English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

12:10 AM

I didn't even have to scroll all the way up to know what song you were talking about. It's a good song.

Cerberus

Yeah.

How the phone holding up?

Shafizadeh

12:38 AM

What's the meaning of "up top"? (I think it meas kick your hand to my hand, because we won, am I right?)

Cerberus

@Shafizadeh Can you give us a sentence?

It generally means "at the top, on top".

@Shafizadeh I believe it can mean that, yes.

Like a high-five.

Shafizadeh

"we won them buddy up top"

@Cerberus yes exactly

Cerberus

Ah, yes.

He should have added a comma.

Or a full stop.

Shafizadeh

Ah

Cerberus

And he should have said "beat" or "defeat", because "win" takes a thing as an object, not the opponent.

> We beat them, buddy. Up top!

Something like that.

Shafizadeh

12:45 AM

I see

Cerberus

Perhaps it's slang. Or he isn't a native speaker.

Shafizadeh

Yeah he was Indian (I seen him in movie)

Cerberus

Ah OK.

Anonymous

I guess I can imagine a context where them in We won them, buddy! refers to an object: We won the prizes, buddy!

Cerberus

Oh, yes, that's possible.

Or if the prize is a pair of slaves.

Shafizadeh

12:49 AM

Let me ask, English is your native language? @Cerberus and @snailboat

You seems vary expert in English

Cerberus

Nope.

I believe it is Snailboat's.

Shafizadeh

Ah, so good for you

Anonymous

Yes, I'm a native speaker of American English.

Anonymous

I think Cerberus has honorary native speaker status.

Shafizadeh

:-)

@snailboat So you speak English with your family? and your friend? You know, that's one of my dreams.

Friends *

Anonymous

12:52 AM

Yes, I speak English on a daily basis.

Anonymous

I don't get to speak with my family too often, but when I do it's in English :-)

Shafizadeh

:-)

How old are you?

Anonymous

I'm 34.

Shafizadeh

good

you also know Japanese ?

Anonymous

Thanks, I worked hard on getting to 34 :-) I spent about 34 years on it.

Anonymous

12:54 AM

@Shafizadeh I've been learning Japanese for about 18 years or so.

Shafizadeh

:D

Anonymous

Or is it 19 now? I keep forgetting to increment.

Anonymous

Maybe I should start telling people when I started learning so I don't have to do arithmetic.

Shafizadeh

@snailboat Ah, you studying is about languages? (I mean you have learned it in collage?)

Anonymous

I never studied Japanese in school, but I did study language and linguistics.

Anonymous

12:56 AM

I took French and Spanish in school.

Anonymous

Did studied? Nice editing error there, snailboat.

Shafizadeh

OH ... how many language do you know ..! good for you

Where are you living now?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus the 5X? it's fine.

Anonymous

I'm always reluctant to say I "know" any language other than English. Instead, I always say I'm learning them. :-)

Anonymous

I live in the United States. California, to be specific.

Shafizadeh

12:57 AM

Ah .. alrigh

Anonymous

@Shafizadeh I like terms for high fives. They're colorful! I don't really know anyone who uses them in real life, but I learned a bunch of them from fiction.

Anonymous

Up top! (high five way over your head)

Anonymous

On the down low! (well, use your imagination :-)

Hanii Puppy

Even if you're a native English speaker, you're still always learning the language :P

Anonymous

Well, sure.

Hanii Puppy

1:00 AM

But on learning a new language, I'd like to offer you my most enthusiastic contrafibularities.

Anonymous

There's this idealization of the native speaker as someone who acquires their own language perfectly from birth, but in reality we're all exposed to different subsets of the language as we go through life, and we each develop our own personal version of the language.

Anonymous

And everyone we interact with and learn from has their own personal version of the language, too.

Anonymous

We influence each other and learn from each other. Spend time around someone, and you tend to start talking like them. We soak up language like sponges :-)

Anonymous

And language is always changing, so we have to keep adapting to that. The English I speak now is not the English I spoke when I was five years old.

Anonymous

@HaniiPuppy Contrafibularities! Now there's a word!

Anonymous

1:02 AM

Now where's that dictionary . . . ? :-)

Anonymous

Ink and Incapability

Ink and Incapability is the second episode of the third series of the BBC sitcom Blackadder. == Plot == Samuel Johnson (Robbie Coltrane) seeks Prince George's patronage for his new book, A Dictionary of the English Language. The Prince – seeking to amend his reputation as an "utter turnip-head" – is interested, but Blackadder tries to turn him against the idea, condemning the dictionary as "the most pointless book since How to Learn French was translated into French". It soon emerges that Blackadder resents Johnson for apparently ignoring his novel Edmund: A Butler's Tale which, under the pseudonym...

Anonymous

OneLook links only to Wikipedia for that term, and Wikipedia redirects to this page without explanation. I guess it was a nonce-word in an episode of Blackadder? :-)

Anonymous

Sadly, I haven't seen an awful lot of TV shows.

Hanii Puppy

I thought you were actually referring to Blackadder with "where's that dictionary" :P youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08

Shafizadeh

@snailboat :-)

Anonymous

1:08 AM

Ooh, pericombobulation! :-)

user204373

Good evening folks

Hanii Puppy

Morning o/

user204373

wow this room never sleeps

Cerberus

@HaniiPuppy Why are you against hairpins??

angry faces

Hanii Puppy

o-o?

Cerberus

1:13 AM

A fibula is a hairpin. Or any kind of pin.

Fibula (brooch)

A fibula (/ˈfɪbjʊlə/, plural fibulae /ˈfɪbjʊli/) is a brooch or pin for fastening garments. The fibula developed in a variety of shapes, but all were based on the safety-pin principle. Technically, the Latin term, fibulae, refers to Roman brooches; however, the term is widely used to refer to brooches from the entire ancient and early medieval world that continue Roman forms. Nevertheless, its use in English is more restricted than in other languages, and in particular post-Roman brooches from the British Isles are just called brooches (for example, the penannular brooches), where in German they...

user204373

Ok I am heading to my nest. Farewell!

Cerberus

It's actually for clothing, I knew that.

Sleep well.

Hanii Puppy

night o/

I'm not sure which answer to mark as the correct one :X Almost all of them are helpful, and all of them seem to get quite close, but none seem to be hitting the nail on the head. english.stackexchange.com/questions/320546/…

And I don't want to feel like a backside oriface by not giving at least someone the correct answer points.

Anonymous

I dunno. You might be better off asking what the most natural way to express the idea is.

Anonymous

I suppose I like contemporary as an answer, assuming you're willing to use the word the right way.

Shafizadeh

1:17 AM

@snailboat As a note, "dunno" means "I don't know", So you don't need to write "I" before "dunno" ;-) !! (of course I know, you know English more and more and more than me)

Anonymous

@Shafizadeh Yes, but I can if I want to. :-)

Hanii Puppy

But contemporary has to be contemporary with something, defaulting to the present.

Shafizadeh

:-)

Anonymous

Dunno is an example of left-edge deletion: I dunno.

Anonymous

Hmm, that strikethrough isn't really clear.

Anonymous

1:18 AM

[I] dunno.

Anonymous

We tend to call it Conversational Deletion here on EL&U, so if you look that up you can find some more information. Linguists have given it a bunch of different names, though.

Anonymous

"Left-edge deletion" is just a basic description of what happens: words or syllables are removed from the left edge of the utterance, typically predictable function words.

Shafizadeh

Good explanations

Anonymous

I is a pronoun, considered a kind of function word for the purposes of this discussion, and it's generally predictable, so we can get rid of it: Dunno.

Anonymous

You can do the same with all sorts of other utterances, but it's always optional.

Hanii Puppy

1:21 AM

It's great for writing, if you want to make whether someone's talking about them and the group they're in, or just themself, vague.

Anonymous

@HaniiPuppy Well, like I said, "assuming you're willing to use the word the right way".

Anonymous

You can't square peg round hole it.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Unless you were on board Apollo 13. :P

Anonymous

Good point :-)

Damkerng T.

Personally, I like temporary.

Hanii Puppy

1:29 AM

Using the word "the right way" can change the meaning of what I'm saying if it's not the right word, not what I'm trying to say. "Pasties and whelks are somewhat regional things." "goldfish-shoes and trench warfare are somewhat contemporary things."

Anonymous

Well, you're left with a problem without a solution.

Anonymous

You're free not to change the problem, if you like.

Anonymous

I guess I can see what you're asking, and none of the answers really fit.

Anonymous

So it's probably the wrong question to ask.

Hanii Puppy

"The wrong question to ask" was usually what my college lecturers used to say before going off on a tangent, answering a completely different question no-one asked that I may or may not already know the answer to, leaving me nothing but frustrated and just as answerless as I was before. Saying that a question is "The wrong question to ask" only ever felt like a cop-out to me.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

1:39 AM

There may not be a good word that hits the nail on the head. In that case, don't accept any answer that suggests a word: the best answer would be "there is no word". Of course, it's hard to prove a non-existence.

Feel free to upvote any answers you like even if they're not quite there.

Hanii Puppy

I'd kinda feel like a backside though, if I didn't give someone the correct answer points ^^;

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

well... if the answers aren't correct...

Damkerng T.

@HaniiPuppy Ignoring the bureaucracy of an answer that vaguely pertains to the question could land you in a political office someday. :P

Hanii Puppy

xD

Cerberus

@HaniiPuppy I agree: many good answers, impossible to choose.

Hanii Puppy

1:49 AM

As long as you hope you don't come up against Jeremy Paxman.

Cerberus

But, to be honest, I think your question is not 100% clear.

Perhaps because you're not 100% sure what you're looking for.

Because the sentence with the blank that you propose seems unrealistic.

Damkerng T.

@HaniiPuppy xD

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Isn't it looking for a word that describes things restricted to a certain time, the way some things are spatially-restricted to a specific region?

Hanii Puppy

I asked that question specifically because I was talking to someone and wanted to describe something as being sorta-regional-but-for-time, and had to stop the sentence midway through because I didn't know the word.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Like, "pop vs soda" is a regional thing. "thou vs you" is a timey-wimey thing.

Hanii Puppy

1:52 AM

In the specific example that prompted me to ask the question, I was talking about architecture.

Cerberus

I think it makes less sense to say something is related to a specific period of time, perhaps because almost everything is.

And, if you really must express that something is not universal throughout all time, you're always talking about something that belongs to a certain time in the past, so you would just say historical or something.

@HaniiPuppy Old-fashioned? Historical? Out of date?

Hanii Puppy

"historical" suggests in the past though, and not limiting it in the way that "regional" does. Saying something's "historical" would be more like saying it's "east of here" than "regional".

Cerberus

By the way, perhaps you might want to add the context of your question, your discussion about architecture, to your question.

@HaniiPuppy Yes, but what is there is no real west, not in a realistic situation? Then it makes sense to only use east as a direction.

Something is either limited to the present (modern, present-time, perhaps even contemporary, etc.), or to some time in the past (historical, etc.).

Hanii Puppy

Then saying something's "east of here" rather than "regional" becomes even more useless, because all it means then is "Everywhere except right here."

Cerberus

It doesn't necessarily mean "everything except right here": it can mean "some place that isn't here".

Hanii Puppy

2:00 AM

But it doesn't convey any meaning, except "not here".

Cerberus

I understand why you were looking for this word, of course.

Hanii Puppy

"Food varies from place to place, it's very regional" "Food varies from place to place, it's everywhere except here"

Cerberus

I'm just saying historical and modern serve in that function with respect to time.

Hanii Puppy

Just makes me sound hungry :P

Cerberus

Haha.

Lawrence

3:35 AM

@KitZ.Fox Just curious - was the use of the word posing intentional? It's an interesting way to describe the action of typing on a keyboard.

skill patrol

3:47 AM

I think "posting" makes more sense @Lawrence

Lawrence

@skillpatrol I considered it, but "respond to posting" doesn't relate to the physical action, unless it's to do with keyboard feet - but then it's not a response. No relevant words come quickly to mind that become posing via typos (auto-correct doesn't count because that can come from any sequence of characters), hence my question to Kit Z. Fox.

skill patrol

@Lawrence pardon my comment :-)

Lawrence

Quite the contrary; thanks for prompting the clarification! :)

skill patrol

hi @Cerberus

Lawrence

4:03 AM

@HaniiPuppy If none of the contributions quite answers your question, the usual advice is to edit the question to clarify what you're after. In this case, however, the question seems clear enough. There's no obligation to assign a green tick when there isn't a fully-satisfactory answer posted (yet).

@snailboat If you're looking for another term, try answer ellipsis.

Answer ellipsis

Answer ellipsis (= answer fragments) is a type of ellipsis that occurs in answers to questions. Answer ellipsis appears very frequently in any dialogue, and it is present in probably all languages. Of the types of ellipsis mechanisms, answer fragments behave most like sluicing, a point that shall be illustrated below. == Examples == Standard instances of answer ellipsis occur in answers to questions. A question is posed, and the answer is formulated in such a manner to be maximally efficient. Just the constituent that is focused by the question word is uttered. The elided material in the examples...

@HaniiPuppy Consider period - period costume, period architecture, etc. You can also say period-specific - something can be regional (peculiar to a recognised place) and period-specific (peculiar to a recognised time).

Anonymous

@Lawrence The problem is that your term describes something else entirely.

Lawrence

6:40 AM

@snailboat I thought you were referring to the truncation of the answer "I dunno" to just "dunno". Why isn't this answer ellipsis?

crl

7:02 AM

this is an ellip...

skill patrol

7:34 AM

...sis

Anonymous

10:03 AM

@Lawrence For the same reason Going home early? isn't answer ellipsis. Being an answer has nothing to do with it. I can discuss the characteristics in more detail later if you like.

Matt E. Эллен

@KitZ.Fox OK :D

@Mitch I think you'll find it's spelt jyrk

Lawrence

@snailboat Thank you, yes please. On "<strike>Are you</strike> going home early?", that's not an answer, so can't be answer ellipsis. If you're arguing that it isn't ellipsis either, I'm puzzled.

@crl and @skillpatrol: same name, different kind.

Matt E. Эллен

@Lawrence Judging by the wiki page, I think dunno doesn't fall into specifically answer ellipsis because I is a full constituent unit of the sentence, but answer ellipsis removes non-constituent units

so in answering "why didn't you go to school today?", "ill" is answer ellipsis, as "I was" is a non-constituent unit, but "was ill" isn't answer ellipsis, because "I" is a constituent unit

Anonymous

Answer ellipsis isn't a general term for all sorts of ellipsis that could possibly apply to an answer.

Anonymous

I gave you an example of left-edge deletion (really a phonological operation rather than ellipsis, strictly speaking) in a non-answer to show that the operation applies to both answers and non-answers, so it can't be an answer-specific kind of ellipsis.

Lawrence

10:17 AM

@MattE.Эллен Interesting. I hadn't considered that.

Sᴋᴜʟʟ ᴘᴇᴛʀᴏʟ

Is the plural of ellipsis ellipses ?

Anonymous

For discussion, you may want to start by reading Left-edge deletion in English and subject omission in diaries (Weir 2012), which contrasts two similar operations.

Anonymous

@Sᴋᴜʟʟᴘᴇᴛʀᴏʟ Yes, but in this use ellipsis is non-count.

Anonymous

You may know the other phenomenon discussed in the paper by the name "diary drop".

Lawrence

@snailboat Aside from MattE.Эллен's note regarding constitutional units, couldn't it be both left-edge deletion and ellipsis?

Sᴋᴜʟʟ ᴘᴇᴛʀᴏʟ

10:20 AM

This conversation is full of ellipses :D

Anonymous

@Lawrence Well, you can analyze most cases as ellipsis, but that breaks down when you encounter examples that delete parts of words.

Lawrence

@snailboat I don't have access to this paper, just the abstract.

Anonymous

Just a moment.

Anonymous

I uploaded my copy: Left-edge deletion in English and subject omission in diaries (Weir 2012)

Lawrence

@snailboat Inserting the link directly into the browser works :) .

Anonymous

10:24 AM

Oh, okay.

Lawrence

Clicking on the pdf looked like it was going somewhere, but just left the page as it was.

Reading now.

@snailboat Both links get me to same PDF document. Inserting the listed URL from the PDF document directly into the browser gets me to the abstract on a pay-wall. ...

johnchae

Hello

:D

Anonymous

Good evening!

Anonymous

(Morning for me :-)

johnchae

Hey @snailboat

Afternoon where I live ^^

I just finished my transcription for a movie, it only took me around 20 hours for that 1h40' long :P

Anonymous

10:32 AM

Wow! Great job :-)

johnchae

Thank you ^^

Anonymous

What time is it there? It's very early in the morning here.

johnchae

It's 5:30 Pm here

Btw, @snailboat, which one do you prefer: Transcript or Transcription?

In the context above?

Lawrence

(cont'd) Based on the abstract, it seems that left-edge deletion, diary drops (subject omission) and ellipsis are three different things. Given a piece of text, it's possible for all 3 to apply while still being semantically different. By analogy, one could answer the question "What do you see?" with Light, My stuff, and matter, but even when they all apply, they're all completely different. I now understand your earlier point about left-edge deletion and ellipsis being different things.

Anonymous

I suppose they both work, although I think of is more common than for.

Anonymous

10:37 AM

I'd probably say transcription of, but I don't mean to say the alternatives are wrong.

Anonymous

I think linguists tend to say transcription more than transcript when referring to writing down what they hear, but transcript is probably more common in general use.

johnchae

Thank you @snailboat, I always used 'for', but thanks for pointing that out, I will keep that in mind.

Anonymous

If you'll take a look at this corpus search: corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=47086306

2

Anonymous

You can see how transcript and transcription are used, and how of and for are used.

Anonymous

You can click each of the four results on the upper-right portion to see a list of examples for each one, which will show up in the lower-right portion. Then you can click these results individually to see the full context for each.

Anonymous

10:43 AM

As you can see, people do use for, but when they do they usually aren't using it to indicate what was being transcribed.

johnchae

Wow, thank you, I never knew this site before, to check which word is more used frequently I always used Google and then compared the results. But now that that I know the site, it'd help me a lot then. Thank you.

Kit Z. Fox

@Lawrence it was a typo for pressing.

Sᴋᴜʟʟ ᴘᴇᴛʀᴏʟ

Aha!

Anonymous

@johnchae COCA is a balanced corpus of American English, 80% written and 20% spoken (spontaneous speech). There are a number of other corpora you can use with other characteristics, and you can find many of them on corpus.byu.edu

Anonymous

I tend to check COCA before any other corpus because it's quite large (though obviously much smaller than Google Search!). For British English I recommend the British National Corpus, though it is slightly older and somewhat smaller.

Anonymous

10:48 AM

I don't recommend treating Google Search as a corpus, as they've never attempted to make their search result estimates particularly accurate, and you can't look at the actual data.

Anonymous

Google Books Ngram Viewer is also a powerful tool and the Google Books corpus is much larger than COCA, but it has a lot of flaws that make it difficult to recommend.

johnchae

Got it, thank you!

Lawrence

@KitZ.Fox Thanks for solving that mystery. :)

johnchae

11:16 AM

"Althought the number of orders... on a daily basis, we have been enjoying a steady increase in sales over the last six months". I would use "varies" to fill out the blank, but I see many other choose "have varies" to match the perfect tense with the latter phrase? So which one is correct, guys?

Anonymous

Did you mean to type has varied?

johnchae

Oh yes, sorry, it should have been "has varied".

Anonymous

They both seem grammatical to me.