Saturday, March 12, 2011

Omission of determiners + ambiguity

As a result of the omission of determiners, ambiguity is present.


Qaddafi wrestles giant bear?
Several readers have sent me links to a recent headline: Anthony Shadid, "Qaddafi Forces Bear Down on Strategic Town as Rebels Flee", NYT 3/10/2011.




The obligatory screen shot is here.

As everyone observes, this is the mildest kind of crash blossom.  But Federico Escobar asks "Who would've guessed Qaddafi had hidden talents as a bear wrestler?" And Rick Rubenstein notes "I'm not sure exactly how you force a bear down, but I'm sure it make *me* flee."

This is not the first ursine crash blossom, and I'm sure it won't be the last:



Update — There are no bears in Jennifer Steinhauer, "Cuts to Head Start Show Challenge of Fiscal Restraint", NYT 3/10/2011. But David Walker writes "Cuts to Head? What? Who got cuts to their head? Then “Start Show” tripped me up, so I had to start over."



When you start with a language where most nouns can be verbed and vice versa — especially the shorter ones — and you add the constraints of headlinese, it's surprising that any headlines *aren't* crash blossoms.


Source: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3022

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