I’m a big fan of the “Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics” series, for example. “Tense” and “Aspect” were essential for me as an undergraduate, and “Grammaticalisation” and “Linguistic Typology and Universals” have both been favourites of mine in grad school. However, not all books from this series are equally appealing to me: “Semantic Theory” was a bit of a let down, because it really wasn’t what I was looking for. The book on “Logic in Linguistics” was also too introductory for me. Good thing I borrowed them from the library, otherwise I’d be quite mad at myself for buying a book that I didn’t really find useful. Amazon just shows the few first pages and the table of contents: based on that alone, I almost bought “Pragmatics and Grammar” but eventually gave up when I saw it in a trip overseas. Naturally, I can’t go abroad every time I feel like expanding my library, so I needed some help.

I recently noticed that all books from this series, however, are partially available on Google Books. I can read a few pages and see what the book is really all about. Great! Apparently, there are plenty of other series partially available on Google Books as well: among them you can find the “Cambridge Studies in Linguistics“, the “Cambridge Language Surveys”, the “Cambridge Syntax Guides“, and – before you think Cambridge sponsored this post – you can also browse Oxford’s “Studies in the Evolution of Language“, Oxford’s “Studies in Theoretical Linguistics“, the “Explorations in Linguistic Typology” (that’s also Oxford), those comprehensive Blackwell Handbooks on a variety of topics, and a bunch of random books from other publishers.

I love the age I live in!

At first, I thought it was a classic case of the now pervasive Crash Blossoms in journalism. This is, as you can imagine, not unheard of (I think this applies both to misleading headlines and perverted hippies alike). The Associated Press reported last month that McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers: If you first thought Ronald McDonald incinerated antiquities, this is not your fault. Sometimes it’s even harder to understand what kind of message they’re trying to convey. Bad mental images are not uncommon if you try to figure out what crash blossoms are in a headline that reads Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms, and if you’re told French left torn in two in row over EU constitution, it’s only natural to think that a violent Europhile tore some poor French nationalist apart in a fight (actually, this on is quite tricky: this is about the French left – as in politics – being defeated two times consecutively). The way our brains try to parse these sentences is to blame here: they’re a very curious kind of Garden-Path Sentences.

The really amusing bit, however, is that no one else seems to be confused by that headline from CNN. I reckon this has got something to do with the fact that I was a sleep-deprived foreigner at the moment I read it (I’m still a foreigner, don’t get me wrong, but I took a nap soon afterwards), and my imagination is probably way too fertile.

A really funny (and rather creepy) example comes from Ken Batisda. He first says the other host couldn’t show up tonight and promptly begins to tell the news without making any sort of pause. Because of his heavy use of pronouns, we’re led to believe he’s talking about the other host until the name of the actual victim is mentioned:

For a good 2 or 3 seconds, it’s only natural to believe that the co-host is the one that died a horrible death. And, this happened on both sides of the Atlantic, even though no pronouns were mistreated on the BBC:

While we’re on this topic, let’s talk about ambiguity in general on the news. If failing to resolve ambiguous interpretations may have hilarious results, it’s fair to point out that making explicit all underlying possibilities often has some comical value as well:

I thought it was clear that she was talking about the fruits, but I’m glad she decided to make it explicit to all viewers that she was not talking about breasts. Good to know

The joke itself is very simple (and rather dumb, I admit), and here’s Kanye failing to get it:

Though explaining a joke usually ruins it, I think this may be an exception. The joke plays with the fact that the contrast between /t/ and /d/ and English does not depend solely on voicing. On top of that, in many different dialects, voiceless consonants also tend to be aspirated, though that doesn’t happen to voiced consonants. “Bike”, for instance, sounds like [baɪk] in these dialects, whereas “Pike” sounds like [p^haɪk]. Nice, huh? But, there are rules to this aspiration and, failing to notice that often leads to hilarious results.

At the beginning of a syllable, a voiceless plosive is not aspirated when it follows an /s/. What does that mean? It means that, even though “bike” is pronounced [baɪk], and “pike” sounds like [p^haɪk], “spike” becomes [spaɪk]. So, what does that have to do with gay fish?

Well, when you say [fɪʃ.stɪks] the /s/ preceding the /t/ blocks the aspiration, so to speak. But, what if, in rapid speech, you drop the /s/? You end up having [fɪʃ.tɪk]… and there’s a problem: how should one interpret our dear alveolar plosive? Both /t/ and /d/ are alveolar plosives, after all, and the listener must make a choice. If you pay close attention the pronunciation of the TV host in the sample above, the plosive is always voiced, thus producing [fɪʃ.dɪks] (which is exactly what he wants to say, “fish dicks”). But, Kanye, being led on by the context, believes the TV host is just pronouncing the /t/ without the aspiration because of the preceding consonant. Though the non sequitur should correct his interpretation, it just doesn’t happen… making the joke all the more hilarious. Anyway, while we’re at it:

I just love the fact that Kanye butchered a tune by Daft Punk that I didn’t like and managed to make something cool out of it. Besides, the video has got a couple of French producers and an American rapper pretending to be Japanese — I think that grants them a few bonus points for cultural diversity. But, I can’t understand why they chose to write everything in katakana. Has it got something to do with how manga is written?