English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

kiamlaluno

5:05 PM

@MrHen It is also a duplicate.

Martha

@kiamlaluno I was just gonna say that.

kiamlaluno

I am sure there is a question about "the route," but I cannot find it, right now.

Martha

Oh, wait, no it isn't: this is an old question.

There's a related question, but not a duplicate.

1

A: Differences between American dialects?

I can't tell apart the various accents, either, other than to know that I'm hearing one. My one story about dialect differences came shortly after I moved to the Philly area, and happened to mention the 202. The person I was speaking to got inexplicably amused, and brought her friend over and ha...

kiamlaluno

Oh, right. The duplicate I was talking of is the question itself.

I thought it was an older question.

Is it possible to close a question because it's a duplicate of itself? ;-)

MrHen

Haha, someone downvoted an answer of mine with "ass" in it. I wonder if it had to do with the swearing...

1

Q: Is there a literary term for the circular nature of a story?

Is there a literary term for the circular nature of a story, starting in place a, going on to b and c before returning to complete at a again?

literary-techniques

This should probably be moved to Writers.SE

See the comments in response to my answer.

Martha

5:16 PM

So, going back to thwacking: a rolled-up newspaper is indeed a good thwacking tool for halfhearted or inadvertent puns. It's also a good reinforcement device for trainees who have learned the error of their ways, and just need the occasional reminder. Unfortunately, nobody on EL&U has yet reached this stage.

MrHen

It is vaguely on topic here but Writers would probably have a more appropriate set of experts

@Martha See, where you thwack I fling chalk and 3x5s.

Or just walk over and punch them, depending.

Martha

@MrHen Since it's asking for the name of the technique, I'd say it's on-topic. Could use better tagging, though.

MrHen

@Martha Yeah, but it would have been a much better question for the Writers. It isn't a question about a technical term for English; it is asking about a technical term for literature.

It is a minor point and I don't mind one way or the other.

But I don't mind throwing Writers a few bones.

kiamlaluno

@MrHen Which answer is it?

MrHen

1

A: Is there a literary term for the circular nature of a story?

Your question is a tad broad but you may be thinking of the "Hero's Journey" or "monomyth". The steps of the journey are: Departure Initiation Return The Wikipedia article has plenty of details for each step. For instance, the subgroups for Departure are: The Call to Adventure Refusal of th...

"sorry mr hen but im looking for the word for the linguistic device of ending a story in the same place it started – iminei 21 mins ago

almost like the first and last scene of the film Scandal...where John Hurt was surveying the same street scene, (albeit with subtle differences) – iminei 20 mins ago"

Martha

5:21 PM

@MrHen: I think @kiamlaluno is wondering which ass -containing answer of yours was downvoted.

MrHen

@Martha oh

one sec

2

A: Is there a pejorative alternative to "improvise"?

The most common phrase I hear for this is "pulling something out of your ass." There are variations and the phrase is pretty flexible: Did you just pull that out of your ass? Stopping pulling things out of your ass. Tom likes to pull things out of his ass.

kiamlaluno

Yeah, what @Martha said.

MrHen

@Martha Holy wow, you can reply to a future comment.

2

You just have to do it before the edit timer is up.

kiamlaluno

Grat, grat.

MrHen

Heh, cool.

Martha

5:25 PM

:D

kiamlaluno

Does that count as time machine?

Martha

Dunno, but it's definitely star-worthy.

MrHen

I wonder if I can get it to reply to itself...

kiamlaluno

@MrHen You cannot.

MrHen

@MrHen Testing recursion in three... two... one...

Well, okay.

That looks about right...

kiamlaluno

5:28 PM

@kiamlaluno Can I?

Ahah!

Robusto

@MrHen — That's as good an explanation as any.

@Cerberus: What makes you think @Martha keeps me in check?

kiamlaluno

@MrHen: Hover the mouse over your question, and take note of the number you see; then write a new post with a colon followed by that number.

MrHen

@kiamlaluno Yeah, I got the recursion reply to work too.

Martha

@Robusto Ooh, does that mean I keep you in terror? 'Cause terror is better than check.

Robusto

@Martha — Actually he said you keep me under control. Which is obviously false, because I have never been under control, not even from myself, so what chance do you have?

Vitaly

5:33 PM

Hello. Does anybody possibly know what this grammatical structure is called: “Those who don't read books, they usually don't have a wide vocabulary” (as opposed to “Those who don't read books usually don't have a wide vocabulary”)? I want to read about it in a reference grammar but don't know where to start.

Martha

Ok, so terror is better than control. Check.

Vitaly

Also, I suspect I have seen a question like that somewhere on English.StackExchange, but I have no clue how to find it.

Martha

@Vitaly, I'm vaguely remembering something, too, but I couldn't find it.

Robusto

@Vitaly Yeah. It's a construction you see a lot. "Me, I don't care what you do." or, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "Mistah Kurz, he dead." Some kind of noun-pronoun repetition subject repetition.

MrHen

I also see something similar in the form of a question: "Those guys? I don't know them."

JSBangs

5:41 PM

@Robusto we linguists call that a topic-comment structure

some languages have that as their dominant clause structure (eg. Japanese)

Robusto

@JSBangs — I don't think that's quite the same thing. The Japanese wouldn't say Kamakura-san wa, kare wa takai. (Kamakura-san as-for, he as-for tall [is]). They'd just say Kamakura-san wa takai.

Vitaly

Thanks! The topic-comment structure concept seems a good launchpad for searching for the relevant sections in a grammar book.

JSBangs

right, because you would never mark the topic twice. you have two wa's

however, unless i'm mistaken you can use both a wa and the subject marker

that being ga

eg. ima wa kuruma ga atarashii desu.

Robusto

Yeah, "now as for car new is" ...

But the ga is usually used to imply more than a topical relationship. More of an operative relationship, or ownership relationship.

If I want to say "I like sushi" I would say Sushi ga suki or Sushi ga suki desu

JSBangs

correct: the topical focalization is given by wa, while ga gives the syntactic subject, if the topic and subject are not the same

the difference is that english requires that the topic be repeated with a pronoun subject if the topic is also the subject

Robusto

5:54 PM

I would not say Sushi wa suki desu

JSBangs

because english is not a pro-drop language

are you native japanese?

Robusto

No.

JSBangs

i don't speak japanese at all, so i'm in no position to correct you. i merely repeat what i've learned in linguistics classes, where japanese is frequently trotted out as the example of topic-comment structure

Robusto

I think topic-comment may not be the same as topic repetition then. Or maybe it just means something different when applied by linguistics majors to the different languages.

JSBangs

my point is that the english and japanese topic-comment structures are not that different, though the syntactic details differ

Robusto

5:57 PM

In your sentence Ima wa kuruma ga atarashii desu there is no repetition of the topic.

psmears

@MrHen Nice one

JSBangs

namely: english requires you to have an explicit subject, even if the subject is the same as the topic. japanese does not require an explicit subject if the subject and topic are the same. that is all.

english always requires an explicit subject

Robusto

In fact, Japanese doesn't even require a subject. :)

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…