@DariusJahandarie Me too.

We use comments differently than the sites where these decisions got made.

Most (all?) of the language sites do.

There are a few site-level settings.

They're pretty minor.

Well, yes, sort of, but you can start meta discussions and such yourself

Either on Japanese.SE or MSO

@ogicu8abruok I think ごっつあん is pronounced like ごっつぁん sometimes

@ogicu8abruok Japanese used to have クヮ I think

ja.forvo.com/word/%E3%81%94%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A4%E3%81%82%E3%82%93/…

Hehe!

I got the urge to look them up, and ござらっしゃる is in dictionaries. 〜しゃる is listed as a 助動詞 derived from せらる = "尊敬の助動詞「す」の未然形「せ」に尊敬の助動詞「らる」の付いた「せらる」の転。"

I guess in some dialects they stick しゃる (often in the form of っしゃる) onto stuff.

Is the さ thing some sort of 東北弁?

@DariusJahandarie English is a really complicated language. But there are plenty of good books describing it that you can rely on without having to analyze it yourself :-)

You can at least use those as starting points

Probably no reference grammar in any language is 100% correct or has 100% coverage, but . . .

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002) is currently considered the most authoritative descriptive grammar--by at least some people, anyway ;-)

Quirk et al. (1985) still has pretty good descriptive adequacy, although theoretically it's not as neat

For a more generative type approach, you could take a look at McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English (2nd ed. 1998)

That's not quite the same kind of book as the other two

Quirk et al. (perhaps confusingly) also has the initials CGEL, except that the C stands for Comprehensive rather than Cambridge, which is why I chose to refer to it by the authors

Habit :-)

Both CGELs are bulky reference grammars, ~1800 pages each

I wish A Reference Grammar of Japanese were as neatly broken down as CGEL

Instead, it comes across as a very long essay

There are a lot of pedagogical grammars, all of them much shorter than those reference grammars. Huddleston & Pullum (the chief authors of CGEL) put together A Student's Introduction to English Grammar based on CGEL, distilled down to about 300 pages

It introduces all the main concepts from CGEL, often in easier-to-understand language, but obviously isn't nearly as detailed and doesn't have the descriptive adequacy

It's structured similarly to CGEL, though it doesn't have analogues for some of the chapters at all--there's nothing at all about punctuation in the little book, for example

Whereas in CGEL, chapter 20 is co-authored by the author of The Linguistics of Punctuation, Geoffrey Nunberg

So depending on what you're looking for, that book could be a good introduction to read through in your spare time

But CGEL is pretty approachable (for a linguistics student). It defines most of its terms pretty well

I honestly think most of the generative stuff is less intuitive, and so, more opaque, and I'm happy CGEL doesn't go down that path

You could call them neo-traditionalists--they borrow terms from traditional grammar as a starting point, then diverge any time they feel it helps them describe things more adequately

In some cases, they diverge in ways that provide simpler overall patterns, but reuse terms from other theories in ways that might not be entirely intuitive

For example, in most of modern linguistics, determiners have been separated out from adjectives, and that's become mainstream enough that most people have adopted the distinction

Simply because they're very different word classes with very different distribution, and it's incoherent to describe the two using the same words

But in CGEL, they swap determinative and determiner, so the former is a part of speech (like adjective) and the latter a function

It makes sense, but it can be confusing if you're talking to people who aren't used to their approach yet, so relying on CGEL in explanations sometimes necessitates defining your terms for people more often than you might have to otherwise

(There are good arguments for doing so, which they lay out, but it can still be tricky if you're describing something to someone and they're used to different terms.)

They also collapse the gerund and participle -ing forms into one category, gerund-participial, which is somewhat contentious

But I have yet to read through any reference grammar that doesn't redefine terms to some extent.

I think coming up with a coherent set of classifications is part of the task of writing a reference grammar.

There are a number of other pedagogical grammars. The most popular reference among L2 learners of English is Michael Swan's Practical English Usage

It's a good book. He draws his analyses heavily from both Huddleston & Pullum's 2002 CGEL and Quirk et al's 1985 CGEL

It's not nearly as comprehensive as a reference grammar, of course.

Longman's grammar is also popular, although it wouldn't be my first choice to recommend to someone like you

Anyway, I think that's about my overview of books on English grammar. Of course, there are many more :-)

I wish the "stay logged in" thing worked for me on jstor. For some reason, I have to log in every time I want to read a paper.

> Since it is possible to have a traversal object with a TRANSITIVE motion verb, we fase the prospect of finding two o-marked phrases used as adjuncts for a single verb--one to mark the affected object and one to mark the traversal object.

> Such sentences will not turn up often (at least not in print) because usually one or the other of the objects (if not both) is usually backgrounded with wa or foregrounded with mo, and these focus markers normally require suppression of the marking of the subject-object distinction. But we would have to assume that such sentences are grammatical in order to account for the actual sentences with wa and mo even if we could not find them.

See pp.255-256

Under "multiple surface objects"

I asked about this on JLSE, but the answer was specifically that these were not grammatical

English Wikipedia has major problems when it comes to linguistics and grammar topics, but it also has some interesting stuff, and some accurate bits

Oh, Wiktionary!

I thought we were talking about Wikipedia

> Significantly, it turns out that constructions like (1) and (2) also cease to be well-formed if the o-phrases therein should be arranged to occur in direct sequence, undisturbed either by another constituent or by the presence of a distinct juncture; in contrast to (1) and (2), the following are ill-formed.

Did I make a transcription error? 馬を学校の前を通らせる and 馬を学校の前を通らせる look similar to me.

Well, they were originally romanized, and I probably killed one of Martin's juncture markers.

> Umá o || gakkoo no máe o | tooraséru.

> Every spoken phrase of Japanese displays a tune that is chosen out of a limited stock of arrangements of stretches of lower and higher pitches. The phrases are separated by boundaries we call "junctures".

> A major juncture (marked by the double bar || ) tells us that the phrases on either side are pronounced rather independently of each other, with the full value for each accent phrase. A minor boundary (marked by the single bar | ) warns us that the pattern of the later phrase is somewhat altered by the preceding phrase; for example, if there is a fall of pitch it begins from a lower plateau.

I figured people here would like it written in Japanese better than written in Martin's romanization, but it has a point--he shows pitch accent as well as those phrase boundaries

Why? "ou" makes no sense.

It's not pronounced "ou".

You'd prefer what, oː?

"Other things" here being a correspondence to kana?

It is a little weird spelling two different pronunciations the same way.

追う and 王

ou and ou

Or ou and oo?

向こう can be unaccented or have its accent on 2, but it's oː either way

When you pronounce /u/, you "compress" your lips (bring them together so they meet at the left and right sides) but don't round them (like in English or French)

That's true in /ou/ too

There's a good picture in The Sounds of Japanese by Vance

Page 55

Hahaha!

My living space is mostly books.

For what it's worth, /ou/ and /oo/ sound fairly different to me.

Regardless of pitch accent

Although I might be judging that impression mainly on careful speech

In rapid, less careful, speech I suppose it might be harder to tell the difference

Although I'm just learning, I've been trying to help a friend of mine with her Japanese class, and I think I finally managed to get her hooked on Anki :-) Hooray!

I feel like using the language every day is more important, but Anki is helpful for the stuff that you want to remember but you aren't exposed to often enough to remember on its own

I wouldn't use Anki for anything you remember without special effort

(Probably < 5% of vocab needs to go into Anki)

I remember reading a little bit about that.

But I can't find it in my notes!

It was something like: using a single-mora 連用形 in an honorific construction is normally forbidden

Martin notes: "But おし, the honorific infinitive of する, is sometimes used as a command: …安心おし 'put your mind at rest'"

The above observations are about the お-V-になる construction, though...

Well, Nishiyama says it's a phonological minimal word restriction.

That's more of a description than a "cause", though.

I'm not sure why there would be a requirement that the phonological word consist of two moras.

(And only in that construction? Hmm...)