telegraphese (was RE: Eggcorn?? Deepseeded)

Clai Rice cxr1086 at LOUISIANA.EDU
Fri Apr 27 19:55:13 UTC 2007


In connection with work on fixed phrases I looked at research on
telegraphese or newspaper headline language, and there is not much out
there. Child language was described for many years as telegraphese, and
some forms of aphasia result in telegraph-style structures, so lots of
research turns up on searches, but almost none of it is related to
normal adult usage. There are several studies of things like metaphor
usage and ambiguity in headline language, but descriptive work still
needs to be done. If anyone knows of anything beyond these five, I'd
appreciate the leads.

Livia Tonelli (1995): Patterns of ellipsis in telegraphese: A study of
six languages. Folia Linguistica 24: 297-316.

Tesak, Jürgen & Jussi Niemi (1997): Telegraphese and agrammatism: A
cross-linguistic study.
Aphasiology 11: 145-155.

Tesak, Jürgen, Jussi Niemi & Päivi Koivuselkä-Sallinen (1992):
Telegraphese and ellipsis in
German and Finnish: A comparison. In: C. Mair & M. Markus (eds.), New
Departures in Contrastive Linguistics. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur
Kulturwissenschaft, Anglistische Reihe Band 5. Innsbruck. Pp. 75-83.

Barton, Ellen. The Grammar of Telegraphic Structures. JEngL 26.1 (1988),
37-67.

Fitzpatrick, Eileen, Joan Bachenko and Don Hindle. The Status of
Telegraphic
Sublanguages. R. Grishman and R. Kittredge, eds., Analyzing Language in
Restricted
Domains: Sublanguage Description and Processing. 39-51. 1986.

Clai Rice

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dennis R. Preston [mailto:preston at MSU.EDU]
> Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 9:24 AM
> Subject: Re: Eggcorn?? Deepseeded
>
>
> Well, let's get some students on it. Gaps in sentences are
> OK; gaps in research are crummy.
>
> dInIs
>
> >---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >-----------------------
> >Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> >Subject:      Re: Eggcorn??  Deepseeded
> >-------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> >--------
> >
> >On Apr 26, 2007, at 5:02 AM, Dennis Preston wrote:
> >
> >>  While we are egg-corning, here's another example of
> "shoe-in" from
> >> one of those pesky stock "offers" I get so frequently; this has
> >> already been discussed on the Language Log I believe.
> >
> >>  This one is shoe in to Double by end of week
> >>  Huge Volume spike, many people are already in the know
> >
> >yes.  credit to Mark Liberman on the ecdb:
> >
> >    http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/47/shoe/
> >
> >(note: the next entry after "deep-seeded".)
> >
> >>  On another front, I don't now if this is non-native or
> telegraphic
> >> style. For some reason the absence of "a" before "shoe-in"
> seems the
> >> former but I'm happy with no "the" before "end" and "week" in the
> >> latter. Is there a difference in the loss of definites and
> >> indefinites in what we used to call telegraphic writing (and is
> >> doubtless now extended to lots of text-messaging styles)?
> >
> >there are certainly differences, and omissibility also
> varies according
> >to context, but i don't know if these factors have been described.
> >
> >arnold
> >
> >------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
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>
> Dennis R. Preston
> University Distinguished Professor
> Department of English
> Morrill Hall 15-C
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing, MI 48824-1036 USA
> Office: (517) 353-4736
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>

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