7 Sentences That Sound Crazy But Are Still Grammatical
mentalfloss.comSeven implausibly grammatical sentences from Mental Floss:
1. ONE MORNING I SHOT AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS. HOW HE GOT INTO MY PAJAMAS I’LL NEVER KNOW.Take advantage of the fact that the same sentence can have two different structures. This famous joke from Groucho Marx assumes that most people expect the structure of the first part to be
One morning [I shot an elephant] [in my pajamas].
But another possible, and perfectly grammatical, reading is
One morning [I shot] [an elephant in my pajamas].
4. THE RAT THE CAT THE DOG CHASED KILLED ATE THE MALT.Make a sentence with multiple center embeddings. We usually have no problem putting one clause inside another in English. We can take “the rat ate the malt” and stick in more information to make “the rat the cat killed ate the malt.” But the more clauses we add in, the harder it gets to understand the sentence. In this case, the rat ate the malt. After that it was killed by a cat. That cat had been chased by a dog. The grammar of the sentence is fine. The style, not so good.
7. THIS EXCEEDING TRIFLING WITLING, CONSIDERING RANTING CRITICIZING CONCERNING ADOPTING FITTING WORDING BEING EXHIBITING TRANSCENDING LEARNING, WAS DISPLAYING, NOTWITHSTANDING RIDICULING, SURPASSING BOASTING SWELLING REASONING, RESPECTING CORRECTING ERRING WRITING, AND TOUCHING DETECTING DECEIVING ARGUING DURING DEBATING.This sentence takes advantage of the versatile English –ing. The author of a 19th century grammar guide lamented the fact that one could “run to great excess” in the use of –ing participles “without violating any rule of our common grammars,” and constructed this sentence to prove it. It doesn’t seem so complicated once you realize it means,
“This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate.”
Read the rest of the sentences in the article.
These weird-but-grammatical sentences illustrate an important fact about sentence construction: we don’t just use syntactic rules to put words together, but we also need to consider how much memory or processing power is available to make sense of them. If you put enough thought into these seven sentences, you can get them to mean something reasonable, but it definitely takes a bit more thinking.
(And then there’s also pragmatics, which is what makes it weird to say “the sky is orange” or “yesterday I walked my pet dinosaur” or the classic “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”).
Ambiguous Job recommendations
ling.upenn.eduIf you have to write a letter of recommendation for a fired employee, here are a few suggested phrases.
Lexical ambiguity
For a chronically absent employee: A man like him is hard to find.
For the office drunk: Every hour with him was a happy hour.Structural ambiguity
For a chronically absent employee: It seemed her career was just taking off.
For a dishonest employee: Her true ability was deceiving.Scope Ambiguity
For an employee who is so unproductive that the job is better left unfilled: I can assure you that no person would be better for the job.
Another fun linguistics way of subtly insulting someone is “damning with faint praise”, which violates the Gricean maxim of relevance in order to give the impression that there aren’t any more relevant, positive characteristics of the person. For example, if someone says “how did you like the movie?” and you say “well, there were actors and costumes and I think it was even in English”, you’re probably implying that it wasn’t very good.
“someone was bored once and did nothing about it. they continued to accept boredom: stayed the same, stagnated, and starved the mind-- it became a motionless-murky-dull, brain-waste, land fill of a place. before long, that which did not grow began to die. and that which had been holding still began to decay, and to dissolve.”
—snippet from a very rough and all-over-the-place piece of writing that addresses the general strangeness of “boredom”, especially in regards to being or becoming bored “of” other people.
i think the word “bored” is misused often, to be honest. if you think about most of the sentences you hear or see it in, the person really could have tried to think of a more specific word, but they probably didn’t really want to find it. or, weren’t able to. (an example being to state that you are ‘bored’ when you are actually feeling something closer to lazy / unmotivated or even anxious.) there are a slew of possible alternatives, to be revealed by the context of what we have to do and want to do at that moment.
boredom means that you are not finding anything interesting. as far as i’m concerned, this is comparable to being dead.
a tip for the future: next time you feel “bored”- please confirm that there is not a single thing on this planet that is of interest to you, and then check yourself into the hospital/psych ward. otherwise, pick a goddamn verb and get to it.
boredom may be easily mistaken for: [not wanting to admit] laziness, fear, procrastination, negative expectations, anxiety, fixation, or avoidance.
or it may be commonly confused with: the feeling of being overwhelmed by a large (but awesome) idea or project, the feeling of not knowing where to start, having too much that has to be done (unfavorable chore/fun ratio), need of rest or relaxation.
Difference Between Tun and Machen
fuckyeahdeutsch.tumblr.comI can’t reblog this for some reason, so I’m posting a link to it instead!
Basically, Fuckyeahdeutsch had posted a response to a question that asked what the difference between “tun” and “machen” is.
This is a really really helpful answer and I suggest you all look at it!
- Student: Can I go to the bathroom?
- Teacher: I don't know, CAN you?
- Student: It seems you have mistaken the locutionary force of my question for its illocutionary force. See, the locutionary force was a simple yes or no question, but the illocutionary force was a request. If only you'd taken a course on pragmatics we could have avoided this whole misunderstanding.
Supremum
Ever since I took too many mathematics classes, I started using the concept of “upper bound” literally. It confuses people.
- Girlfriend: How long do you think it’ll take you to work out?
- Me: Oh, I don’t know. I’d say less than five hours.
- Girlfriend: Five hours?! What are you planning to do there?
- Me: I didn’t say it would take five hours. I said it would take less than five hours.
Well, it did take me less than five hours. It took me an hour and a half.
Same problem with confidence intervals — I give these very literal answers. My former boss told me a story about a “rationality test” she was given, by a statistician or something. First she was asked to guess some fact that only a 5th grader would know, like how many tons the moon weighs or what’s the square mileage of Antarctica. Then the statistician asked her to give 90% confidence bounds. That’s, you’re ≥90% sure that the value is between these two numbers. Most people fail by saying numbers close to their original guess.
My boss just said, “I’m confident that the number is somewhere between zero and a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion … trillion.” Well she was correct! And she was one of the only ones.
You can make confidence bounds as wide as you want and be logically correct. People will look at you in bewilderment when you say things like “I’ll be gone somewhere between two seconds and seven days,” but you will not be a liar.
Mathematicians are the only people who go around making statements like “I found out that the answer is greater than 6 and less than 3→3→64→2. I’m pretty sure the answer is 13, though.”
(3→3→64→2 is bigger than billions of universes.)
It’s not even the difference between certainty-of-proof and casual guesstimation. It’s the difference between giving an upper bound and giving the least upper bound (supremum).
I can say with complete confidence that I will never earn over 10^18737 pounds in my life, no matter how much hyperinflation or life extending medicines lie in the future. I can say the same about 10^18736 pounds. How low am I willing to go with these statements? Ay, there’s the lub.
No less of an intellect than Paul Graham swaps upper and lower bounds. In describing how he’s designing a new programming language (arc) with the goal that useful programs should be as short as possible in it, he writes:
That’s part of why I focus on code size. Length is an external constraint. If you start looking at code thinking “what is the lower bound on how long this has to be?” you’re one step from discovering the new operator that will make it that short.
I might be the only person who reads this and is confused. When I hear “lower bound” I think “Nothing is lower than the lower bound. It has to be bigger than the lower bound.” But then he is talking like putting a lower bound on the code means the code is shorter. Zoinks?
And then I’m like, oh. Duh. He means “the lower bound on the upper bound on how long this has to be.” Supremum. Well you could have just said that, Paul. Or I could not think so literally.
“Our life problems have always been “solved” by verbalists and rhetorical metaphysicians who cleverly played with vague words and who always ignored the supremely important matter of dimensions because they were ignorant of it. There was no possible way to arrive at an agreement on the significance of words, or even the understanding of them. Let us take, for instance, such words as “good” or “bad” or “truth;” volumes upon volumes have been written about them; no one has reached any result universally acceptable; the effect has been to multiply warring schools of philosophy—sectarians and partisans. In the meantime something corresponding to each of the terms “good,” “bad,” “truth” exists as matter of fact; but what that something is still awaits scientific determination. If only these three words could be scientifically defined, philosophy, law, ethics and psychology would cease to be “private theories” or verbalism and they would advance to the rank and dignity of sciences.”
—Alfred Korzybski, Polish-American scientist, engineer, mathematician, philosopher, linguist, logician, author of Science & Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and is remembered most for developing the theory of general semantics (1879-1950)Listen
This month’s Superlinguo radio segment was all about cleft sentences.
What I did was tell Fee, Jess and Ben all about how cleft sentences are spawned.
Here’s the podcast, if you missed it.
Amazing Grice
specgram.comAmazing Grice, O maxims sound
that saved my sophistry!
I once just lied, but now I’ve found:
best lie pragmatically.Twas Grice that taught me not to fear;
of facts I can take leave.
All baseless; not a claim sincere—
yet people still believe!—Sai and Alex Fink, in SpecGram
(more)
Gricean maxims and song parodies: what’s not to love?
Things You Think You Know About Language: Information Structure, Part 1
I feel like talking about my personal favorite aspect of linguistics, which occurs at the interface between syntax (the study of word order) and pragmatics (the study of how context, and discourse-related notions, interact with formal grammatical rules). These days, it also goes by the name of “information structure.” Primarily, this concerns those syntactic choices which require (or, seen another way, imply) a very specific discourse context.
Semantics involves the truth-conditions of a sentence: the semantic content of a sentence determines whether that sentence would be “true” or “false” given the facts about the world it’s expressed in. Pragmatics, on the other hand, involves a subtler level of interpretation. While the pragmatic nature of a sentence won’t necessarily help determine whether it’s judged “true” or “false,” it will help determine how the sentence will be interpreted. Generally speaking, pragmatics helps us understand how a certain sentence, in a certain context, organizes the information the speaker wants to convey, and how a sentence can convey more than what it contains on the surface. I’ve discussed this briefly before.
Information structure discusses the interaction between pragmatic issues and syntactic phenomena. My favorite example, because it’s the focal point of a lot of my own research but also because it’s not too hard to explain, is a construction called topicalization in English. It’s when some phrase, like the direct object, does not occur in its canonical or default order in the sentence, but instead appears at the very beginning of the sentence. Like so:
Garlic I like.
When it’s just sitting there, isolated from any real context and presented without comment, it’s kind of weird. There’s a chance it doesn’t even sound like a possible sentence of English to you. The canonical order (I like garlic) seems much more reasonable.
Context, however, should change this into a totally acceptable sentence (although I have found that there is some difference between speakers). Intonation may be an additional cue: in the case of topicalization, part of the whole package is some form of emphasis on the topicalized phrase. See if this makes the sentence better.
I have really different feelings about different members of the onion family. Garlic, I like. But onions make me feel kind of sick.
For me, at least, this is a perfectly acceptable chunk of English prose. I will hope that this fits with your judgments, hypothetical readers, but if you’re still skeptical, let me know and I can provide loads of other examples. Trust me. I’ve got heaps of them. This is kind of my thing.
Gricean Maxims and "I'm not a racist, but ..."
Now consider this example:
I’m not a racist, but Eleanor is an asshole.
If you look at it from the point of view of the Gricean Maxims, it means something very importantly different than
Eleanor is an asshole.
because you wouldn’t mention race at all unless you meant it to be relevant to the current discourse. Which means you are directly implying that race is relevant to your comment.
Which means that you probably are a racist.
GRICEAN MAXIMS, EVERYBODY
I wonder if they taught me all the shat I learned this semester in food terms I would understand it better.
“Every dish must have one and only one component of protein and every component of protein must be in one and only one dish.”
“An M-assignment is a chef that assigns to each sous-chef ∈ Kitchen an M-entity chef(sous-chef) ∈ Restaurant. The set of all M-assignments is denoted by CHEF, i.e. CHEF = {chef| chef: Kitchen —> Restaurant}.”
“Autosegment = Menu
• Menu
= an element of gastronomical representation
Elements = appetizers or entrees (simplified)”
Thank you Profs. Safir, Bittner, and Jurgec because I just used your definitions and changed them to foodie terms. Don’t need no copyright infringement crap on my tails.
Language and Politeness
At work today, a customer asked if I would mind doing something for them. I was already helping them out with something and what they were asking was no big deal. For a moment though, I chuckled to myself, because what if I had answered that I did mind? I would tease with friends and family and say that I minded, but it didn’t seem appropriate to joke around at the moment.
Pragmatics and politeness are interesting areas in linguistics, because we need these kinds of little phrases to navigate society every day. There are all sorts of funny little polite phrases we say all the time where we know what the outcome or answer will be, but we have say them anyways. I’m not underscoring the importance of these kinds of phrases, on the contrary: they’re extremely important. These small little gestures go a long way towards projecting who we are to those around us.
Usually people don’t over think these polite phrases, I don’t think about them that often. But, I do like those moments were I actually stop to really think about some phrase and I can appreciate some of the silliness behind it.
Pragmatics Analysis
Maxim violations often happen in daily conversations. In a BBC TV series called Merlin, I found an example of a maxim violation.
Arthur’s father, King Uther, has just died. Arthur stands vigil for his father’s body in the throne room through the night. Merlin, his servant, waits outside the room until dawn comes and Arthur comes out. Arthur is surprised to see Merlin there, looking tired with red eyes and dried tears.
Arthur: Merlin. Have you been here all night?
Merlin: I just didn’t want you to feel that you were alone.
Arthur: You’re a loyal friend, Merlin.
(Merlin, Series 4 Episode 3: The Wicked Day)
Merlin’s answer is obviously a maxim violation. He violates the Maxim of Relation because he doesn’t answer Arthur’s real question. He seems out of topic. He also probably violates the Maxim of Manner too because his answer is a bit ambiguous. What does he mean that he didn’t want Arthur to feel that Arthur was alone? Does he mean that he’d be there for Arthur? Does he mean that Arthur can consider Merlin as a friend? Does he mean anything else? Anyway, Merlin’s answer is just another way to say that yes, he has been there all night.
In my opinion, this could happen because of a couple of reasons. Firstly, maybe Merlin feels that he has to justify his reason for staying outside the throne room, waiting alone for Arthur to come out after his vigil, which is the last moment for him to be together with his father. After all, Merlin is just Arthur’s servant. It would be weird to say that Merlin actually cares enough for his master to wait alone and cry on a cold floor the whole night. So when Arthur asks if he’s been there all night, he can’t just answer that yes, he has. He feels the need to explain his reason. Secondly, maybe Merlin is trying to cheer Arthur up with his words and, more importantly, his action. By saying that he didn’t want Arthur to feel that Arthur was alone, indirectly, he is saying that he wanted to keep Arthur company. Indirectly, too, he is saying that Arthur was not alone, that he’d be there for Arthur, even, especially, in bad situations, such as now because Arthur is in grief. His action, which is staying all night for Arthur, speaks for itself.
In the end, Arthur’s response to Merlin’s answer is: “You’re a loyal friend, Merlin.” This shows that Arthur catches Merlin’s implicature. He knows that Merlin has been there all night, and that Merlin would be there for him. Arthur has had an assumption that Merlin is giving another level of meaning. This is what we call cooperative principle.
“However, a very clear example of the performative use of description can be found in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers, where the good wizard Gandalf breaks the traitor wizard Saruman's staff (both a symbol and an instrument of his power) by saying Saruman, your staff is broken, an utterance couched in a purely descriptive form.”
—Sweetser, E. (2000). Blended spaces and performativity. Cognitive Linguistics, 11(3/4), 305-334.
It is strange reading your own professor’s work for a class, knowing that she’s going to talk about it, but I find myself really liking this piece. This is rather surprising given that I so dislike her teaching/lecturing style. It seems that she is much better at explaining her thoughts in extensively revised written work. Plus, I can’t help but love a good LotR reference!
