A linguist walks into a bar

allthingslinguistic:

blood-and-vitriol:

notallwugs:

Two scientists walk into a bar:

“I’ll have an H2O.”

“I’ll have an H2O, too.”

The bartender gives them both water because he is able to distinguish the boundary tones that dictate the grammatical function of homonyms in coda position as well as pragmatic context.

Q. Two linguists walk into a bar. Which was the specialist in contextually-indicated deixis and anaphoric reference resolution strategies?

A. The other one.

A linguistics professor walks into a bar and asks for a martini.

“Don’t you mean a martinus?” asks the bartender, who has heard this joke before.

“No,” says the linguist. “When a word is borrowed into another language it takes on the inflectional patterns of the target language, rather than the source language.”