Syntax and Internet Memes: Doggo and the Internal Structure of the English VP
Past Event
Thursday, October 11, 2018 7:30 PM EDT
Merten Hall, 3300
Please join us for our next Linguistics Colloquium speaker, Prof. Jeffrey Punske from Southern Illinois University Carbondale!
Language games (also called ‘ludlings’ (Laycock 1969, 1972)) and other instances of playful language provide insights into the internal structure of languages that may be less apparent in regular use (see: Sapir 1915 through Vaux 2011; among others). Much of this work focuses on phonology and morphology, with considerably less attention given to examples of playful syntax (though see Pullum (2005) for discussion of Yoda syntax). In this talk, we provide a sketch of an analysis of an internet-based language-game, known as Doggo. We show that the properties of the Doggo language game illustrate the underlying syntactic structure of English—such as providing evidence for Hale & Keyser’s general approach to a bifurcated verb. We also provide suggestions for future research into internet language games.
Jeffrey Punske is an Assistant Professor at Southern Illinois University with previous employment at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania and Oklahoma University. He earned his PhD in 2012 from the University of Arizona. His research focuses broadly on issues of morphosyntax and lexical semantics from a Distributed Morphology perspective and on the development of pedagogy for Linguistics instruction. He has been published in journals such as the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics Analysis & Lingua.He has a forthcoming co-edited volume from Oxford University Press on the use of constructed languages for Linguistics pedagogy.
