The Fun of Language and the Language of Fun

How do we define a noun as a part of speech (as opposed to a verb or an adjectives)? One superficially attractive way, often used at schools, is to say that, roughly, nouns describe, or refer to, objects, whereas verbs describe actions and adjectives, properties. And indeed, for prototypical nouns, this would be true. Table, [...]

Lewis Carroll, or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a mathematician, a logician and a deacon. His knowledge of logic and amazing sensitivity to properties of natural language make his works full of jokes and passages that are based on various linguistic phenomena. As a semanticist, I can say for sure that almost any topic in semantics [...]

In the previous post, we have discussed the communication of read ants. Let us now turn to honeybees, whose communication system is very famous. Here, we know not only what kind of information foraging bees can provide but also how the information is encoded. The first person to decode the so-called bee dance was Karl [...]

The so-called bee dance constitutes the most well-known example of an intricate communication system used by insects. By repeating movements of certain kinds, bees succeed to transmit information about the source of food (distance + direction), as well as its quality. But today I’d like to talk about a less well-known, but apparently no less [...]

In the previous post we started talking about jokes and riddles that are based on different types of modality. We introduced two kids of modality – deontic and epistemic. Additional two types which, too, have found their realization in jokes are dynamic and logical modality. Consider the following joke, one that plays with different types [...]

Some jokes and riddles play with the range of interpretations available to modals. These are auxiliary verbs expressing necessity and possibility, such as can, may and must. This post is devoted to the kinds of necessity and possibility that modals can express, and to jokes that are based on the resulting ambiguity and/or indeterminacy. Epistemic [...]

We talked about the significance of the ability to lie in one of the previous posts. I am now reading the book “Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind” by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin, and the authors introduce several examples of deception in the world of apes. I’d like to share these stories [...]

Have you noticed that people sometimes laugh when they hear a language that is closely related to their own mother tongue? What do they find so funny about this related language? Speakers of the latter shouldn’t feel offended. It is not their mother tongue per se that is judged as funny; it is the relation [...]

In numerous systems of moral values that we are familiar with, a lie is treated as a bad thing. Is there anything we can say in its defence? As a matter of fact, there is, if we consider a lie from a cognitive (rather than moral) perspective. The ability to lie comes together with very [...]

Structural, or syntactic, ambiguity has to do with the syntactic structure of a sentence. Roughly, this is a phenomenon whereby what sounds like the same sentence can be constructed in two or more different ways. The constituents can be combined in a different order, rendering ultimately what looks like the same result. But despite the [...]