A couple for my fellow linguistics geeks

[liv]

jae found a most excellent wild specimen of the kind of headlines that always get trotted out as examples in popular books about language: Rob Ford beating claims merit police probe, lawyer says [link, just to demonstrate it's real and not made up, not because the article is particularly worth reading.] Apart from "says" at the end, every single word in that sentence is both a noun and a verb.

I've tried the Babelfish game on it and very quickly got nonsense, but not really funny nonsense. Still, even as good a machine translator as modern Google translate struggled to identify who did what to whom. It's a perfect Necker cube of a sentence, though; I only wish that sub-editor had phrased it as: Lawyers: Rob Ford beating claims merit police probe for ultimate garden path perfection.

And one of the links that floated to my attention recently was a rather good piece by Zeynep Tufekci about Orality and Twitter. A very nice counter, both scholarly and accessible, to the complaint that the internet is destroying literacy! I like the argument very much, that what the internet is actually doing is preserving and giving visiblity to genuine oral language rather than written language and language that's trying to imitate prestige dialects.

Comments

[rysmiel]

My very favourite one of those is tnh's story about coming out of a Worldcon in the 1980s and seeing a newspaper vendor's headline thingy with "Begin Mars Peace Talks" on it; it was a story about Menachem Begin, but tnh's immediate thought was "since when have we been at war with Mars ?"

[liv]

*hug* That one is pretty memorable, indeed.

[kaberett]

Oooh, nice find on orality.

[liv]

:-) Thank you, but I can't really take credit. I wish my workflow for picking up articles from social media allowed me to keep better records of who brought stuff to my attention.

[jjhunter]

The 'Orality and Twitter' article is fantastic; I strongly suspect I'll be rereading it more than once, and certainly recommending it the next time I do a linkspam post.

(Ooooo, those thoughts about orality and poetry, and the rhythms of for-speech vs for-reading oh. *om nom nom* thinky thoughts indeed!)

[liv]

I am pretty much ♥_♥ about that Orality article myself. Just one of those new concepts slotting nicely into my brain.

[pseudomonas]

One for Language Log and their crash blossoms?

[liv]

Crash blossoms, thank you, that was the technical term I was looking for. Though the Rob Ford headline does have one clear verb, merits, even though out of context merits could also be a noun. I suppose that makes it similar to charts in Liberman's example.

[pseudomonas]

There's a certain amount of garden-pathing in yours, especially with "claims" as a candidate verb.

[liv]

Honestly I stared at the sentence for so long that my brain started trying to make police the verb, which doesn't quite work because there's no way that claims merit is a plural noun phrase. I think any choice of verb outside those three requires ignoring the punctuation.

[pseudomonas]

You can read "merit police probe" as "the merit which police probe"; but the reading the center-embedding the parse I suggested involves implies confuses me too.

[simont]

every single word in that sentence is both a noun and a verb

The one of those I always remember was from the Ceefax news (back when Ceefax was a thing): 'School murder police quiz man'.

[liv]

Nice one. That almost feels like it's missing punctuation, but even so, impressive pile of nouns!

[jack]

It took _me_ about five minutes to work out what it was saying...

Oh! Very good point about oral language.

[liv]

Yay, you're back *hug* And yes, I do think the Rob Ford headline is a bit garden path as well as crash blossoms.

[(Anonymous)]

Plenty of great crash blossom examples on Wikipedia, of all places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headlines

Including some of the classics like the wartime "French push bottles up German rear" and "British left waffles on Falklands".