telegraphese (was RE: Eggcorn?? Deepseeded)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Apr 27, 2007, at 12:55 PM, Clai Rice wrote:

> 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.

well, a classic:

Ferguson, Charles A.  1982.  Simplified registers and linguistic
theory.  Obler & Menn, 49-66.

Obler, Loraine K. & Lise Menn (eds.).  1982.  Exceptional language
and linguistics.  NY: Academic Press.

i'm away from my library and don't recall whether Doug Biber has much
detail in his books, but there are the 1988 book Variation Across
Speech and Writing and the 1995 Dimensions of Register Variation to
check out.

some specific phenomena have modest literatures of their own: copula
omission, object omission, subject omission, "reduced" questions, in
particular.

arnold

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