Like I'm sure sex is cool and all but have you ever thought about the relationships between different word classes

Some LMK characters in my style with my OC Pebble

if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.

this sentence copied and pasted into Word takes up more than one page single-spaced. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those 1800 pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.

incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?

Okay, but hear me out-

Are we really starting to forget this man?

Getting back into lmk and of course the first thing i do is draw. The Guy 💜💚

I think about the implications of Syntax being a human turned spider demon forever, ok ?

Hey mr sir I was wondering if you had any idea how to understand syntax. I am in a class and I am SUFFERING and the only resources I was given was the teachers notes. And they don't make sense. I am so close to failing and no one knows what the hell they're doing (not even the instructor)

Syntax is analysis. Always remember that. It is, at best, tangentially related to language. It is a representation of a theory (and there are multiple such theories) about why the words in a language are arranged in the order they are in order to produce a meaning. It is an attempt. It's not necessarily true. It is not a representation of something real. It is a representation of something that IF it were real, wouldn't that be cool? It doesn't actually say anything about language.

The important thing to remember about studying syntax at the university level is that you are not studying syntax: You are studying a specific theory of syntax. Your job is to learn that theory and how it works. You are NOT learning how a language works: You're learning how that theory works. It doesn't matter if anything you're doing makes linguistic sense: It matters if it makes sense within the context of the theory. That's it.

I say this because based on the way you've worded your question, it's pretty clear that this is a point you've missed. If you hadn't, you wouldn't be saying "I was wondering if you had any idea how to understand syntax", you'd be saying "I was wondering if you had any idea how to understand XXX theory of syntax". Because that is what you are doing.

If you are studying an older X-bar theory of syntax (for example, Principles and Parameters, or Government and Binding), I can help you with that. If you're studying a modern generative theory like the Minimalist Program, I can't help you with that, as I never learned it. I also can't really help with Head Phrase Structure Grammar or Construction Grammar, because I never studied it; I just have some exposure to it. I do understand Relational Grammar, because I had to learn it to go through some older Austronesian papers, but I find it unlikely that you'd be learning RG, as it's been mostly abandoned.

If it helps you, though, everything you're learning is, to put this in the most controversial way possible, the equivalent of learning astrological star charts. It's like, you tell your friend, "Dude, I went to work today, and my coworker was sick, so I had to cover her bathroom shift, but as a thank you my boss said I could have Friday off!" and your friend is like, "And that makes total sense, because Virgo is in ascension, and the moon is in its third phase, with Libra in retrograde!" and you're like, "Uhhhh..." *headpat* In linguistics, that's, "Wow, in Finnish most indefinite objects take the partitive, but you can also have a partitive subject with a paucal reading!", and then, "That's probably because of object to subject raising required in order to check features generated in D-structure when…" etc. Thus, if you think of it like some sort of game, it might help to put it in its proper context.

If you do have some transformational grammar questions, though, I'm happy to try to help explain.

Gretchen: I think the best-known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in English is a certain little creature with eight legs. Lauren: The octopus. Gretchen: The octopus. Lauren: Which I just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis. Gretchen: I admit that I have also done this. If you were gonna pluralise “octopus” as if it’s English, it would just be “octopuses.” It’s very easy. But there’s a fairly long-standing tradition in English of when a word is borrowed from Latin to make the plural the actual Latin thing. Because, historically, many English speakers did learn Latin, and so you want to show off your education by using the Latin form even though it’s in English. So, if you’re going to pretend that “octopus” is Latin, then you wanna say, “octopi.” However, there is yet a third complication, which is that “octopus,” in fact, is actually Greek – “octo” meaning “eight” and “pus” meaning “feet. So, Greek does not make these plural by adding I to it. In that case, there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious, to be honest, plural. Lauren: Is there where you say, “octopodes”? Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, “octopodes.” But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /aktaˈpodiz/. Lauren: You’ve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology, syntax, and words. 

First time drawing syntax :^]

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Extras ✨

silly syntax doodle :]

cool spider lego man😱

SYNT@X🔋🕷️🧪

Request: trans rights are human rights

[ID: Syntax tree for the sentence "trans rights are human rights".]