"Two linguists walk into an x-bar and exit a bunkhouse on a certain Bar-X ranch." Linguistics blogging is reaching some kind of critical mass or maybe the hundredth Nim Chimpsky. Languagehat has pointed us towards the new blog yclept the X-Bar. The entry that caught his eye discussed the possible ambiguity of the sentence: "The man killed the boy mercilessly with the knife." Viz., is it the man or the boy who's doing the knifing? My Sonoman idiolect admits only the meaning that the man killed the boy. (Now, who was it—Jim McCawley perhaps?—who mocked the violence of the typical (in this case Edward Sapir) linguist's sample sentence, "the farmer killed the duckling"?) And, why don't linguists say bar-x instead of x-bar? (We'll leave aside that they quickly replaced the macron with a prime sign in the interests of pre-DTP typographical constraints. Me, I always wanted to pronounce it not-x theory.
[Addendum 10/02/03: Rosanne (at the X-Bar) has modified her entry. The ambiguity is whether the man or the boy has the knife.]
Posted by jim at October 2, 2003 12:31 PM | TrackBackI assume linguists say "x bar" because that's what mathematicians say (we can have "x bar", "x hat" and "x prime" - all at the same time if necessary - but when switching to calligraphic letters it's always "script A" and "curly f"). And in Ingleesh, that's what everyone says - does anyone say "acute e" or "umlaut a"?
Posted by: des on October 3, 2003 01:43 AMI guess I wanted to call these things diacritic-letter because my old manual typewriter had a dead key for umlauts, accents, etc., and so the diacritic was typed first. Besides which I grew up on a ranch in California, and those generativist x-bars always looked like plain ol' bar-x cattle brands to me.
Posted by: jim on October 3, 2003 06:56 AM"Not X" was my first thought, since i had studied a little bit of logic before but that would leave me without the start of the joke...