Gutsy Grammar

I recently came across this sentence in a post from InsideRIA:

"Very cool for figuring the best way to structure your and in which order to load assets."

Normally, I'm pretty forgiving with grammar, but this caught my eye.  Clearly, it seems that the better way to frame this would be 

"Very cool for figuring both the best way to structure your assets and in which order to load them."

But I was able to parse the sentence, and I believe on the first pass, though it gave me pause.  It seems that under a syntax with the grammar rules of English, it would be considered grammatical.  I'm sure there are many native speakers that would reject it based on principles of "correctness", or some other normative structure, most likely folk-taxonomic.  But it makes me wonder about the nature of syntax.  When we come across sentences like this that work, albeit not perfectly (or perhaps a better word would be paradigmatically), but can still be read and understood, doesn't it point to less of a constrained syntax and more of a 'prototype' theory-esque view?  

I do concede that the sentence is not very likely to be produced as an utterance, and was most likely a by-product of the writer's mind having already planned the structure and moved on to something else while he was still writing it.  I do happen to know that the author is Canadian and I believe a native speaker of English, and quite well-spoken.  So it seems that we should count this as a natural part of English.  At any rate, something interesting to ponder.

Logos for Linguists

I was just reading an interesting article about company branding and logos. Graphic Identity Design can go about creating a logo in two basic ways: create an abstract or image-based symbol that identifies with the company or brand, or use a part of or the whole company name to create a logo. Nike's "swoosh" logo, for example, falls into this first category, as do many car companies' including Chrysler, Mercedes, and Toyota. In the second category you have logos for ExxonMobil (which also has an associated logo of type 1), American Airlines, and General Electric. Of course, this first category doesn't really involve linguists, but the second category has some interesting parallels.

Some of these companies use the whole company name as their logo, while some choose a nickname or initials. From the article, "...what about logos that aren't full names, like initials? Here is where you have to be careful. They only make good logos if they are nicknames of an established company name. General Electric is a long name, so GE makes an excellent logo, because it's what people will use as a nickname." (Jack Trout) This naturally begs the question, when is it OK for a company to shorten their name as opposed to using it in its entirety? "...if people tend to use your full name, that's your name and that's what should be your logo. Metropolitan Life Insurance can be MetLife(nyse:MET- news-people). But New York Life will always be New York Life." (Ibid) Here's where I see linguists coming in. I think it would be an extremely interesting bit of research for a linguist to see what people tend to call different companies by, whether it's the whole name, an abbreviation or a nickname. Going by the principle that what moniker people use will not by and large be affected by what a company decides to use, a researcher could amass a large amount of statistical data and eventually come up with a set of rules that describe these tendencies. Some questions that I think would form the center of a study like this are:

How many words will people allow in a full company name in regular conversation?
What impact does the popularity and/or success of the company have on the name people use for it?
Are there any syllable-type constraints on the rules?
What influence does rhyming or alliteration have?
How much does it matter what the other company names in the same industry (or other categorical grouping) are?

I could see this as an extremely powerful study to have for marketers.

Conceptual Categories of the Young

I was lucky enough to be unemployed during the 6th Annual Rochester International Jazz Fest, so I spent a lot of time in Rochester for it, staying with my father. He lives off of Park Ave., which is a really great, almost European-style village full of unique restaurants and shops. Around dinnertime, you can stroll down the Avenue and be simply amazed by all the wonderful smells coming from the various eateries. One evening when I was eating outside with my girlfriend at K.C. Tea and Noodles on Park Ave., I overheard the following realization uttered by a young child of roughly between 4 and 6 whose parents were pulling him along in a wagon as they walked by:

"Every kitchen grabs my nose!"

I thought this was a pretty great example of the way children categorize different concepts. First, the use of "kitchen" instead of "restaurant" is a clear example of how children use basic-level terms much more frequently than non-basic terms. I'm willing to bet this child knew the word "restaurant", and maybe even had used it before. However, as the stimulation was primarily olfactory rather than visual, he simply called up the term that was most associated with {a place that you smell food in}. It was probably very convenient for the child to be able to have a such a strong lexeme like "kitchen" to select, since it's a familiar room in their own house, and probably where he (and his parents) spend a good deal of time.

What is probably the more interesting aspect of this utterance is the use of "grabs my nose." You could equate this phrase to something like "smells so good." The child here seems to be mapping the concept of sensing an odor, or "smelling," onto an action of physical contact with the sensory organ that interprets the odor. Another way of putting this would be to say that the child is making an animate character out of the odor, or anthropomorphizing it. It would therefore be feasible to think that if the child were in a similar situation, but perhaps the smells weren't necessarily good or there were a lot of different ones that he smelled very fast, he might say "Every kitchen taps my nose," or maybe even "Every kitchen touches my nose." On this analysis, strengthening the form of physical action indicates an increase in pleasure yielded by the odor at hand. On an alternate analysis, however, one might purport that the more intense the action semantically encoded by the verb, simply the stronger the smell. In other words, perhaps the verb doesn't encode the pleasure felt by the smell. On the first reading, we could also assume that if the odors were very strong and unpleasant, the utterance might have been "Every kitchen punches my nose!" or maybe "Every kitchen attacks my nose!"

A final note on the metonymy at play here: "kitchen" is standing in a metonymic relationship with "odors being produced by the kitchen." Nuff said.

Metonymy, Corpora and Voiced Stops

I have to admit that I was really inspired to start this blog after seeing Catáfora Paratáctica, a blog by a colleague of mine, Dan Geyer. The purpose of this blog will basically be to have somewhere to organize and discuss my thoughts on linguistics and language-related phenomena/data.

The title of the blog is really a nutshell summary of my major interests in the wider field of linguistics. I am quite interested in metonymy, as well as similar phenomena in semantics, and especially cognitive semantics and conceptual category theory. Corpora indicates my interest in computational linguistics, especially knowledge representation and speech recognition, as well as encoding pragmatics and discourse representation. Finally, one of my favorite subfields of linguistics is phonology/phonetics, which is where voiced stops comes in.

A few disclaimers and notes: first, I will try very hard to keep this a strictly academic/anecdotal blog, though there is the possibility of the occasional rant or other personal use. Furthermore, I will attempt to give as in-depth an analysis for each phenomenon as I possibly can. To that end, I hope to engage in much discussion using this forum, so comments are encouraged!