Language Overflow

Anonymous

02:41

@Lambie Titles most definitely are proper nouns. An article's title is the name of that specific article, just as Fred Smith is the name of a specific person and the Golden Gate Bridge is the name of a specific bridge. — Timbo 4 hours ago

Anonymous

I've tried to distinguish proper nouns from proper names on ELL before, but it doesn't seem like most users do so.

Anonymous

> The United States of America

Anonymous

The whole thing is a proper name.

Anonymous

Determinative, adjective, noun, preposition, proper noun.

Anonymous

Each has a part of speech. America is specifically a proper noun, but states is just a common noun.

Anonymous

02:43

United is just an adjective. And so on.

Anonymous

In general, it doesn't make sense to say that an entire phrase is a noun.

Anonymous

(Unless it's a one-word noun phrase consisting solely of a noun.)

Anonymous

Nouns are words, not phrases.

Anonymous

So it doesn't make a lot of sense to call the whole thing a proper noun.

Anonymous

We can use the label proper name for it instead.

CowperKettle

04:11

> “So far, we have already favored out more than 18 customer products with good yield [and] performance,” said C. C. Wei, a Co-CEO and President of TSMC, during a conference call with financial analysts.

favored out?

What does that mean?

Anonymous

04:47

@CowperKettle minerhome.com/…

Anonymous

> TSCM notes that their 7nm chip has “[…] already fabbed out more than 18 customer products with good yield and performance.”

Anonymous

@CowperKettle tsmc.com/uploadfile/ir/quarterly/2018/1yZjH/E/…

Anonymous

Looks like it does say fabbed.

Anonymous

So that is of course fabricated.

CowperKettle

05:03

Ah, so it's a typo!

Thank you!

Sorry for raising a foofaraw over this.

Captain Bohemian

05:20

@CowperKettle you are not weak now? You said you were too weak to talk last night.

As I am reading the English grammar on web dictionary, I found there are a lot of grammatical terms I had never been taught during middle and high schools, when was the period our English courses taught us English grammar.

When I was in high school, I considered I had been taught all English grammar because I found most grammatical rules I was taught then had been taught previously--I felt our English course was boring in keeping teaching us grammatical rules which had been taught. But now I feel there are a lot of English grammar I have never learnt--I feel a little astonished and delighted because I find new things to learn in English.

I ususlly feel a subject starts to bore me when I don't find new things anymore in it for me to learn.

CowperKettle

05:45

@CaptainBohemian I downed two cups of coffee and has been able to do some work. Also went to the clinic to have my blood sampled for biochemistry and Hepatitis B and C. I doubt I have hepatitis, but that's what the doctor said to do.

I'll make a third cup of coffee. I want to sleep, although I've slept for for 8 hours

Ukrainian song of the day:

Позволь менi, мати Волинський народний хор Ukrainian Folk Song

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Stanza 1. Let me dig a well, Mother dear, so that girls come to me to fetch water. Now all girls have come to fetch water at my well, but the girl I love is forbidden by her mother.

Stanza 2. Let me set up a tavern, Mother dear, so that girls to come to have fun. Now all girls have come to my tavern to have fun, but the girl I love is forbidden by her mother.

Stanza 3. Let me die from sorrow, Mother dear, so that girls come to prepare me for burial. Oh, they'll come to put clothes on me, to make me pretty for the grave, to gaze at me.

Stanza 4. Now all girls have come to cloth me for the grave, the girl I love is forbidden by her mother. (The girl says:) "Let me go, Mother, I won't be long, I will only say a short prayer by his door")

Stanza 5. All girls were dressing me for the grave, and finally my beloved girl came. She came and started crying: "Oh, were it not these hands that held me, were in not these lips that kissed me".

Stanza 6. The guy heard her cries and tubmled from the deathbed to the floor. "Thanks God I came alive! Now, Mother dear, allow me to marry" (Haha, he was pretending to be dead the whole time)

A jolly song

It reminds me of the song called Finnegan's Wake, where the guy also comes alive at the end.

Captain Bohemian

06:12

@CowperKettle I have long heard people having problem with their liver get tired unusually easily.

@CowperKettle You have coffee often? I don't drink coffee at all because it is intolerably bitter for me.

Captain Bohemian

08:47

what is a grammatical person?

skull

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and others (third person). Put in simple colloquial English, first person is that which includes the speaker, namely, "I," "we," "me," and "us," second person is the person or people spoken to, literally, "you," and third person includes all that is not listed above. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs, and...

Captain Bohemian

09:38

@skull based on this definition of grammatical person, I guess there is also the defined grammatical place, e.g. here, there.

skull

10:40

@CaptainBohemian I think @snailboat is better qualified to answer that :-)

Captain Bohemian

10:50

@skull but I am aware the purpose of coining the term "grammatical person" is to have the conjungation of verbs dependent on the gramattical person. The verbs used for places seem not need to conjugate with places, so coining the term "grammatical place" seems to be useless.

Captain Bohemian

11:09

@userr2684291 Last night you told me the construction of the future perfect tense. Today I come across it in dictionary: "We use the future perfect tense to say that something will finish or complete at a specific point in the future, often indicating how long something will have been happening once a future moment in time is reached. We can also use the future perfect to make a prediction that something has or should have happened in the past."

thefreedictionary.com/Tense.htm

userr2684291

11:54

@CaptainBohemian Try to figure out when it's used inductively by looking at various contexts in which it's used. The problem is, it can be replaced with will + plain form most of the time, but from what I know, it's commonly used with expressions such as by the year X.

> As business majors, Information Systems students will have also completed the lower division business core which includes financial and managerial accounting, business law, micro- and macroeconomics, business applications: spreadsheets and databases, and business communication.

> Third, by the time the audience sees the final product, a film will have been edited to both compress the film's time and create rhythm, tone, and a coherent narrative.

> VAN-SUSTEREN: All right. So much discussion about Harry going to Iraq, and obviously not going now. But Britain's pulling its -- pulling back. In February, there was an announcement that you're taking soldiers or taking military out, which is sort of curious. BAXTER: Yes. Well, by the end of the summer, about half the British troops will have left.

(I stole these from COCA.)

V.V.

13:53

Hello, can anyone tell me what it means“I gotta keep moving,” he said. “I’m losing my stride.”. The first part is clear.What 's wrong in the second? Losing tempo?rythm?or anything else?Thanks in advance.

CowperKettle

14:13

Getting some air, Atlas?

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@V.V. Yes, he is losing his ability to move fast, or to do things "in a stide" (easily, on the run)

В Калифорнии начал светиться океан. Все из-за ночесветок!

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Glowin ocean water, somewhere in California

@snailboat, you should go see that )))

Anonymous

Good morning! A fine morning for glowing.

Araucaria

14:31

Good afternoon ...

userr2684291

@snailboat Hm, yeah, you're right. So it's a regular old inversion.

I saw were and just assumed the rest of the sentence.

Anonymous

Yeah, I'm using H&P's terminology there, but some linguists have used the term "inversion" by itself to refer to subject–dependent inversion.

Araucaria

14:57

@snailboat Which example have you guys been discussing? (I'm into inversion at the moment ...)

userr2684291

@Araucaria ell.stackexchange.com/questions/166192/…

Araucaria

@userr2684291 Ah, I see, quite right. It's the other type I'm worrying over at the moment ...

@snailboat Do you reckon that the inversion in So, do I might actually be a case of subject dependent inversion disguised as subect-auxiliary inversion? (Does that sound remotely possible to you?)

or to you @userr

userr2684291

@Araucaria I'm no expert on this matter – not by a long shot. I'm not sure why you included a comma in that example, however.

Araucaria

15:15

@userr2684291 Ah, I think it's because my brain thought it was a question tag. (Another SA inversion, of course, a genuine one).

Anonymous

@Araucaria Possible? Sure, but I'm not sure if I see what would make that the most parsimonious analysis. Lumping that in with SDI might suggest that it's subject to the same pragmatic and stylistic constraints, but it doesn't appear to be, so you still need to give it its own description.

Anonymous

So I'm not really sure what lumping it in buys you in terms of theory.

Anonymous

And it does seem a little counterintuitive to me too, so I wonder if it would be useful in terms of teaching. I usually think there are two main reasons to adopt an analysis, either because it's the most parsimonious or because it has some pedagogical value. (Hopefully these two can be lined up as often as possible!) But in this case I don't see that either reason applies, unless you have some explanation to share that I'm not seeing.

Araucaria

@snailboat Well, it might fit in with the stylistic constraints, perhaps, I think. The VP represented by so would be speaker old info. The I would be 'new' in terms of still being in focus due to contrastive stress (and notice the I must be stressed there).

That's all a bit stretching things, I know, but there is a theoretical reason ...

userr2684291

Haha.

Araucaria

15:26

... relating to part of my PhD thesis. That is that I believe there's two types of SAI, 'stylistic SAI', for want of a better term, which has no semantic contribution and 'semantic SAI', which has a semantic contribution to the sentencce.

If that were true there is a neat generalisation, which is that 'stylistic SAI' is always optional, whereas 'semantic SAI' would be mandatory.

However, out of fifteen or so environments for SAI, there's two problematic ones.

They both relate to inversions after so, which are mandatory, but can't be construed to make any contribution to the semantics. If, perhaps, the inversion after so in So, do I is a case of subject dependent inversion (where the so represents a dependent pro-VP), then I only have the other annoying inversion after so to worry about ...

Or - I could give up on the theory ... :(

Araucaria

15:42

The other thing that might be in favour os considering so do I as SDI, is that you can't have a verb after the I. You cant have Pat like cars. So do I like them too., for example, or Do I so, so in effect the whole VP dependent is preposed and the I postposed - which sounds very SDI-like. Well, if you squint at in from a certain angle, perhaps.

Anonymous

Oh, that's interesting.

Anonymous

Can you give an example of the other troublesome inversion with so?

Araucaria

"So far did he run, that his feet fell off"

That kind of degree so thingymujig

Although there might be a kind of test you could do there to perhaps argue that SAI inversion isn't always mandatory (but it's a really big fudge). You could argue, that the SAI in such constructions isn't always mandatory, because you could have SDI there instead (or not SAI anyhow) if the verb is BE: So protracted have been the problems. So you could use that as a diagnostic for stylistic SAI. Urm, but that's not really very convincing ...

But if it was true then you could show that the SAI in conditional antecedents was the same type of SAI that you find in questions, and that this made exactly the same semantic contribution as the if in conditional antecedents and the if in subordinate interrogatives. And then you might have a strong case that all grammatically marked conditional antecedents in English are "interrogative clauses" - where interrogative clause is a phrasal category, not a semantic one.

(And then you could show that all grammatically marked conditionals in English worked in exactly the same way and give exactly the same treatment for normal conditionals, bisuit conditionals, exhaustive conditionals etc etc ...)

But maybe that's a bit too much detail!

Araucaria

16:09

(And the tumbleweed blew across the LO chatroom as the members were put into a deep stupor by the arse-paralysingly boring conditionals waffle ...)

Anyhow, any thought on so SAI would be eagerly appreciated.

Ciao all. Got to take the students to the pub for our social programme!

Anonymous

Oh, I'm sorry! I'm here, but I'm sort of multi-tasking :-)

Araucaria

O/

Anonymous

See you around, @Araucaria!

Araucaria

@snailboat Bye!

Captain Bohemian

English grammar is full of abstruse terms whose meaning are impossible to be guessed out without actually reading about them.

Anonymous

16:14

@CaptainBohemian Although many labels are supposed to be transparent (meaning you can guess the general meaning from the term), labels are not definitions. To fully understand them, you need to look them up anyway.

Anonymous

But in some cases terms can be opaque (hard to guess from the term). Sometimes people choose opaque terms for their mnemonic value (how easy it is to remember them once you know the meaning).

Anonymous

Earlier, Araucaria talked about biscuit conditionals. J.L. Austin came up with that term for examples like:

Anonymous

> There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want some.

Anonymous

In this case, the term is chosen more for its mnemonic value.

Anonymous

The interesting thing about these is that the truth value of 'There are biscuits on the sideboard' is not conditional on the truth value of 'if you want some'.

Anonymous

16:18

Presumably there are biscuits there whether you want them or not.

Anonymous

Rather than the truth value being conditional, it's the relevance of 'There are biscuits on the sideboard'.

Anonymous

If you want some, then 'There are biscuits on the sideboard' is relevant to you.

Anonymous

So in the Cambridge Grammar (CGEL), Huddleston & Pullum use the 'relevance' label for these instead of 'biscuit'.

Anonymous

They have a preference for transparent labels, whereas Austin came up with fun, memorable labels.

Anonymous

Haj Ross came up with a lot of fun, memorable labels, too.

Anonymous

16:21

In linguistics you'll find that many things have multiple names because different people have different reasons in mind when they come up with their names.

Anonymous

But even keeping in mind that some labels are more transparent than others, labels are not definitions, so you're right that you won't really be able to guess the full meaning most of the time.

Captain Bohemian

@snailboat sorry, I don't get you in what term is intended to be memorized by composing the sentence "There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want some."

Anonymous

I was talking about biscuit conditionals, which are supposed to remind you of this sort of example.

Anonymous

When you hear the name, you remember "There are biscuits if you want some." It's a name for that sort of conditional.

Anonymous

Unfortunately, whether you use the "biscuit" term or the "relevance" term, you have to actually learn what these conditionals are. Neither term will make sense without explanation.

Captain Bohemian

16:34

@snailboat you mean to memorize the word "biscuit", a kind of food if I remember correctly?

CowperKettle

17:21

I went bicycling and my tire went flat in the(?) Mayakovsky Park. And I composed a poem while fixing the tire.

> The Mayakovsky Park's a perfect place
To park your bike and fix a punctured tire,
And watch the birds and hear their trills go higher,
And feel the Spring and wonder at its grace.

(0:

Captain Bohemian

@CowperKettle The park is still like winter as the trees there are not in green. My surrounding has been like the beginning of summer.

CowperKettle

@CaptainBohemian There is no snow, which means it's "almost summer" in Yekaterinburg.

The local saying goes: "The winter lasts for nine months, but hey, the rest is Summer!"

Correction: nine months

"Девять месяцев зима, остальное - лето" (Dyevat myesatsev zima, ostalnoye - lyeto)

Nine months winter, rest - summer

Captain Bohemian

@CowperKettle I just contemplated to compose a poem to express my somewhat blue sentiment, but can't compose, so I just visited SE literature, but haven't found any guide of how to compose a poem.

@CowperKettle Mine surrounding is somewhat opposite to you--more than half of a year is like summer.

@CowperKettle Only late December to Feburary has real atmosphere of winter.

CowperKettle

@CaptainBohemian I start out with a single sentence, and then try to come up with rhymes ))

@CaptainBohemian Where do you live?

Captain Bohemian

@CowperKettle far lower than yours.

CowperKettle

17:34

India?

Pakistan?

Captain Bohemian

no

CowperKettle

Kashmir?

Captain Bohemian

no

CowperKettle

Kazakhstan?

Australia?

Captain Bohemian

no

CowperKettle

17:36

Ah, probably Chelyabinsk.

It must be Chelyabinsk.

Captain Bohemian

no

I'm in the subtropic zone.

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