Srs bzns linguistics 2: Snowclone boogaloo
Hello from snowy Berlin!
It snowed here last week, and, surprisingly, it’s stayed cold enough that it didn’t all disappear in a few days. The snowy view from my window gave me the inspiration for the topic of this newsletter: the snowclone.
But first, the news
I’ve ordered proof copies of a revised and hopefully error-free version of Filling Your Worlds. Kickstarter backers will have seen the photos of how many pages I needed to make corrections on (too many). The ebook version is still in the future, and I plan to send out an updated PDF version to backers before then.
Snowclones
In Attack of the Snowclones (open access), Hartmann and Ungerer use a Construction Grammar analytical framework to describe what snowclones are and how they work and, in so doing, argue that they’re worthy of studying as a linguistic feature.
The term originated from a discussion on Language Log in 2004, and there’s a tag where you can find many more posts about them. Geoff Pullum asked readers to name the type of construction like this one: “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z,” and Glen Whitman offered up “snowclone” in his blog post. Pullum characterized them as “lazy journalists’ cliches.”
Arnold Zwicky, another writer at Language Log, proposed in 2006 that the process of snowclone development has four stages: i) people want to express something, so they say it in a normal way. He uses “you may not like it, but other people do” as the base; ii) someone comes up with a pithy, memorable way of saying it, and it becomes popular. (“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”); iii) people then allude to it and make substitutions; and iv) it becomes a type of semi-fixed expression with open slots (One man’s X is another man’s Y).
This type of change from specific to general happens a lot in linguistics, but I’m not going to go into it in detail here, but if you’re interested, you can read about grammaticalization on Wikipedia. Things can also change from general to specific, of course, like how in Old English deor meant simply an animal, and now a deer is a specific animal. (Cognate with German Tier, Norwegian/Danish dyr, and Swedish djur, all meaning ‘animal.’)
Hartmann and Ungerer argue that there are three features of snowclones that set them apart from other fixed and semi-fixed phrases like proverbs:
There is a lexically fixed source that is culturally salient enough that people can recognize it. They use the construction X is the new Y as one of their case studies, and it can be traced, probably, to fashion slogans of the 1970s. Other sources are movies/TV (“I’m a doctor, Jim, not an X”) and advertising (“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”)
The slots have to be productive. In linguistics, productivity basically means that a structure is actively used by language users to produce new utterances. In a snowclone, you find that there is a fixed segment (“is the new”) and one or two variable segments, and these variable segments can be used to create new phrases.
They have distinctive linguistic characteristics, often breaking norms, that highlight linguistic creativity and make the pattern memorable.
The next section of the paper is a lot of statistics about two snowclones to support their argument: the mother of all X and X is the new Y. They chose these because they came up frequently in the text corpora they looked at, which means that people actively use them (they’re productive). They found that in the mother of all X, X is frequently something negative or unpleasant (hangovers, cock-ups, traffic jams). X is the new Y is more complicated, because there are two slots, and they interact with each other. For example, if X is something abstract, Y is very likely to also be something abstract.
They address, briefly, whether memes are a type of snowclone and conclude that while memes share some, or indeed all, characteristics of snowclones, it’s better to analyze memes as a separate, multimodal entity, because memes usually also contain images.
This was a fun paper to read, even if the stats parts went mostly over my head. If you want to read all the statistics or just look at the tables and graphs, click through. It’s perhaps a bit dense, but they have examples.
Application to writing
One thing that snowclones require, which Hartmann and Ungerer mention, is a functional knowledge of culture, popular and otherwise, because these constructions stem from the culture. Whether it’s playing on Shakespeare (“an X by any other name”) or last year’s summer blockbuster, when someone uses a semi-fixed phrase, they’re drawing on all the cultural baggage that comes with it. If someone doesn’t recognize the source, they’ll have difficulty understanding it fully.
So, maybe you have a character who is new in a setting and doesn’t get the references. Or maybe they try to do one and get it wrong.
Until next time!
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