I recently received an email from a current grad student in the program to which I'll be attending in the fall. She congratulated me and such, then ended the email by offering advice or help with anything I needed, as well as to tell me what the professors are really like. This emphasis of really really made me wonder: are you trying to tell me that you didn't give me a good impression of them when I was on the campus looking at the department?
I feel like this is said a lot around university campuses. It seems to me here that the speaker is letting you know in a nice way that they flout the quality and manner maxims for the sake of being polite in order to ease you into the program/new professors.
I find this to generally come as a surprise when someone says it, and wonder why the reality was not stated in the first place.
While planning a trip to Indianapolis to visit a friend next weekend, he sent an email saying that I should arrive late afternoon, about 1:00.
I am rather curious as to when 1:00 became late afternoon? Just as The weekend has taken up Friday for some people, so has late afternoon snatched up early afternoon it appears.
Page 340, question 3: The book does not say that sentence a) has a normal interpretation. I disagree. Depending on the context it can. Most of the time I would say "take it there" or "bring it here." Imaginge though two people looking over a map, and one person is telling the other to deliver let's say a new car to his house. If I were the first person I would say, "Take it here," pointing to where my house is located on the map.
I have a question about Tuesday's homework. On question 2b the book classifies "at once" as temporal deixis (gestural). I understand the temporal classification but not so much the gestural. "At once" to me means "now," which is clearly temporal. Where does the gestural come into play? I don't feel it's necessary to be looking at someone to understand "Come out from behind there at once, Smith!" If anything, I think the gestural classification should go with "there," which the book does classify it as such- "spatial deixis (gestural-the distinction is sometimes hard to apply). Personally, I would apply the gestural classification to "there" way before I would to "at once."
I noticed that the Beetles song I am the Walrus begins with a really good example of personal deixis gone awry!
- I am he is you are he is you are me and we are all together.
If one were to try and follow this train of thought through to an actual conversation, no one would ever be able to tell who was refering to whom. I think that this goes to show us that drugs and pragmatics clearly do not mix.
So, I was watching an episode of Arrested Development today, and this dialogue came up that I couldn't pass by for a blog post.
The situation: the mother is seducing the warden of the prison, and the son with whom she is talking can't accept the fact that she would do such a thing.
Mother- I'm trying to seduce him!
Son - Who's the I in that sentence?
Mother - Me!
I found it rather funny that his own inability to view her as doing that inabled him to understand that the I was the speaker, as it normally is.
On the test yesterday we were given some food items with GOE ratings and the category BREAKFAST. I remember one of the items being green beans. Now to some people grean beans is not a breakfast food. However, I know I've eaten them for breakfast before for lack of food in my pantry (as sad as that is). So in a way I can say that yes it could be a breakfast food, at least on that day. I think the beans received a GOE of 7, which I thought was a little harsh because some people might give them a higher number. I say this mostly to reiterate how subjective I think the GOEs are.
Lexical deals with the meaning(s) associated with a word? Ex: "dog" is a canine creature. Grammatical deals more with the meanings of words with relation to the rest of the words surrounding it? Ex: "The boy took the chilled milk out of the blazing inferno." This doesn't make sense; there's semantic clash. Is this an example of grammatical semantics?
Having just touched on adjectives, I thought it might be interesting to look at a few other examples that are uncommon, though possible in English.
We discussed the two regular placements:
- attributive: adj noun - a black bear
- predicative: noun is adj - the bear is black
I thought of a couple examples that didn't really fit this, where it was - noun adj. So, I looked it up and found that some call it post-positve adjectives, whatever, we all know that names vary practically from day to day and person to person. Here are some examples that I found to be interesting:
heir apparant
Windows Vista
iPod Nano
times past
Any others come to mind?
So, I know it's been a few weeks since we've talked about idioms and such, but I can't help pass up a good example that I just stumble upon in life. So, I was at the movies when, during one of the previews someone said 'I'm clean as a fiddle' - clearly this struck me as odd, or rather incorrect. I kind of brushed it off until during the movie itself, one of the characters said 'I'm fit as a fucking fiddle!'. Saying sorry now for the language btw - nice alliteration though, you must admit.
So, I began thinking about it, and decided idiom because you can't change anything for synonyms and still keep it's meaning, can't refer back to it anaphorically, nor can fiddle be used for more than one function at a time.
Have you all recently ran into any good examples of idioms/metaphors/whatnot being used incorrectly?
