nonstandard transmissions

Today I lost my mind on Twitter and pointed out some often misused words & punctuation marks. For posterity, I will enumerate them again here, having wiped off the overtones of condescension and annoyance.

1. Apostrophe use: some simple guidelines.

• Apostrophes do not mark plural. Do not use them to mean more than one of anything.

• Ex: cars NOT car’s; CDs & DVDs NOT CD’s & DVD’s.

• Apostrophes are not used to mark possessives in pronouns.

• Ex: “Poor dog, its tongue was hanging out.” vs. “It’s time to leave.”; “Whose book is this?” vs. “Who’s going to the show?”

• Apostrophes are used to mark possessive on nouns.

• Ex: “Yes, I have Mary’s phone.” or “The car’s tires need to be rotated.”

• Apostrophes are used to contract the verb “BE” as IS.

• Ex: it’s = it is; who’s = who is

2. Who vs. Whom: when and why.

• The –m in WHOM is a leftover from the regular use of the dative case in the past. Same roots as the –m in HIM. This means very little to most. Just remember that

• WHOM is only used after prepositions:

• Ex: To WHOM it may concern; For WHOM the bell tolls.

• In every other situation, WHO is the correct choice.

3. Irregardless is not a word. It’s a redundant construction. Don’t use it

4. Relevancy is not a word. It’s a redundant construction. Don’t use it.

5. For any questions on spelling, I recommend Dictionary.com. Use it. I do.

to explain the data in the last post:

Ruth E. Cisneros | LING 590 | Formulaic Language

Formulaic Language & Humor:

An overview of idiomatic language usage in comedy

I. Introduction

The initial focus of this paper was to explore the intersection between formulaic language and humor by exposing the former in the latter. However, with both humor and formulaic language having broad definitions, the overlap is large and open to a lot of discussion.

Difficulties:

• Lack of availability in transcriptions.

Another avenue of analysis became obvious. It didn’t take long to find examples of formulaic language being exploited to humorous ends in three different skits on Saturday Night Live. Following is an analysis of these three contexts. I hope to pick out some of the nuances of formulaic language as we’ve learned about it this semester via this look at the data.

II. Interesting side note

When thinking about formulaic language & discussing it with others, three or four very prototypical phrases were suggested as formulaic language to look for:

1. “Is this thing on?”: 332,000 Google hits, most titles to blogs or podcasts
2. “Don’t forget to tip your waitress”: 942 hits
3. “I’ll be here all week”: 64,900 hits
4. “Try the veal”: 50,100 hits

These were overall infrequent collocations and constructions on Google, appearing only as self-aware usage to indicate the specificity of the comedy genre. Overall, however, they do not occur within the genre all that often. None of them appeared in the stand up comedy routines I listened to for this project.

I noticed the same thing with many of the examples used in class. While “kick the bucket” may not be in heavy rotation in spoken language, it is a particularly expressive construction, making it a good example; a representative for the myriad other expressions that fall under the term constructions.

III. Data

Collected from two different episodes of Saturday Night Live, these skits employ and exploit formulaic language in different ways. Their value lay in different aspects of constructions, how they’re used, and the level of awareness we have of them. It is this understanding that allows us to “get it” as a joke.

1. Travel Writer Judy Grimes: uses “just kidding” between different jokes, original content between each use.

1. Just kidding:

a. speech act indicating the transition between a joke and normative discourse.

b. fulfills pragmatic role – announces change of register

c. fulfills grammatical role – complex construction used as one unit in utterance.

2. Google raw count for “just kidding:” 11,500,000

3. Intuitively & anecdotally labeled formulaic language.

a. allows for the change in topic

b. used as a self-aware mechanism to keep the joke going.

2. Political Humorist Nick Fehn: uses many different constructions, collocations, and idioms without original content between them. Following are some of the chunks he uses.

1. it’s the reason: 63,400 Google hits

2. I wake up: 1,010,000 hits

3. most Americans: 5,710,000 hits

4. the very idea: 2,050,000 hits

5. any publication: 612,000 hits

3. Death by Chocolate: acted out literally, casts the chocolate bar in a different light. The lack of language is as powerful a medium when using a structure as familiar as “death by chocolate.” Its metaphorical underpinnings are explored by juxtaposing our understanding of the saying against the literal meaning being played out.

1. Raw Google hits: 295,000 hits

IV. Discussion

The value of this data lies in its commonplace nature. The constructions used as the premise of the jokes are easily recognizable. In all three cases the premise is humorous based on the fact that the dialog is completely overtaken by the prefab pieces, all of which are used daily by speakers in non-humorous contexts.

• In the first skit, Judy Grimes perpetuates a long, self-deprecating joke by repeatedly attaching the construction “just kidding” to everything she says. The relationship between idiomatic language and creative content (original utterances) is obvious in the way she relates occurrences to “just kidding.”

• In the second skit, Nick Fehn uses a variety of prefab chunks commonly used as introductions or sentence-starters. The joke lies in he not moving past the introduction and instead putting forth another generic chunk.

• The third skit was a performance of a collocation being interpreted literally, which creates incongruity in understanding. In this case, the construction is metaphorical in nature, and well-known enough to stand in contrast to a life-size chocolate bar committing murder.

Overall, the role of formulaic language is highly useful, widely used, and a category of language with enough recognizable characteristics that we know how to manipulate them in both normative discourse as well as for humorous purposes.

Formulaic Language & Humor:

I. Judy Grimes, Travel Writer - Use of “just kidding:”

II. Nick Fehn, Political Humorist - Use of many idiomatic expressions:
III. Chocolate - acting out of a language chunk:

McCreery, John L. 1995. Negotiating With Demons: The Uses of Magical Language. American Ethnologist. Vol. 22, No. 1. 144-164.

first way of reading transcription of an incantation by a Taoist healer in Taipei is as text. However, “dislocated from this primary context, assertions about the significance of particular words or phrases are dubious at best.” (144).

as text, many questions are left unanswered. those interested on Chinese religion will not be able to get all their questions answered.

reading naively causes the anthropologist to see what they are looking for while missing many details that a scientist trained in phonology, syntax and/or prosody might capture. fundamental difference between the two disciplines: the texts/rituals/experiences that anthropologists deal with are inherently (primarily?) linguistic.

notes Bauman’s observation on performance, and points out that in addition to ritual, these are performances. without understanding the basic premises of performance, eg communicative excellence on the part of the performer, among others listed by Bauman, there is certain amount of data outright missing from an ethnographic study.

the anthropologist is successful in capturing many of the nonverbal aspects of the performance. “if anything, our danger is that of drowning in relevant facts; the issue is how to use them. How can we distinguish valid discovery from illusion produced by projecting concepts onto the text that have no solid base -within- the text?” (145).

attempts a middle ground between structuralist/semiotic approaches and process/performance orientation. sharp focus on aesthetic detail, “logic in tangible quantities” (Levi-Strauss 1969: 1). special attention paid to the sequences of rituals, along to type (syntagmatic/paradigmatic) as “properties of ritual language adds force to interpretation.” (145).