#syntactic analysis

[howdoesone]

How does one describe the process of compounding in morphology?

Compounding is a morphological process by which two or more individual words are combined to create a new word with its own distinct meaning. This process is used in many languages around the world, and it is an important aspect of word formation in morphology. In this article, we will describe the process of compounding in morphology, including its types, formation, and examples. Continue…

[dickggansey]

i love languages bvut im such a perfectionist that i don't even dare to learn more than one at once bc i wont stop until i am completely fluent and i KNOW i would let it consume me. so i can't learn italian until i am completely fluent in japanese :) you guys have no idea how annoying i am about languages. at school i was the best at syntactic analysis in spanish AND english. and i was sooooooo annoying about it. so now i'll be adding a new language to the list

[proto-language]

i love getting to make leetol pictures for my dissertation

[englishlessonsclass]

Syntactic Analysis | Indirect object - Adjunct

 The Indirect Object is another Grammatical Function; it is another type of verbal complement. The typical role associated with ...

#English #lessons #collegestudents #university #Classof2022

[coldpenguintaco]

Syntactic Foam Market is Expected to Witness Significant Growth of US$ 169 Million by 2025, MarketsandMarkets™ Study

Syntactic foam is a type of composite material made of small hollow particles dispersed in a matrix material. It is a lightweight, strong, and stiff material used in a variety of industries, including aerospace, marine, automotive, and construction. Syntactic foam can be used to manufacture parts for military, space, and commercial applications. It is used for flotation, buoyancy, and insulation…

[mad-scientist-enthusiast]

Yor Forger- Character Analysis

I think Yor is such a fascinating character. For one, she has a very unique relationship with femininity. Growing up, Yor had to be "the strong one" and look after her brother in the absence of their parents, and this led her to becoming an assassin so she could provide for him. But even without the Garden, Yor has always been physically strong, blunt, and brutal. Her upbringing didn't allow for the same societal socialization as most girls her age had, which also plays a role here. Despite this, Yor makes a great effort to present as formal and as feminine as possible. And to her credit, she does hit all the hallmarks there. She dresses the right way, has a formal manner of speaking, works in a stereotypically feminine occupation as her day job, and goes out with her coworkers when invited; yet her coworkers, and presumably others still seem to know there is something inherently different about her.

In any other setting, this might be okay—an odd coworker is nothing to worry about—but SPY x FAMILY takes place during the Cold War. People are willing to turn even neighbors in to the Secret Police on just mere suspicion, and that's not even including those who make false reports just because they don't like someone. Yor's survival (or at least freedom) relies on her ability to perform femininity according to the standard, but even when she does everything right, she's still alienated from her peers. A lot of this has to do with language, as she tends to only be aware of syntactic and basic semantic context of words and phrases, instead of the pragmatic context used in Ostania. This was likely also a result of her upbringing. She's not only living a double life as an assassin, but also having to perform this femininity to such an extent is another mask she has to wear. Throwing the pretend marriage into the equation, you get an unrealistic amount of masks to juggle all at once.

Although I'd like to think she's able to take a few of them off when it's just her, Loid, and Anya. Outside of Yuri, Yor has felt that her strength and brutality are things to hide and be ashamed of, so it's a pleasant surprise when her new family immediately accepts and praises her for these things. Loid doesn't think there's anything untoward about her, and typically finds Yor's strength to be quite useful (and hot). And Anya looks up to Yor, wanting to be strong like her one day. This is one of many reasons why their family works so well. So much of her life is spent feeling inadequate for things she can't control while living in fear that someone might report her to the Secret Police, and yet now, with her new family, she is treated normally and with respect. She is able to live a fantasy she never thought she would be able to have with her social difficulties. 

I mention her communication struggles as part of her separation from accepted standards of femininity because the way that women talk and their ability to be socially savvy is inherently tied to their femininity. To me this reminds me of the gender disconnect many autistic people (like myself) feel when they are unable to perform their gender roles conventionally. Even strongly masking, it can feel like theres something so deeply wrong with you that everyone else seems to pick up, but you can't for the life of you identify what. Yor wants to perform femininity, as seen by her uniform with the Garden. She very easily could've gone for something more practical or comfortable, but instead chose an outfit that is seductive and feminine. But the issue comes into play when she's presented with different social contexts. She didn't connect that wearing a seductive dress would probably be inappropriate for getting drinks with her coworkers, because she doesn't realize what is and is not appropriate in the first place. 

Overall, I think this view of her character adds so much depth to her and is way more interesting than the "female himbo dommy mommy" box that the fandom tends to stick her in, to me. (No hate btw, to each their own).

[segretecose]

maybe they put too much emphasis on grammar and syntactic analysis in the latin language world but my god would some of you need some good old sentence parsing

[i-scan-your-poems]

Would you please do a analysis of the famous "lik the bred" poem by reddit user poem_for_your_sprog?

my name is Cow, and wen its nite, or wen the moon is shiyning brite, and all the men haf gon to bed - i stay up late. i lik the bred.

"i lik the bred" is like maybe my favorite internet poem of all time! of course!

full scansion:

◡ – / ◡ – my name / is Cow, ◡ – / ◡ – and wen / its nite, ◡ – / ◡ – or wen / the moon ◡ – / ◡ – is shiy/ning brite, ◡ – / ◡ – and all / the men ◡ – / ◡ – haf gon / to bed- ◡ – / ◡ – i stay / up late. ◡ – / ◡ – i lik / the bred.

metrical form: iambic dimeter rhyme scheme: ABCB other notes: This could also be analyzed as AABB iambic tetrameter, but what I love about it is that after one long sentence, it breaks the syntactic unit in the middle of a couplet to create a surprising ending. Ink has been spilled over whether the non-standard orthography of this poem is intended to evoke archaism (as it is about an event that happened in an 18th-century historical reenactment) or the animal speaker (cf. the orthography of lolcatz memes).

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

While I agree with most of your posts

I think bringing up grammar in song writing is just kinda weird

Like as long as a song isn't as egregiously grammatically incorrect as 'I'll do what I should have did' (thank you deacon blue) it just isn't a relevant criticism?

Even the song writer you respect most probably doesn't write their songs like an essay they can lose marks for. And that's a good thing! Songs would be a lot worse if writers were worrying about these things

It's just such a bizarre thing to bring up- and unfortunately it kinda makes your other points look less valid because it comes across as weird and petty and like you'll drag Swift for anything (Plus obsessions with 'correct' grammar is just rooted in abliesm, classism and racism- so yeah not a good look)

Plus bringing up your literature degree... like you never studied poetry? Which famously plays with grammar and sentence structure? Like that's inherent to the genre and while very little of TTPD is poetic, lyrics are still most similar to poems then they are to essays or journal articles

Sorry you just really hit a nerve here cos it's just such a ridiculous thing to bring up.

Okay, yes people don't write songs like essay's. However, they often still use determinable grammar rules in art.  

You are keying into the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar rules. 

The prescriptive rules are ones that you are most likely to find first listed in dictionaries or textbooks. Descriptive grammar rules contend with the dialectal differences and slang. In either case, rules and stipulations or exceptions are noted in various linguistic analysis of the demographic's dialect. Both subgroups of grammar are consistently evolving as the use of the English language changes over time.  

Before I move on, I just want to say that I am well-aware of the deep history surrounding the debates on proper grammar. These debates, of course stem, from sociohistorical issues surrounding class, race, and ableist attitudes. You are correct. However, the academic conversation on grammar and linguistics has advanced dramatically into the subdivision of grammar-practices with respect to dialectal and cultural differences. I judge Taylor Swift's grammar as similar to my own, since she claims to be from my “neck of the woods.” Thus, I feel it is entirely appropriate for me to throw metaphorical tomatoes at her.  

 In the juncture of this difference on prescriptive and descriptive, I want to make that point that people who utilize the difference well often take prescriptive rules and bend them to fit their specific thematic point, thus the lyric forms to its set of descriptive grammar rules. These artists do it with such finesse and precision, unlike Taylor Swift, that it’s nearly awe-inspiring.  

For instance, Kendrick Lamar uses many AAVE typical syntactical structures to make his music personalized art. He won a Pulitzer for it. Take, as an example, the intro to his song “Humble” in which he writes, “Nobody pray for me / It been that day for me” (2017). This is not grammatically correct according to the prescriptive grammar rules laid out in the 1940’s. However, linguistic scholars do not operate on so strict a pendulum anymore. Notice, too, that Lamar is not actually breaking any grammatical rules, only playing with the purpose and form of his syntax, when we take into account the dialectical intention with which he uses “it been” as a poignant use of the past participle form of the verb “to be.” Thus, the simple sentence of “it is” changes into the “it been” as a subjective call first to his cultural dialect and to the thematic gesture of the song. As the phrase “it been” leaves out the helping verb “have” which would put the phrase into present progressive tense should it be present; however, it’s noticeable absence as a stiff detraction from prescriptive grammar rules, focuses Lamar’s thematic point on moving the audience to mediate on the past as it intrudes on the present time. His use of language discrepancy between prescriptive and descriptive rules focuses recognition on his dialectal culture and on his main thematic point as it hinges on making sure to notice where you’ve been in life in order to stay humble and live with authenticity. He is a masterclass on descriptive grammar being used in such a beautifully artistic way that I am damn near in tears for his music.  

Okay, moving onto to your point about poetry not being grammatically correct. You are quite wrong here, because poetry "plays" with syntax but it does not throw the rules out. Much like the example I laid out above, poetry does the same thing wherein it plays with prescriptive grammar in a thoughtful way that often ties into the moral or theme of the work. Poetry centers on a different form of syntactical methodology... yes, you are right. However, the emphasis is still on the necessity of understanding grammar structures like poetic feet, meter, rhyme scheme (etc). It's not a free-for-all. The best poets of the last 6 centuries have been some with the most linguistically precise sentence structure that I've ever read. I can give you examples, but if I do that this answer will become a million words long.  

I am, however, sorry to have struck a nerve or come-off like a know-it-all. I was only expressing my frustration that Taylor Swift is apparently one of the biggest artists in the world and she doesn't even bother to ask a friend if the meaning of her phrases gets lost in excessively languishing grammatical structures. For instance, in her song “Chloe or Sam or Marcus or Whatever” she is stacking so many phrases hinging on coordinating conjunctions that the meaning of the phrase itself loses any poignant message. She writes:

Named Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus And I just watched it happen As the decade would play us for fools And you saw my bones out with somebody new Who seemed like he would've bullied you in school And you just watched it happen (Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus).

In this stanza alone there are 6 coordinating conjunctions stacked together, interspersed with additional prepositional phrases and 2 extra relative clauses. It is the most egregious run-on sentence I have ever seen published before. I've seen better, cleaner prose in the work I've graded from High School freshmen. Not only could she have said it in less words, but the way she is writing it makes it drag on and on. The meaning gets lost, and any emotional impact is shut down because people get lost in the wordiness.

It’s a failure on her part, and it’s clear how just writing a run on sentence with no meaning is so much different than the way that someone like Lamar is masterfully arranging language to fit his purpose.  It's offensive that she gets to make a million-billion dollars off so little effort. 

Sorry, I wrote you an essay, but I am so incredibly passionate about writing. Also, I’ve been listening to Lamar a lot today because of his recent diss track, and it just reminded about how much of a lyrical genius he is. Sorry, I detoured into a rant about how cool he is too. And I need people to understand that I am not critiquing Swift because I need to dunk on someone in order to bolster my own sense of self-worth. I just want better mainstream art, and I want people to have better, stronger art with which to engage.  

I did not mean to hurt your feelings.  You are quite right that obsession with "proper" grammar is bullshit; however, I am not looking for some old fashioned "proper" nonsense. I want people to write like Lamar, with intelligence and passion while he bends the notions of grammar, not like Taylor Swift with obvious run-on obfuscated and stupid phrases.

edit: Also, good writers do actually worry about grammar. It has to do with illocutionary forces behind the phrases. The best among us knows the language inside and out, and that is why they are the best writers.

Edit 2: Also, I've been thinking about this, but what do you think literary and poetry critics do? You say it's bizarre to critique Taylor Swift’s poor grasp of the English language? Of course, I'm critiquing that... she's the one who calls herself a writer. I don't go around checking everyone's grammar, but if you call yourself a "good" writer and a poet, obviously expect people to analyze the words on the page.

[max1461]

A feature I don't like that is present to varying degrees in textbooks in basically every field besides pure math is that they don't feel very "skeptical". A math book doesn't just claim things, it also includes proofs, i.e. it tells you how we know that those things are true. My experience with textbooks in e.g. biology is that they don't even attempt this; they just assert shit about how the cell works or whatever. I really don't like this. Obviously it would be impossible to convince the reader of your claims in a biology text the same way a math text can, but I'd appreciate if these books at least gave me some direction in looking into the evidence for the claim.

Actually, linguistics books are pretty good about this too. I'll give credit to the Chomskyans and add that generative syntax books tend to do this especially well. I think this is because the basic methodological tool of generative syntax is the native speaker grammaticality judgement, and (unfortunate as it may be) a large proportion of generativist work has been on English. The upshot is that if you're a native speaker of English and you read a syntax claim, you can just test out a couple example sentences yourself to see if it holds up. Even when the language under discussion isn't English, it's convention to include example sentences from the object language which illustrate the analysis. The result is that you get to see the exact data, or at least illustrative examples of the data, that the given syntactic hypothesis is trying to model. So you know roughly how that hypothesis was arrived at, you know why somebody would think that.

My problem reading econ texts and even physics text in the past has been that they posit all these abstractions, they posit things like "real GDP" or "force" or whatever, and they don't do a good job of grounding these things concretely—that is to say, framing them in terms of things I have immediate access to, like my reasoning faculties or my powers of observation. I just have to take their word that there's a thing called "force" and it obeys this law, and what is it exactly? Don't worry about that.

Note that I don't have this problem with "mass" because the concept of a scale (like an old school scale, with the lever and the two plates) is familiar to me; I can conceptualize what mass is in terms of a straightforward empirical comparison between objects that I could do, even if I have to take the book's word for e.g. the mass of a baseball or whatever. Same with size, because I know about rulers.

I think physics books could do this better, they could be more skeptical, concrete, and grounded, but they mostly aren't. I've talked before about how most people consider math very abstract, but it feels concrete to me in this sense. A mathematician can tell me exactly what an abelian group is in a way that I can write down and work with, but it's harder for a physicist to tell me exactly what a field is (even in terms of a purely empirical operational definition).

I've made this whole post before, and better. But I'm making it again.

[ukfrislandembassy]

Scottish Gaelic throws up some interesting challenges to Anglo-centric assumptions about word class and syntactic structure sometimes. A few months ago I came across this sentence in a corpus: Theabas mo bhàthadh.

Translated into English this means 'I almost drowned'. So straightforward enough right?

But no! When you actually do the morphological analysis, you realise that the structure of the Gaelic assigns all the 'wrong' word classes (to an English speaker) to the various lexical meanings.

Starting with what in English is the predicate, 'drown'. In the Gaelic this is whay they call in the Celtic literature a 'verbnoun', a kind of masdar form which shows a lot of nominal properties. The verb root in this case would be bàth 'drown'.

One of the nominal properties of verbnouns is that they take an argument in the genitive, sometimes the direct object, or in this case the subject mo 'my' (versus the non-possessive form mi 'I, me'), which also triggers lenition on the possessed, hence mo bhàthadh.

Now for the real head scratcher. The first element in this clause is theabas. This is a verb, meaning basically 'to almost happen', which only occurs in the past tense. By itself the root is theab, but here we seen an additional -as suffix. What's that? Well it's an archaic form of the past tense impersonal, which would normally be -adh (and I've come across a couple of examples of theabadh too). So this means that there was an erstwhile subject that has been demoted and an object raised in its place, and in this case the only conclusion that can be drawn is that this subject was the firsr person singular mi, now expressee as a possessive pronoun modifying the erstwhile object, the verbnoun bàthadh.

So to spell that out, compared to the English translation we find a finite verb instead of an adverb, a possessive pronoun instead of a subject pronoun and a verbnoun (in subject position!) instead of a finite verb.

If you want more examples search for theabas at Corpas na Gàidhlig.

[thatpodcastkid]

Magnus Archives Relisten 21, MAG 21 Freefall

Tom Petty plays in the background as a man falls to his death

Is this too niche a joke? Not possible. MAG 21 analysis, spoilers ahead!

Facts: Statement of Moira Kelley, regarding the disappearance of her son Robert. Statement given October 20th, 2002.

Statement Notes: I have some friends with thrill seeking hobbies and I've really just been waiting for this to happen to one of them. RIP Robert Kelley but my bros are NOT built different and the sky will eat them.

The intensity of Robert's fear in this episode was so deep and profound. The way that he fell for so long that he actually wanted to hit the ground. The fact that he didn't open his parachute on time because he was so desperate to reach the ground faster. You were really able to experience and understand his emotions.

"The sky ate him" is usually the line that gets a lot of press in this episode, and for good reason. But the line that's always stuck with me is "Enjoy sky blue." It's only three words, but it says so much. The word "Enjoy" highlights the normalcy of life in the Magnus Archives universe. Rober is doing what he loves, he should be happy, he should enjoy the jump. But he won't. Fairchild won't let him. The horrors won't let him. The narrative won't let him.

But the second half of that sentence--"sky blue"--adds a whole other element. Syntactically speaking, Simon Fairchild presents it as a noun. It could be an activity or experience to Fairchild, like skydiving. It's something he does often, experiencing the thrill and horror of the fall by "sky bluing." It could be fun for him. Maybe if Robert had enjoyed the fall, Fairchild would have recruited him as an entity. It's not capitalized in the transcript, but because it is being spoken by Moira Kelley who lacks context, it's possible it is a proper noun. Could it be a place? An area the Fairchilds blip in out of and send hapless victims to, the same way the Lukases send people to the Lonely? Or is it a name? A living entity that got a taste of Robert on his first dive and decided to finish its meal on the hill?

The wind sfx in this episode is so great. I've been suspending my disbelief with the sound effects in the early episodes because I assumed they were mainly just to build ambiance for the listener, but they do have interesting implications for future episodes. If, in recording early statements, Jon begins experiencing/developing his Eye powers, then these effects (the wind in this ep, the heart beating with Julia Montauk, etc.) could be him "hearing" what the victims felt and experienced. He is looking through their eyes as he reads the statement.

Entity Alignment: Tom Petty continues playing quietly in the background

Really great Vast episode. I've never been particularly scared of heights, so I don't often find the vast episodes "scary," but I do find this one to be particularly unsettling and thrilling. The sky being presented as semi-sentient, with the ability to not only steal but eat a man makes the idea of falling through all the more terrifying.

When Moira Kelley began the statement, she explains that she "doesn't have the words" and doesn't know what to write. But of course, she explains everything in perfect detail anyway. By virtue of being in the Institute, she is compelled to tell her story. The Eye is urging her to relive the horror that she sold her home to escape. She says that "knowing won't bring him back," but the Institute doesn't care. It just wants more knowledge and fear to consume.

Character Notes: In MAG 111, Gerry explains that families are often just tools for avatars to ensure transfers of power and increase their own power. This vaguely seems to be what Fairchild is doing with Harriet, although less so. But I also wonder if the same can be said of the businesses that avatars and entities involve themselves in. According to Jon, Open Skydiving isn't a "real" company with any records, but it clearly has been operating for many years and people utilize its services. Similar circumstances seem to be true for the Magnus Institute, as well as Peter Lukas' real estate and shipping companies. They provide moderate services merely to provide funds and resources to avatars, while also functioning as mediums through which they can create more fear.

(Something something a company treating you like family means they want to use your success to increase their own status something something)

Slightly less relevant, but Robert says the jump was a charity event for Simon's deceased wife. I would love not only to know more about who Fairchild's wife was and how she died, but also what charity he could possibly be leaving any money to. "Defective parachutes for youth" "Old men against OSHA" "Wheelchair kitesurfing fund."

Slightly more relevant, but Martin!! He's back! Oh no!

The most important thing about Jon's reaction to Martin bursting in is when he shouts "What are these things?" Not only has he never seen the worms before, but he has no idea what they are. Even after reading Timothy Hodge's statement, he can't connect the worms he sees to Jane Prentiss. This is totally reasonable for any regular person, as he likely never expected to see the worms in person nor would expect Martin to burst in covered in them, but Jon isn't a regular person. At times, Elias has allowed Jon to make leaps in logic that lead him to the actual truth as a means of hiding his Eye powers. Elias wants Jon to know things he shouldn't, but only on his schedule. Jon needs to explore Prentiss more deeply so he will be marked for the ritual, so he's rationing information.

[cosmiclion]

Okay yeah I'm definitely asexual. I find a lot of people hot, even like to joke about how I'd like to climb them like a tree because it's fun, and I enjoy creating and consuming adult content again because it's fun, but when it comes to the actual thing I have little to no interest in it. My eros is null. A rock on the ground has more libido than me. My ideal date ends with me infodumping on you about linguistics and syntactic analysis. Fuck? More like fuck no amirite.

On that note, if you find it weird that an ace person with very little or zero interest in sex might enjoy engaging with adult content, you can see it like this: porn and erotica are like any other genre, for example you don't need to be a detective yourself in order to enjoy murder mystery stories 👍

[fruityyamenrunner]

Psychoanalysis is one of the big motors of why They Don't Want You to Know Linguistics.

Linguistics provides alternate explanations for load-bearing parts of psychoanalysis. For instance, psychoanalysts want you to believe that "Freudian slips" are a crucial form of communication. Psychoanalytically, "Fehlleistungen" are oracular utterances, to be interpreted with the full witchcraft armament of suspicion and infatuation. Linguistically, "production errors" are clues to phonemic, morphological or syntactic structures and do not necessarily bear moral or even semantic weight - you can impute it to them, but be aware you're doing so because you want to.

More generally, psychoanalyists are like witches in that there is no such thing really as semantic bleaching -- if someone, or some group of people, uses one particular discourse particle with higher frequency, this is a Deep Tell. Eagleton:

This is a very long way away from a linguistic analysis of "like" in that register. It is simply an imputation of weakness (one that he himself is guilty of -- o professor eagleton, you only "perhaps" think it's reflected? how suspicious you are of your own metanarrative!) that sticks because of psychoanalytic authority. It falls apart in any scientific analysis.

[nostalgebraist]

I had some fun asking ChatGPT about cases from "Counterexamples in Analysis." You get this kind of uncanny valley math, syntactically and stylistically correct but still wildly wrong.

This was a response to "Prove or disprove: there exists a nowhere continuous function whose absolute value is everywhere continuous." It responded in TeX, which I coped into a TeX editor.

Another answer to the same question:

[wiltedprayers]

Lewis Nixon as a poetry movement: The objectivists.

so, I thought it'd be nice if I did a little analysis of Lew's character through different periods of poetry— to be more precise, modernist poetry (late 19th century-mid 20th century). Nix was a socialite and Yale student, so he probably went on to study the classics and more cemented poetry movements like Renaissance poetry and (maybe) the English romantics. however, considering the nature of his character (and I am talking about the HBO dramatized version, not the real-life Lewis Nixon), I think he'd be more interested and moved by the contemporary poets of his time (early 20th century). this is especially because of their disruptive philosophy regarding poetry: the avant-garde movements of the time (which included poetry, but also extended to theater, film, and plastic art) were many, incredibly present in the politics of the period, and brought a new perspective to the study of poetry that remained throughout the century.

the objectivists, which were not exactly a 'movement' and more of a small group of like-minded individuals, believed in the sincerity and objectification of poetry: they treated the poem as an object and had an intelligent approach to their writings, greatly inspired by the previous Imaginist movement and the history contained within their poetry.

the core group of objectivist poets consisted of Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, William Carlos Williams, and George Oppen. they were most present during the 1930s.

their poems were characterized by line breaks that disrupted a normal speech rhythm and had deliberate syntactic fragmentation (something present in 19th century Emily Dickinson's poetry, for example). they weren't inherently absurd (like Dada poetry) and usually touched heavily on political topics, given that most of them were left-wing and/or Marxists. they exploited small and everyday words like 'The', 'Is', and 'A'.

excerpt from Louis Zukofsky's "'A'—22":

why do I think Nix would've enjoyed their poetry? well, for one, I think he would've appreciated the innovation and simple wording used to convey strong emotional points; Nix, unlike characters like Webster, doesn't believe in flowery language and always came across to me as a concise, fast man. he held no love for his years at Yale and always looked at things from a different perspective which, in my opinion, is what made him such a fitting intelligence officer. I think Nix would've been attracted to the objectifying nature of this type of poetry; seeing the poem as a real thing in a way in which it allows us to be sincere with ourselves.

it's worth mentioning that most objectivists came from poverty or marginalized backgrounds, which greatly influenced their writing. naturally, there'd be a real dissonance between Nix and these topics for obvious reasons, but there's no reason to think he'd be put off by them. if anything, I see Nix as a learner, an observer, a very curious man. this is all conjecture of course, but treading into more modern and avant-garde art movements seems like something he'd do in an attempt to distance himself from his structured 'prep school' type of education. while Nix is not precisely a rebel, he's also not one stuck in ancient conventions, and he's not afraid to defy authority (see his reticence regarding sobel and sometimes sink, his approval of Dick's fake patrol, etc). he'll adapt very nicely to social etiquette because that's the environment in which he was raised, sure, but he doesn't really care for it.

excerpt from Carl Rakosi's "In What Sense I Am I", which I think fits Nix’s character rather nicely:

we can see the disjuncture in the way Rakosi presents his sentences, purposefully creating an organized mess of his paragraph to make his poem seem like its building itself off piece by piece; this is just so incredibly Nix in my opinion.

another poem, this time a piece by Lorine Niedecker:

once again, the structure of the poem is loose, and very short. It's concise and to the point; Niedecker's use of "Ah" also showcases the objectivist poetry style, one where everyday expressions and simple sounds take center stage.

to wrap this up, I think Lewis Nixon (as a character!) would be much inclined to a certain type of poetry present mainly in the modernist period of the early 20th century. one that's disruptive, innovative, and contemporary, that isn't afraid to focus on an intelligent use of prose by the poet; this poetry movements (imagism, objectivism, and early confessional poetry) are very tied to their sociopolitical context, and fundamentally change the discipline, which will continue to evolve artistically throughout the rest of the 1900s.

if you'd like me to analyze other BoB (or even the Pacific) characters through poetry and art, please let me know! gotta admit, I wrote this in a frenzy at 3am because I just could not stop thinking about a fictional character's likely poetic inclinations. would appreciate any kind of contribution on this subject too! this is, of course, just my opinion :) feel free to disagree!