Noncompositional

I participate in a weekly syntax reading group (though my participation is decidedly less frequently than weekly). This semester our desired topics all ended up starting with the letter A: adverbials, argument structure, adjuncts. After several weeks of readings, we were reaching a point where we felt satisfied with our coverage of material, and were thinking about what to read for the next meeting. Someone suggested we should move on to the Bs, which immediately brought up [binding](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_%28linguistics%29), and so we moved on to the Cs (control? case?). Then someone suggested that we instead just go for the Zs, at which point the only possible suggestion was [zeugma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma).

We then got sidetracked into a little discussion of exactly what zeugma was, and an example was brought up that was sited at a campus health facility. It went something like

> Please do not place or take away anything in this box

Nice. This might actually be a good argument for undergraduate syntax students for seeing exactly why the structure of this sentence is…well, strange. And of course also an example of the sort of thing that, while unexpected if you’re a syntactician, is basically understandable (maybe we can find out how long the sign has been there, and how often its message is misunderstood).

The next step is, as someone suggested at the meeting, to call of the facility and say, “I’d like to report a very serious case of zeugma.”

[Yes, yes, this is not a typical case of “zeugma” as (I think) most linguists understand it; there isn’t any lexical ambiguity with both meanings realized by different conjuncts, nor have two incompatible valences of a single verb been combined into a single clause. But I think we can expand our definitions a bit, can we not?]

Today I came across a group on [Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/) called _You’re a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?_ Funny, yes, though I suppose there’s a tradition to have long, multi-utterance Facebook group names. But what had be chuckling for a while was the description of the group:

> Being a linguist is not about speaking lots of languages!! It’s about coming up with theories based on data that you read about in someone else’s paper and that probably don’t account for any variation or possibly anything at all…or something…

Genius.