Pragmatics, Semantics and Free Guitars

Thanksgiving Pragmatics

Happy Thanksgiving

Read Kiddo Read

One of the many things I am thankful for this Thanksgiving is the love of reading that my parents instilled in me at a young age. It is this love of reading that fostered my love of words and language which, in turn, brought about my passion for studying the science of language.

Please help instill the love of reading in your child. Check out this new website for parents, teachers and librarians started by James Patterson - READKIDDOREAD.COM

Feed Hungry Dogs

Please check out the website freekibble.com (I have also added a permanent link below right). It is a website started by a 12-year-old girl that provides a daily trivia question and helps to feed hungry dogs.

Also, don't forget to help feed hungry people by playing the Free Rice vocabulary trivia game.

Pushing Daisies - Rat's Ass Idiom

In a previous post about idioms I mentioned that when an element of an idiom is changed it usually loses its idiomatic meaning. What about changing the word order of an idiom? One of my favorite television shows just included some dialogue that indicates changing the word order of an idiom does not necessarily take away from the idiomatic meaning.

On last week's episode of Pushing Daisies Ned's half-brothers(that are twins) demonstrate their skills as illusionists, to which Emerson Cod sarcastically remarks, "a magic show...where did I put that rat's ass I could give?"

Now that I think about it, there are many idioms in which the word order could be changed without losing the idiomatic meaning (so long as the speaker and listener are on the same page pragmatically).

The Genericization of "Person" Names (Names as Generic, Descriptive Nouns)

A previous post mentioned the term genericide, which is defined as the process by which a brand name becomes a generic name for the product category. I would like to propose an expanded definition of genericide; I think it should also include the process by which a known "person" name becomes a generic, descriptive noun for anyone that has certain characteristics that are associated with that name.

Consider the following names that have already gone through genericide:

Melvin: an uncool person.
Bob: an imaginary friend.
Lolita: a sexually precocious young girl.
Poindexter: a brainy, nerdy boy.
Eugene: see Poindexter.
Velma: the female version of Poindexter.
And of course...
John Doe: an unidentified man.
Jane Doe: an unidentified woman.

I was always more of a Velma than a Lolita in high school.

Video Funny - Improve You English

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Grammar Dog

Apostrophe Errors - Boys and Girls Restrooms

The signs on the restrooms at my sons' middle school read BOY'S and GIRL'S. Pictured above is the boys room (as one of my sons was with me, I was unable to get a picture of the girls room because he was about to "die of embarrassment."). At any rate, I wonder who the one lucky boy and one lucky girl are that each get to have their own personal restroom.

Thankfully, the Language Arts teachers at the school are always among the first to point out this apostrophe error.

New Word in People Magazine - Docureality

The November 24 issue of People includes a review of the VH1 show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. Interestingly, the review labels the show a docureality series. I have heard of documentaries but never a docureality. When looking into the word docureality, I was unable to find any definitions, though there were numerous references to the term in relation to different television programs. The majority of these references spelled the word as docu-reality with a hyphen or as docu reality with a space (I wonder how People magazine decided to use the docureality spelling). Regardless of the spelling, I think the word docureality is a poorly constructed portmanteau word. A documentary is considered to be a factual movie or television program and as a factual movie or television program is based on reality combining documentary and reality is redundant.

Having Fun with Homophones - Cue and Queue

I stumbled across this while I was doing some research on snooker for a freelance job. It gave me a good chuckle so I thought I would share it.

DETROIT Make it Here - A New Creative Community

DETROIT Make it Here is a new online community that was created to "inform, empower and unite the creative community" in and around Detroit. As I consider blogging a type of creative writing, I decided to join this community. DETROIT Make it Here has great potential as a resource so I thought I would mention it here in hopes of getting more people to join. The forums provide a great platform for discussing career and business issues, asking questions and getting feedback from like-minded individuals in the community. Please check it out and consider joining. Here is a link to the site:
DETROIT Make it Here

Diagramming Words: Morphology

With last week's post about diagramming sentences and syntactic trees, I thought it should be pointed out that words can also be diagrammed. The morphological tree below shows syntactic word structure because it demonstrates how suffixes are capable of changing the grammatical function of words.

Language and Gender Cartoon - Unspoken Communication

Musical Metathesis

With the holidays approaching soon, I am reminded of how happy I am that my children are finished with elementary school. It is not that I want to see them grow up any more quickly, but because there are no more mandatory school musicals. I firmly believe that school musicals should be optional after the 3rd grade - they are no longer enjoyable for anyone after that. The majority of children I know from my boys' former 600 student school (even those that like singing) can't stand participating in school musicals. And God knows the parents don't enjoy the obligation of attending the musicals - cramped seating, horrible viewing, sweltering auditoriums, malfunctioning and screechy audio systems, music teachers that drag out the program...need I say more. One of my sons came up with an incredible metathesization to describe school musicals that I truly wish I could mention to his former music teacher.

MUCUSAL

Mucus is an unpleasant product and anyone who has it wants to be rid of it and will even take drugs to speed up the process. Maybe that is what I should have done...taken drugs to speed up the musical (I mean mucusal) production.

Spell Checker Poetry

A wonderful example of why people should not rely on spell check programs.

Ode to My Spell Checker

Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to say
Weather eye yam wrong oar write.
It shows me strait a weigh as soon as a mist ache is maid.
It nose bee fore two long and eye can put the error rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am shore your pleased to no.
Its letter perfect awl the way.
My checker told me sew.

- author unknown

This poem is a bit of an exaggeration these days as most spell checkers include grammar checkers so many of these homophonic spelling errors would be caught - it is still a fun poem though.

We All Make Mistakes - McCain's Schwa

I never claimed to be perfect though I did commit an error that I am a bit embarrassed about. In my post comparing Obama's name to McCain's I stated that McCain's name has only one vowel sound - WRONG. In fact, McCain's name includes the most common American English vowel sound - the schwa. When verbalizing the "Mc" portion of his name there is clearly a schwa (also called a reduced vowel) between the /m/ and the /k/. The schwa occurs in unstressed syllables because when a syllable is not stressed the vowel sound in that syllable is reduced. Interestingly, because any vowel sound can occur in an unstressed syllable and therefore be reduced there are 43 different spellings for the schwa.

Diagramming Sentences: The Syntactic Tree

The method of sentence diagramming(shown below) that most high school students still learn today is based on on the work of Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg from 1877.

The sentence diagrams preferred by linguists today are based on the work of Noam Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff and are called syntactic trees. Syntactic trees are preferred because they illustrate the dimensionality of sentences; in other words they show that sentences are more than just strings of words with a flat structure.

All people should be as happy as linguists.

By the Bye Magnum P.I.

Having been a fan of the television show Magnum P.I., I always loved the expression "by the bye" (which the character Higgins seemingly uttered at least once an episode), in fact I used it in a post a week or so ago. At any rate, I thought I would see what I could find out about the expression. For those who are not familiar with it, "By the bye" is an idiomatic expression meaning by the way or incidentally. "By the bye" has the alternative spelling "by the by."
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary the word by is an "Elliptical use for "secondary course" (opposed to main) was in O.E. This also is the sense of the second by in the phrase by the by (1615).

Creedence Clearwater Revival - misheard lyrics

Beautiful Mondegreens

Advertising Slogan Semantics

The Virtual Linguist recently posted a list of the twenty most frequently used words found in advertising slogans in the last twenty years. I thought it might be fun to semantically analyze some of these word choices. The words (in order) are:

you, your, we, world, best, more, good, better, new, taste, people, our, first, like, don't, most, only, quality, great and choice.

1 and 2) The choices of the words you and your seems obvious and it is understandable that they are the first and second most popular; both words cause each and every person who reads or hears the slogan to feel that they are being addressed personally.
3 and 12) The word we (as in "you and me") causes each person to feel included and everybody wants to feel included. Similarly, our ("yours and mine") is inclusive semantically.
4, 5 and 6) The word world could also be thought of as inclusive because each person is part of the world (as in "we are the world"). However, I think it is probably the case that world as the place where we all live would be the more common semantic use in slogans. Which brings us to
the word best - we all want the best in the world of whatever it is that is being sold, and most people want even more of the best.
7) I would think that the use of the word good must occur in a slogan in the semantic sense of good versus bad and not good, better, best (the good, better, best sense implies that good is just acceptable).
8) In advertising the word new is used to mean better, therefore these two words are semantically equivalent.
9) When it comes to the word taste, there are two different semantic senses that slogans could be promoting - taste versus tasteless food wise (these pancakes taste great) or taste as in discrimination (his sense of taste is exhibited by the car he drives).
18) When the word quality is used as an adjective it refers to something that is excellent or superior; however, something can be poor quality if the word quality appears semantically as a noun.

Obama's Name Wins Election Thanks to Language Acquisition

From a linguistic point of view it makes perfect sense that Obama won the election. The name Obama is easier and more natural to say than the name McCain. The reason the name Obama seems to roll right off the tongue so naturally is that the sounds and sound patterns in his name are consistent with some of the first sounds and patterns children make when they are acquiring language. In other words, we have known these sounds and patterns longer than any others.

Beyond crying, some of the first sounds a baby makes are cooing sounds which are basically vowel sounds, for example: ooh, aah, and eeh. Obama has three separate vowel sounds compared to McCain's one.

The next step in language acquisition is babbling which consists of repeated consonant vowel combinations (CVCV), for example: mama, dada, and baba. In linguistics the repeation of sounds and structures is called reduplication. Thus it can be said that Obama has a reduplicative name, in fact the last two syllables of his name sound an awful lot like a baby's babbling (O - bama).

And finally, when it comes to the acquisition of consonant sounds, those that are most commonly acquired first are: b, d, m, n and h. The only consonants in Obama's name are included in the list of consonant sounds that are known to be acquired early (O - BaMa).

With this linguistic analysis of Obama's name in mind (the many vowel sounds, the consonant sounds that are acquired early and the pattern of reduplication), it is no wonder Obama won the election.

Semantics for Elementary School Teachers

This is from an email I received and it is a great refresher on semantics for elementary school teachers.
____________________________________

TEACHER: Maria, go to the map and find North America.
MARIA: Here it is.
TEACHER: Correct. Now class, who discovered America ?
CLASS: Maria.
____________________________________

TEACHER: John, why are you doing your math multiplication on the floor?
JOHN: You told me to do it without using tables.
__________________________________________

TEACHER: Glenn, how do you spell 'crocodile?'
GLENN: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L'
TEACHER: No, that's wrong
GLENN: Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.
(I Love this kid)
____________________________________________

TEACHER: Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?
DONALD: H I J K L M N O.
TEACHER: What are you talking about?
DONALD: Yesterday you said it's H to O.
__________________________________

TEACHER: Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we didn't have ten years ago.
WINNIE: Me!
__________________________________________

TEACHER: Glen, why do you always get so dirty?
GLEN: Well, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.
_______________________________________

TEACHER: Millie, give me a sentence starting with ' I. '
MILLIE: I is..
TEACHER: No, Millie..... Always say, ' I am.'
MILLIE: All right... 'I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.'
________________________________

TEACHER: George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry tree, but also admitted it. Now, Louie, do you know why his father didn't punish him?
LOUIS: Because George still had the axe in his hand.
______________________________________

TEACHER: Now, Simon, tell me frankly, do you say prayers before eating?
SIMON: No sir, I don't have to, my Mom is a good cook.
______________________________

TEACHER: Clyde, your composition on 'My Dog' is exactly the same as your brother's. Did you copy his?
CLYDE : No, sir It's the same dog.
___________________________________

TEACHER: Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when people are no longer interested?
HAROLD: A teacher

Alliteration Abounds - Newsweek

One of my children was asking about alliteration the other day so it struck me as funny that the October 27 issue of Newsweek - which I read the very next day - happened to have a couple of examples of alliteration. First, there was a column about health titled "The Power of Pure Poppycock" (nice set of p's, not to mention that the first word of the article is perhaps). Then there was a blurb about the separation of Madonna and Guy Ritchie that mentioned their son, Rocco Ritchie, and said he'd "better grow up to like alliteration."

I know I like alliteration. I think it is a very entertaining poetic device (contrary to what the cartoon below reads - which, by the way, provides a perfect example of the entertainment factor of alliteration).

Prototype Semantics Diagram

The prototype approach to meaning is very important to the field of semantics as mentioned in previous posts about prototype semantics. People think in categories and assign objects to categories by comparing the objects to what they think will provide the best example of that category. A good way to illustrate this concept is with a prototype semantics diagram.

Following is a prototype semantics diagram of the category bird:


The further out from the center of the circle each object is - the less prototypical that object is for the category that is being diagrammed. This diagram reveals that people think of bluejays, robins, and doves as more prototypical birds than penguins or ostriches.

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Euphemisms