Great Linguistics Movies and Their Famous Lines—Part II
The SpecGram Editorial Board
It’s surprising how many of today’s youth are unfamiliar with the Classics of Linguistic Film. And while these fickle youth are unlikely to actually take the time to watch—much less have the cultural sophistication necessary to appreciate—these films, perhaps they will gain something from acquainting themselves with their most important and oft-repeated lines.
Part I of the collection was published in the last issue.
“Data? We ain’t got no data! We don’t need no data! I don’t have to show you any stinking data!”
—The Theory of the Sintaxis Madre
“E.T. Phone Ology.”
—E.T. the Extrametrical
“A long time ago in an urheimat far, far away....”
—* Wars
“My Mama always said, life was like the relationship between a waveform and a spectrogram; you never know what you’re gonna get.”
—Formant Gump
“We are the knights who say
!”
—Monty SpecGram and the Holy Phoneme
“Be going ahead, make my deixis.”
—Sudden Aspect
“What is best in life?”
“To crush your enemies, see them defunded before you, and to hear the rationalizations of their apologists.”
—Conan the Statistician
“Rose-friggin’-bud.”
—Citizinfix Kane
“Nobody backs Karen R. into a corner.”
—Sloppy Chatting
“Luke, I am your Doktorvater.”
—Tenure Wars: The Committee Strikes Back
“Open the odd spellings books, please, Halle.”
—1968: An SPE Odyssey
“Keep your vowels close, and your future tenses closer.”
—The /ˈgɔdˌfʌðɨr/ Part II
“After all, tomorrow you can publish a completely different analysis.”
—Gone with the Dissertation
“Enamored of the knell of nasals in the morning.”
—Apocryphal Quips Now
“I see dead languages.”
—The Sixth Word Sense
“I’ll produce what she’s producing!”
—When Labial Met Dental
“You were only meant to convert the TRADOS files off!”
—The Italian Translation Job
“We’re gonna need a bigger phoneme inventory!”
—Mouths
“I’m taking a secondary stress job driving trucks full of nitroglycerin across rickety bridges in South America!”
—Alveolar and the Chipmunks Meet the Wordwolf
“I’ll be backed!”
—The Vowelinator
“Display it, Sam. The fundamental frequencies apply as time goes by.”
—Spectrobanka
“Take a good look at ’em, Raymond, look at ’em, and while you’re looking, listen. This is me, Marco, talking. 52 tableaux and me are telling you... you know what we’re telling you? It’s over! The constraints, the beautifully conditioned constraints are smashed. They’re smashed as of now because we say so, because we say they are to be smashed. We’re busting up the hierarchies, we’re tearing out all the sympathy flowers.”
—The Manchu GEN Candidate
“Do or do not. There is no verb raising.”
—The IP Strikes Back
“How’d it get burred? How’d it get burred? How’d it get burred?!?”
—The Flicked /r/ Man
“Mrs. Vowelinson, you’re trying to reduce me. Aren’t you?”
—The Gradation
“Anyone could become obsessed with the past tense with a background like that!”
—Verbtigo
“All right, but apart from the phoneme inventories, the role marking systems, the basic sentence structures, the evidential systems, the intonation patterns, the tone marking, and the corpora, what have the field linguists ever done for us?”
—Life of Brian the Syntactician
“I feel the need—the need to read!”
—Top Gum
“I have often been forced to rely upon the grammars of strangers.”
—A Streetcar Named Typology
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not intransitive anymore.”
—The Wizard of Verbz
