Archive for Linguistics in the comics
The correct amount of bad
The last two panels of today's Dumbing of Age:
Walky has a good point about "too bad". But the last panel is also a good example of emphatic even — see
"What does 'even' even mean?", 2/8/2011
"Can they even prove that?", 5/24/2011
"Even again", 10/21/2011
"Annals of even", 10/4/2013
Read the rest of this entry »
Style? Stance? What?
Yesterday's SMBC:
Mouse-over title: "The emeritus will take 4 hours telling you about a trip to Africa that happened 40 years ago."
Read the rest of this entry »
An xkcd for Geoff Nunberg
Mouseover text: "I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!"
From Geoffrey Nunberg, "The pragmatics of deferred reference" (in L. Horn and G. Ward, eds., The Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell, 2003):
Read the rest of this entry »
All too true
Today's xkcd:
Mouseover title: "Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in.""
Quasicompositionality in the comics
Today's xkcd:
Mouseover title: "The <x> that is held by <y> is also a <y><x>, so if you go to a food truck, the stuff you buy is truck food. A phone that's in your car is a carphone, and a car equipped with a phone is a phonecar. When you play a mobile racing game, you're in your phonecar using your carphone to drive a different phonecar. I'm still not sure about bananaphones."
See Mark Liberman and Richard Sproat, "The Stress and Structure of Modified Noun Phrases in English," in Lexical Matters, Sag and Szabolcsi, Eds., 1990.
Update — How about other XY/YX English compound pairs, written with or without internal space? There's cat house and housecat; fish-bone and bonefish; index-card and card index; ball game and game ball; dozens if not hundreds of others; how many can you think of within a minute or so?