Pragmatics Cracks

Where is the crack?

It's all in the context.

From David Soames Advertising

Nomenclature with Demetri Martin - Toddler Nicknames

From Demetri Martin's "This is a Book".

Verbal Poetry

Excellent poem from Futility Closet.

One night an errant Werewolf fled His wife and child and visited A village teacher’s sepulchre And begged him: “Conjugate me, sir!”

The village teacher then awoke And standing on his scutcheon spoke Thus to the beast, who made his seat With crossed paws at the dead man’s feet:

“The Werewolf,” said that honest wight, “The Willwolf — future, am I right? The Wouldwolf — wolf conditional, The Beowulf — father of them all!”

These tenses had a pleasing sound, The Werewolf rolled his eyeballs round, And begged him, as he’d gone so far, Add plural to the singular.

The village teacher scratched his head; He’d never heard of that, he said. Though there were “wolves” in packs and swarms, Of “were” could be no plural forms!

There werewolf rose up blind with tears – He’s had a wife and child for years! But being ignorant of letters He went home thankful to his betters.

– Christian Morgenstern

Human Sentences are "for the Birds"

Thunk would who have.



Excerpts from The Week magazine, July 15 issue (page 17, newsstand version) :


Humans aren’t the only animals capable of speaking in sentences ...

... Birds also use specific grammar rules to structure their tweets. Scientists played jumbled birdsong to Bengal finches and found that almost all of the birds refused to respond to certain remixes. “It’s as if you were presented with a sentence like ‘we will go to the zoo tomorrow,’” Gisela Kaplan, a professor of animal behavior at Australia’s University of New England, tells ABC Science. Some reordered versions of the sentence, such as “tomorrow we will go to the zoo,” still make sense, but “zoo go we will tomorrow the to” doesn’t. Finch songs, it seems, are no different, and like humans, the birds learn syntax by listening.


Isn't interesting it very?

Advertising with Articulatory Phonetics

Love these LG advertisements from David Soames Advertising.

Unfortunately, I couldn't enlarge the image enough to make it readable, so here is the copy from each ad.

Top: Grab me a beer.

Left: Pass the chips.

Right: Where's the remote?

The mouth positions in the ads illustrate the place of articulation for bilabial and dental phonemes quite well.






Pragmatics plays a role in the advertisements as well. Viewers of the ads are put into a context where they have to read lips because the music from LG speakers is so loud that people can't hear each other.

The Past Tense of Text

What is the correct past tense form of the verb to text?

This question has come up quite a bit recently in conversations I have had with friends. Because I generally prefer to view language descriptively rather than prescriptively, I was thrilled to see David Crystal's response to the question on his DC Blog post titled "On texted vs texed".

Following are some excerpts from his post that provide a condensed answer to the question:


... when text became a verb again in the 1990s, in the modern sense, it followed the normal pattern, and texted is the form given in all the dictionaries. So the interesting question is, why has an alternative form developed. ...

... Pronunciation is probably part of the answer. ...

... adding an -ed ending alters the pronunciation dynamic. We now have two /t/ sounds in a rapid sequence, as we had in broadcasted, and that could motivate people to drop the ending. Speakers generally prefer shorter forms. ...

... Whatever the reasons, we do now find forms such as texed and tex'd being used with increasing frequency. I think it's only a matter of time before we find it being treated like broadcast in dictionaries, and given two forms.


In regards to the above mention of "two /t/ sounds in a rapid sequence", the past tense -ed suffix can be phonetically realized as /t/, /d/ or /Id/depending on the final sound of the root morpheme and depending on the speaker's dialect.

Compare the words walked, buzzed and rested.

For most people walked will end in /t/, buzzed will end in /d/ and rested will end in /Id/.

The only time the -ed suffix is vocalized as /Id/ is when the final sound of the root morpheme is a /t/ or /d/.

Returning to Crystal's mention that "speakers prefer shorter forms", I suppose a case could be made for two different analyses of the phonological shortening of the verb texted.

1. The root-final /t/ is omitted thus the -ed suffix is pronounced as /t/.
2. The -ed suffix, which is more commonly realized as /t/ than /Id/, is deleted.

Quite the phonological conundrum, isn't it?

I still say /tektId/.

Demetri Martin, Linguist???

One of my sons recently purchased comedian Demetri Martin's book, "This is a Book". As I was flipping through it, I noticed that Demetri Martin appears to have a true appreciation for the many aspects of language and how they can be manipulated to humorous effects. Much of his humor involves morphology, syntax, semantics, semiotics, pragmatics and orthography.

Here are some examples from the book.

Pragmatics

Syntax

"Nearly 1/2 of all people in the United States are torsos."


Semantics

"The boomerang is Australia's chief export (and then import)."


Semiotics

Morphology

A Palindrome

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN A MAN AND HIS YOUNG SON. THE MAN IS TRYING TO TEACH THE YOUNG BOY THE NAME OF A PIECE OF FRUIT AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SINGULAR AND PLURAL:

-Son, say a papaya.
-Papayas.
-No "s."

Orthography

Linguistics: How, Why, How and What with David Crystal

If you have ever wondered what inspires a person to study linguistics and what exactly linguists do, this episode of "Meet the Author" with linguist David Crystal is well worth a view.

Sparkler Semiotics - Canoeing

Happy 4th of July.

Viewing fireworks from the water is an enlightening experience.

Image from Epic Fireworks Blog