Starred posts

StoneyB

Apr 13, 2014 14:40

Well, in my experience, the way it works is you pick something you think you understand ... you go out and consult a few scholarly works to make sure you've got the terminology right ... you then discover you didn't understand as much as you thought, so you read more scholarly works ... then you discover that they all contradict each other and nobody really understands it ... finally you pin down what everybody agrees on and what nobody agrees on ...

StoneyB

Apr 12, 2014 17:08

Note, too, that pro- forms don't stand for words (W) but for 'phrases'. A pronoun (or pro-noun) doesn't stand for a noun but for an NP. A pro-adverb stands for an adverbial, which may be a preposition phrase, not an adverb.

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 17:00

I'll repeat something I mentioned earlier: if you object to pronoun, you can call the lot of them relative words

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 16:02

(This is an example of me making an argument in a very rigorous fashion.)

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 14:18

@felipe.zkn The form is "I suggest [ ~~that~~ you eat there ]". It's a finite subordinate clause, so the appropriate (but optional) subordinator is that, not to.

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 14:01

Here, don't appears to be an auxiliary--a single word! It switches places with I.

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 09:51

Would, like the other modal auxiliaries, expresses a range of meaning

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 09:36

Epistemic modality = related to the speaker's level of knowledge

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 09:30

Without context, I'd say: the first is assertive (you think he will choose you), the second is hypothetical (there is an unspoken condition it hinges upon), and the third is likely to be a statement of capability

Anonymous

Apr 12, 2014 08:52

And since there's no gap, that cannot be replaced with a relative pronoun: *I think which grammar rules!

Anonymous

Apr 11, 2014 18:55

@GATA The light of the sun has dulled the surrounding area, but as your eye moves further away the landscape becomes gradually clearer and clearer.

Anonymous

Apr 11, 2014 18:48

Maybe the internet is happy again.

Anonymous

Apr 11, 2014 17:09

♪ Sleep, sleep, sleep ♪

Anonymous

Apr 10, 2014 18:16

Hooray for left dislocation!

Damkerng T.

Apr 10, 2014 13:43

Found it. Here it is: learningenglish.voanews.com/content/…

Anonymous

Apr 10, 2014 11:41

I've had to read it four or five times.

Anonymous

Apr 10, 2014 11:02

A warning about something doesn't necessarily tell you not to do it--it just tells you what the topic of the warning is.

Anonymous

Apr 10, 2014 11:02

I might give you a warning about a big red button. That warning might be against pressing it. Or it might be against not pressing it. My about sentence is less specific.

Anonymous

Apr 9, 2014 17:15

A running joke in my circle of friends is using "unlimitedly" in conversation as often as possible.

Anonymous

Apr 9, 2014 17:14

Oh, god! Now it says aroard. Is there no limit to my typoness?

Anonymous

Apr 9, 2014 17:05

I'll take the example of aboard from A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. H&P say that aboard is traditionally analyzed as a preposition when it has a complement, and an adverb when it does not. "She went aboard the liner." "She went aboard." If we analyze intransitive aboard as an adverb, we find that it is decidedly unlike other adverbs; it doesn't premodify verbs, and in fact doesn't modify verbs at all; it doesn't modify adjectives or other adverbs, either.

Anonymous

Apr 9, 2014 12:00

Don't worry. I am forever the ELL chat room's edit monkey.

oerkelens

Apr 7, 2014 18:44

"doesn't mean there isn't" = "means there is"

oerkelens

Apr 7, 2014 18:44

A nice double negative :)

Anonymous

Apr 7, 2014 04:24

As the Cooperative Principle describes, listeners make assumptions about speakers' meaning, and speakers assume that listeners will make those assumptions, which the two to create implicatures--they communicate things successfully without always saying what they literally mean.

Damkerng T.

Apr 6, 2014 16:55

I know! It's because you're Pops. :-)

Damkerng T.

Apr 5, 2014 09:14

And, also use the dictionaries first. :-)

skullpatrol

Apr 4, 2014 08:56

R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out want it means to me :-)

Anonymous

Apr 4, 2014 04:51

The /t/ in water is [ɾ], while the /t/ in tap is [tʰ]. The /t/ in stop is [t˭].

Anonymous

Apr 2, 2014 20:31

> In English, the durational difference in stressed syllables can be 100 ms or more, and it is well-established as one of the strongest perceptual cues to whether the coda is voiced or voiceless (e.g. Denes, 1955; Chen, 1970; Raphael, 1972).

Anonymous

Apr 2, 2014 08:56

In CGEL, "modality" is in terms of meaning, while "mood" is in terms of grammatical form.

Anonymous

Apr 2, 2014 07:10

You're talking about energy in general. You're not talking about some specific energy that was previously referred to or that both speaker and listener know about

Anonymous

Mar 31, 2014 15:36

@helix COCA, as its name suggests, is specific to American English. It's a very handy tool, and it's often my tool of first resort. Other BYU corpora you may be interested in include GloWbE (the Global Corpus of Web-based English) and BNC (the British National Corpus)

Damkerng T.

Mar 31, 2014 14:36

What is your suggestion? (or at least what you think the chart suggests)

Anonymous

Mar 28, 2014 19:09

@GATA Not really. Admonish isn't the sort of word people use in everyday informal conversation. But that doesn't mean you can't use it, just that it's rare.

Damkerng T.

Mar 28, 2014 13:06

Changing it to "everything he was wearing" sounds like he was taking everything off, then got naked, and cleaned up the mess.

Damkerng T.

Mar 28, 2014 13:04

"Everything he had been wearing" sounds like he had already changed his clothes. It also sounds like he stuffed what he had been wearing (or was wearing earlier), which is not what he was wearing at that time.

Damkerng T.

Mar 28, 2014 10:21

(Glad that IceGirl understands)

StoneyB

Mar 26, 2014 01:37

It's the score that carries West Side Story - just as it's the word-music that carries Romeo and Juliet. The French playwright Beaumarchais once said "Whatever is too silly to say can be sung."

skullpatrol

Mar 25, 2014 12:55

ice girl forced skullpatrol to help her :-)

skullpatrol

Mar 25, 2014 12:17

@IceGirl good work

Damkerng T.

Mar 24, 2014 01:36

You should say it three times. The first "Here is what we are going to tell you". The second time "Here is the thing". The third time "That was what we've discussed."

Jolenealaska

Mar 24, 2014 00:21

I hate that!

Damkerng T.

Mar 23, 2014 11:22

I'm thinking about running a series of questions from our chat room on the main site. The idea is simple, just pick interesting questions in here (being answered or unanswered) and ask it on the main.

Anonymous

Mar 23, 2014 07:57

I know [ who my friend is ____ ]　　←　Gap in predicative complement position, who fronted

Anonymous

Mar 23, 2014 05:39

> As Bloomfield famously put it, "Writing is not language, but merely a means of recording language by means of visual marks." ... The contrastive approach has militated against the development of the autonomous study of written language as a linguistic system in its own right. ... Indeed, current approaches to writing presuppose that there couldn't be much to say about the subject. ...

Damkerng T.

Mar 20, 2014 08:47

Discovery of the day: "It's not rather good" is rather not good.

Damkerng T.

Mar 20, 2014 06:54

So maybe some day I could say, "Houston, we've got a problem!"

Damkerng T.

Mar 20, 2014 06:53

Though my avatar isn't really an astronaut, I always secretly wish to be one. :D

Anonymous

Mar 20, 2014 03:26

The -ish attaches phonologically to the last word but syntactically affects the preceding NP. It's a clitic. [EDIT: See further discussion below.]

English Language Learners

English Language Learners