or no impact on the message that is received: