The garden path to heaven

There is a Facebook page called "I Miss Someone Really Bad Who Is In Heaven".

My initial reading was:

Villain: "If only my parents could see me now..."
Sidekick: "Sir, I am sure they're smiling down from evil heaven."

I was somewhat disappointed to find that this is not the intended reading.

Donkey Anaphora and the King(s) of France

An end-of-the-semester gift from one of my semantics students:

A t-shirt for a (as yet fictitious?) band. Started as an in-class joke which arose from the juxtaposition of two topics:

(1) presupposition failure in sentences like "The king of France is bald", and

(2) issues involving the binding of pronouns in sentences like "Every farmer who owns a donkey_i beats it_i."

What speechitatest you? On engineered language change amongst high schoolers

The latest Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, on high school language change:

Note:
The type of language change the students are shown undergoing would require more than a source of new lexical items, I would think.

We find morphological change: Wouldsest for 2nd person singular present of "would".

And syntactic change: What speechitated Harvard? for "What did Harvard say?" (note the necessity of do-periphrasis in modern English).

How could a thesaurus (of fake synonyms) drive these sorts of changes? [Of course, under Minimalism, parametric variation, including differences in word order, is theorised to be a reflex of formal features which are borne by lexical items. So perhaps if the thesaurus had some way of encoding abstract syntactic features in such a way that they would be picked up along with the phonological and semantic aspects of the lexical item....]

λ♥[love] (Linguistics Love Song)

See the Sentence First blog for the lyrics and also Language Log for comments and explanation.

[I'm currently dissertating, thus the lack of posts.]

Trocheeotomy? Trocheeectomy.

The latest xkcd:


Click for larger image

Trocheeotomy? Or should it be trochee-ectomy? (~trocheeectomy)

[Some additional things:

Here's an interesting chart of trochee bigrams from the xkcd blag:

[again, click for larger image]

And Mark Liberman on Language Log offers some discussion here. (I imagine xkcd is thinking of Snow Crash rather than The Big U. By the bye, the linguistic-y part of Snow Crash I've always felt to be the weakest part of the book.) ]

The alt-text:

So, this maximal projection walks into a V-bar, and says...

So, this Maximal Projection walks into a V-bar, and says: “Give me a little vP!”

The bartender asks: “Really? That’s not your usual order.”

And the Maximal Projection replies: “I know ... maybe it’s just a phase.”

[from Amy Fountain's cafepress site, with hattip to the Eternally Stressed Semanticist.]

Now illustrated: