Page 33 - The Language of Humour

20 ‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’
Syntax

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim
Man Eating Piranha Mistakenly Sold as Pet Fish
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

Ambiguities often occur in headlines because they are abbreviated and
occur before the context. Although such puns are often deliberately used
to catch attention, they are sometimes unintentional. These examples are
not simply a case of individual words having double meanings, but the
fact that there are two possible ways to group the words in relation to
each other. The ambiguity is easily resolved by rephrasing. It’s a dog-
bite victim that the squad helped; a man-eating type of piranha was
sold; a defendant in a shooting case is going to be tried.
Syntax refers to the way that meaning is created by the structure of
words in a sentence. The way phrases are structured and the way
clauses are structured are looked at in turn. If you are not familiar with
the terms for analysis of phrase and clause structure—shown by letters
above the words—concentrate on the rephrasing of the sentences,
shown in round brackets.
The structure of phrases works in this way: each phrase must have a
headword (h), with the option of modifiers (m) added before or after
it.

The surface structure may look the same: there are headwords and
modifiers, but there can be two interpretations of the deep structure, i.e.
which modifier goes with which headword:

We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container.
(We will sell gasoline in a glass container to anyone./We will
sell gasoline to anyone who is in a glass container.)

Two possible interpretations of phrase structure can cause ambiguities
in the way that headlines, notices etc. are read. These are examples of
unintentional humour: ‘For sale: Mixing bowl set designed to please a
cook with round bottom for efficient beating.’
You can show, by phrase structure analysis and labelling, which
headword you understand the modifier to be attached to. Or you can
simply rephrase the sentence to show how the parts are related.