In a language I am studying I have just noticed a significant but subtle difference in the length of [f] segments in tonic versus atonic syllables (an ~50ms difference which is statistically significant). When mentioning the effect to a colleague, I was asked whether such an effect, where consona...
I have started frequenting the stats stackexchange site, and I found a very helpful message when I tried to comment on a post:
Comments use mini-Markdown formatting: [link](http://example.com)
_italic_ **bold** `code`. The post author will always be notified of your comment. To also notify ...
I am doing a project on descriptive answer evaluation. I want to transform all the sentences into simple sentences as much as possible. I am talking about English language sentences.Is there some rules that help me to transform a complex sentence to set of simple sentences. please help me...thank...
Proposal: Russian Language & Usage
I am surprised at this new name "Russian Language & Usage" for my original proposal. My intention was to have questions like "What's the best way to convey the message “Будет и на нашей улице праздник” in English?" answered. I don't care how linguists a...
So "if" + verb + "-ed" means it is a subjunctive in 95 % of cases.
We use meaning/context to decide.
As with everything.
"I have three rocks" v. "she rocks".
Same form, different morpho-syntactic label.
I guess you could make a grammar where all words with identical forms always get the same label; but I don't think that adds much our understanding of language.
The development of the subjunctive in English may have been influenced by Latin.
And any label or category is a choice.
But the English subjunctive works very differently from the Latin subjunctive, and I think there are decent arguments to use the label.
In the end, the question "does this label help us understand language?" should be very important. But tradition and what people are used to should also carry weight, at least outside linguistics.
Perhaps some system where only numbers and codes are used would be most efficient in linguistics, but that doesn't allow linguists to tell laymen that "there is no such thing as a "subject": you must not tell people this nonsense! Just use the accepted label "x2" from now on".
And even within linguistics, the ongoing stream of new and initially obscure terms may not be altogether efficient or useful.
I've recently stumbled on this site, dedicated to teaching English as a second language to Portuguese speakers. Right at the beginning, while making a comparison among English and Portuguese phonologies, the author states the following:
In less compact languages, with a small number of 1-syll...
Proposal: Russian Language & Usage
I am surprised at this new name "Russian Language & Usage" for my original proposal. My intention was to have questions like "What's the best way to convey the message “Будет и на нашей улице праздник” in English?" answered. I don't care how linguists a...
I've recently stumbled on this site, dedicated to teaching English as a second language to Portuguese speakers. Right at the beginning, while making a comparison among English and Portuguese phonologies, the author states the following:
In less compact languages, with a small number of 1-syll...
lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks
lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks