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| Thursday, November 30th, 2006 | 6:41 pm
[night_tracker]
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There should be a day when everyone should be required by law to talk in deep structure. A day should be when law require everyone to talk in deep structure.Best rule for Kings' Cup ever. "YOU! YOU MUST ONLY TALK IN DEEP STRUCTURE!" "WTF? GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" or "Huh?" | | Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 | 5:23 am
[banjomensch] |
oh man, I just thought of the best title for a phono paper analyzing sibilant harmony in chumash. "The [ant]s go marching leftwards iteratively, hurrah, hurrah!" see? catchy and descriptively accurate. | | Saturday, January 7th, 2006 | 8:32 pm
[peanutxpeanut]
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| | Friday, October 7th, 2005 | 1:06 pm
[jeffreyatw]
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Di
http://www.jamaica-star.com/Every article quotes people, while trying to capture their accent... it's a great exercise in reading things out loud to understand them, if nothing else. | | Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 | 4:28 pm
[peanutxpeanut]
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Does anyone else say this: ADULT (n) ['æ.dəɫt] ADULT (ajd) [ə.'dʌɫt] ? I don't think my usage is as clean-cut as noun/modifier, but I don't know if I've ever heard someone else say ['æ.dəɫt] like I do | | Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 | 9:31 pm
[peanutxpeanut]
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| | Friday, September 16th, 2005 | 10:43 am
[banjomensch] |
Okay, so last night, I was thinking about coordination. My undergrad understanding of the phenomenon states that an XP is made a child of a coordinating phrase, which consists of XP1, a coordinator, and XP2. This prohibition is an important one, it allows sentences like "the dog and the cat are angry." and stars "the dog and ran to the store are angry." This is also terribly important in complements of verbs: "They made him eat the pie and go to bed." "They made him angry and sleepy." "They made him angry and go to bed." * (BAAAH!) But check it: As the complement to the copula, wacky, wacky shit can happen: "He is eating the pie and going to bed." "He is angry and sleepy." "He is angry and going to bed." "He is angry and in the garage." It seems that there is some kind of copular complement phrase that gets coordinated. Whats y'all's analysis? | 10:33 am
[peanutxpeanut]
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We're weeding the collection at the public library I work at, and I was fortunate enough to be working when the linguistics/languages books were being processed for discard. Technically we're not supposed to take discards home for liability reasons, but... If you can convince me that you'll enjoy/use one of these more than I will, I'll be happy to mail it to you. ( the list ) | 9:43 am
[therealnickjr] |
Sounds cocky?
Here is the profile description of a facebook group called "Hottest People on Facebook": "This highly selective group is for the best looking people on facebook...all coming together to look at each other. Sounds cocky? thats because we are." That Sounds cocky? bit is interesting to me for at least two reasons. Actually, it's mostly the s on the end of sounds that I find intriguing. What is intended as the subject of that short question? Could it be the previous statement, in which case singular verb agreement is justified (cf Does that sound cocky?)? Or is it the members of the group, the we in the following sentence? The only thing that bars that second interpretation for me is the singular verb agreement, but otherwise, the way the sentences are sequenced, it would seem appropriate for the writer to be asking if the members of the group sound cocky. Personally, I would have written Sound cocky? not just for the above reason, but also (and this is the interesting thing), because I would never say Sounds cocky? at all, no matter what the subject is. Why? Because for me, Sound cocky? is short for both Does that sound cocky? and Do we sound cocky?. The verb sound is without any suffix in either case, but not because of verb agreement. It is without any suffix because it is preceded by the auxiliary do, which demands that the first verb to follow it be in the bare form. It is not uncommon to drop an inverted auxiliary do and subject of a yes-no question. The derivation is something like this: 1) That sounds cocky2) That does sound cocky3) Does that sound cocky?4) That sound cocky?5) Sound cocky?The subject, of course, should be recoverable from the context (I'm sure the ellision of the subject is much more complicated than I'm making it sound here, but that's not really what I'm interested in right now.), and the auxiliary is usually recoverable from the form of the first overt verb in the sentence. Sure, there are other auxiliaries that require the following verb to be in the bare form, namely the modals ( must, should, can, etc.), but I think these are too semantically contentful to be ellided anyway. Auxiliary do, however, is semantically empty. It only serves the purpose of having an auxiliary to invert with the subject in a yes-no question. So it is a prime candidate for ellision. So the dropping of do is nothing new. What I find interesting is that the main verb, in the example I've been discussing, did not remain in its bare form, as, I would argue, is the standard case. Now, whether this is just a sporadic error, or a manifestation of a different grammatical rule from my own, I can't tell. I'm not quite sure how to accurately test something like this on google. But if it is a real rule in someone's grammar, it could be explained as a counterforce to neutralization: since both a do question with a plural subject and one with a singular subject can end up in the same surface form, maybe this is a way to maintain the difference. | | Thursday, September 8th, 2005 | 5:16 pm
[therealnickjr] |
thoughts on insist Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. page 41 "Bacon himself came from this [upper] class, had a good bit of land, and was probably more enthusiastic about killing Indians than about redressing the grievances of the poor. But he became a symbol of mass resentment against the Virginia establishment, and was elected in the spring of 1676 to the House of Burgesses. When he insisted on organizing armed detachments to fight the Indians, outside official control, Berkeley proclaimed him a rebel and had him captured, whereupon two thousand Virginians marched into Jamestown to support him." I never noticed this before, but insist seems to have at least two or three meanings, one of which entails the truth of its complement: 1) Bacon insisted that the Indians posed a threat.2) Bacon insisted that they fight the Indians.3) Bacon insisted on fighting the Indians, but we didn't have enough resources.4) Bacon insisted on fighting the Indians, despite our warnings, because he is a very stubborn person.In (1), insist means to strongly assert something, to strongly commit yourself to the truth of a proposition; this is probably the most basic meaning. In (2), insist means to strongly urge, in order to bring about action. (3) seems to me to have pretty much the same meaning as (2), but just displays a different syntactic arrangement: (2) shows insist accompanied by a CP complement headed by that, while (3) has insist followed by a PP complement headed by on, which in turn is followed by a non-finite clausal complement. (Not really relevant, but while the two versions of insist in (1) and (2) seem to display the same syntactic behavior, the one in (2) is marked by having the option of being followed by a subjunctive verb: cf Bacon insists that Williams fight(s) the Indians.) It is (4), however, which displays what I think is the meaning in the passage above, and which came as a surprise to me. It has the same syntactic characteristics as (3)--in fact they are the same sentence, with the following clause present only to help see the different meanings--but the meaning I'm going for in (4) is the one in which insist entails the truth of its clausal complement (actually, the clausal complement of on). Here, insist means something like "do anyway," which I try to make more obvious with the despite our warnings bit. I'm only guessing that the meaning in (4) is what Zinn intended, because I doubt William Berkeley would have arrested Bacon just because he insisted on something in the (2) and (3) sense. Plus, there probably wouldn't have been much "capturing" involved if Bacon were right there in the House of Burgesses, insisting on something. Another interesting semantic difference between (3) and (4) is that there doesn't appear to be any easily recoverable subject for the non-finite clause in (3), while the subject for the same clause in (4) is understood to be Bacon. In (3), it seems that Bacon isn't really insisting that anyone in specific fight the Indians, but just that they are fought by someone, or maybe the subject is understood to be his collective audience, including himself. It's hard for me to tell. (4), however, can only be interpreted with Bacon as the fighter. Current Mood:  curiousCurrent Music: None! | | Thursday, August 11th, 2005 | 7:23 pm
[xaiero]
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So... Pragmatics.... so good or no good? Current Music: UGH JACK JOHNSON | | Friday, August 5th, 2005 | 1:08 am
[sarkat]
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Translator job
I found this in my search for jobs. I thought I'd pass it along in case anyone out there knows either Japansese for Korean well enough to want to apply for it. "We are a small Santa Clara company looking for translation services. We are looking for both a Japanese and a Korean translator for conference call interpreting and some written documents." http://www.craigslist.com/sby/etc/89003915.html | | Thursday, June 30th, 2005 | 11:44 pm
[chipmunkwarrior]
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hello
so i'm a newly admitted freshman with proposed linguistics as my major... who wants to tell me everything they know about this major at ucsc and linguistics in general? any takers? Current Music: Radiohead - Creep | | Monday, June 6th, 2005 | 2:08 am
[sarkat]
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Wow... people..
Wow. I start a community and don't watch it for a day and suddenly its full of... people. Largely people I don't even know! Where the heck did y'all come from?? Current Mood: bemused | | Sunday, June 5th, 2005 | 5:45 pm
[blue_j]
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| 1:11 pm
[peanutxpeanut]
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151 etc
I've got a question for y'all-- How come the recordings I take of voices sound different than the actual speech I hear? It sounds like some low frequencies are missing, perhaps. My voice sounds like a 10-year old. ps. What is everyone doing for all their projects? ( mine- 116 and 151 )pss. WTF a take home final and a Semantics II squib | 8:04 am
[blue_j]
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| 3:46 am
[andywata]
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Hey, is anyone else taking LING 101 in the fall? | 2:04 am
[jeffreyatw]
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Hello, I am a Linguistics major and yet I have not taken a single Linguistics class. Bye! | 12:33 am
[gogalucky]
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i'm in intro. vera lee-schoenfeld is hawt. ling is hawt. oki. |
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