Ummm…I’m 49 and my son is 18. So unless you’re suggesting either of us are insufficiently bright to follow the discussion, then, no, we’re good. I still don’t get the “colorless green nouns” thing though.
I’m not sure I get it myself. In a 1957 publication Chomsky did, as means of an example, give two sentences: colorless grean ideas sleep furiously, and furiously sleep ideas green colorless. The point he was getting at was that “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” has never occured in an English conversation, and in the statistical models used to determine grammaticalness at the time, both of those sentences would have been found to be equally ungrammatical. His point, however, was that the former sentence WAS perfectly grammatical, even though it was nonsensical.
Anyway, when I saw it in a question, and noticed that the second half (“would fruit flies like a banana?”) lacked a determiner ‘the’, which seemd related to the whole “in hospital/in THE hospital” piece we’d been throwing about, I essentially answered “No, because I like having a determiner”. (presupposition is the main thing english determiners are responsible for. ^^)
Oh, you’re good then! I wasn’t suggesting anything of the sort… for some reason, I assumed this was a case of a bright 5-10 year old being inquisitive. I do research in primary language acquisition, which results in me lecturing in elementary schools a lot, so I was offering to find a way to reformat “British english appears to use collocational restriction to avoid triggering presupposition failure” into smart elementary school speech so you didn’t have to agonize over doing the same. 
Try taking multiple graduate seminars from him. (He’s actually a really nice guy, but I do feel your pain.)
And while I’m here:
Why do my university students tend to favor British usages like “amongst” when writing? Is it because they think a more unusual (to them) form is therefore more formal? I get a lot of hypercorrections (“whom” for “who,” “and I” for “and me”), but I don’t really understand abandoning the correct word for one that doesn’t occur at all in your dialect.
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Explain the difference between "free variance" and "allophone." -
Why do people--even people like Marianne Celce-Murcia--insist that the the unreal past conditional is the "subjunctive."
I believe that: “If I’d seen him, I’d’ve talked to him about the problem.” to be unreal past conditional.
And I’d say that “I suggest he contact the City Council about the problem.” to be subjunctive.
Also, which IPA symbols do you prefer to use to distinguish between the inter medial /t/ in American English, such as the difference between “little,” “button,” “Santa Monica” the way Angelenos say it.
You mention studying how adults acquire languages. I’m a native English speaker taking an Arabic course. Do you have any tricks, tips, or techniques that will help me excel at this?
TIA
Testy
I’m familiar with the basic history of Hangul, since the story is easy to find on the internet, but you mentioned it in response to a question about the design of the letters/characters being based on the actual anatomy of speaking. This I haven’t heard much about, and would very much like to.
Ooh, I’ve got a related question – why is it common for my (native-English-speaking, first-year university) students to use constructions in writing that they would never use in spoken English? For example, I read a paper recently whose author used the phrase “extreme conditioned people” to mean “people exposed to extreme conditions,” and I can’t imagine any native speaker saying that in conversation. Where do phrases like this come from?
The problem is not about collocation. The problem is that people ask the question beginning with “Why…” It’s kind of like asking: “Why are violets purple?”
A TRUE linguist would just say: “Because they’re violets.”
Not to dismiss the origin of the word “violet.” That’s a different question.
So the Brits say: “My family are…” and the Americans say “My family is…”
Don’t waste your professors’ time with silly questions. It might effect your prospects for a good PhD reccommendation. There might be a “reason,” but the answer is probably something like: “In the South, they like to eat okra. In the north, they don’t care for it.”
“Collocation” my foot.
I think I misunderstood this. The sentence is indeed technically grammatical. While these indeed would probably never have occur in real life, Chomsky was pointing out that no one would ever actaully utter such a sentence. The irony was that as a structuralist, he was a pure linguist.
That was a distinction between pure linguistics and applied linguistics. Applied linguists go out and record (preferrably on video) what people actually say. Then they analyze what people actually say and try to come up with theories.
Pure linguists just make up sentences and then write 500-pages tombs to theorize what people say.
To the OP:
What is your opinion on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ? I took a class on psycholinguistics, and half the semester was spent talking about a book that discussed 12 experiments based on this theory. I think the book was called “Language in Thought” but I’m not sure. I’ll try to look for it later.
Me personally, I lean more towards the strong side. The 100% strong side is obviously false, that language concretely determines thought, but I think it’s more true than the opposite idea. In any case, it’s supremely fascinating, dont you agree?
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How does hearing relate to speaking? I grew up in a an area where we pronounce Mary/marry/merry all the same, and when I moved away, it took me ages to hear the difference when other people said them, and then more ages for me to pronounce them differently.
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I work with adult ESOL students and my current challenge is helping native South American Spanish speakers learn to say an English “J.” Any tips on how to break the J barrier? Please note it would be greatly appreciated if you could word your answer in a way that a. I can easily understand and b. then in turn convey to students who are extremely new English learners.
My fiancee’ s mother is Icelandic, and while my fiancee spoke the language until she was five or so she has now forgotten most of it and has to re-learn it. Since I’m intriuged by the culture and language I’m attempting to learn it as well. I find I’m having two distinct issues that may be related to my being a native english speaker. Normally, I have little to no trouble reproducing sounds I hear, however two escape me entirely.
The first is something along the lines of “eh-thv” It is a fairly common syllable in the middle of words. I cannot pronounce it correctly or integrate into a word without adding a sort of japanese-ish “eh” or “ah” sound between it and it’s surrounding syllables.
The second is “Thot” or “Thut”. This one always throws me for a loop because it always seems to be swallowed, or mumbled within a word. I find it difficult to pronounce because it apparently is not supposed to be articulated, but rather sort of semi pronounced on the inhale.
Lastly they seem to speak at a constant mumble. I cannot distinguish any “words” out of a sentance. Is this common to Icelandic and other Norse Language groups? Am I doomed here?
I’m the fiancee. As he’s mentioned, I’m a passive bilingual. It’s really frustrating, as it’s difficult for me to pick up the speaking and writing part of Icelandic (again), even though I’m reasonably good at understanding when listening to a conversation. Any tips on how to try and regain a language that less than 400,000 people actually speak? I’ve been having a hard time finding stuff beyond the basics of The University of Iceland’s online programs.
Personally, I think that it’s going to take him time and a closer ear to get the sounds right, in addition to a lot of practice. Icelandic is an aspirated language, so it’s just going to be difficult for him because the pronunciations are a LOT more subtle than in spoken American English.
I’ll have you know I’ve been paying extremely close attention to what I’m hearing. I just can’t seem to reproduce what I’ve heard. Japanese is subtle, Icelanders mumble.
Well I’m not a syntactician, but I’m still capable of seeing a pattern in that type of variation, like we’ve discussed, and I think it’s an answerable question. To quote my prof: “Presumably this “the”-free usage is contingent on the location referred
to being either unique (and can thus be viewed as inherently definite)
– e.g., if there’s just one hospital, or just one library, or whatever
– or else being viewed as a more abstract category or kind or
something like that (I’m probably not using the proper semantics
lingohere ), like in the case of “school” above. That is, “at school”
doesn’t so much refer to being at a specific place (a building with a
particular function, etc.) as it refers to a kind of activity or state.
Also, think about things like “at dinner” vs. “at the dinner” and how
they mean different things, just like “at school/church” vs. “at the
school/church” do.”
Sounds like collocation to me. :rolleyes:
I’ve never looked at this, but my off-the-cuff guess is that they think British english sounds “better”, and so they fall into the habit of using what they think is correct English vocabulary in order to give their paper what they think is a more formal feel.
- The quick and dirty answer is that allophony occurs at the language level, and free variation occurs at the speaker level. Every speaker of the same dialectlanguage will display similiar allophonic trends; English, for instance, tends to aspirate stops at the beginning of words, but it doesn’t aspirate them at the end of words. Free variation, on the other hand, while often manifesting in allophones, is often most obvious in individual dialects; “potato” has two distinct pronunciations in the united states, and all speakers are aware of these distinctions, but usage usually depends on your dialect.
I’n not a morphologist, so I’m going to steer clear of this one; people are yelling at me for disagreeing with their opinion on syntax, and I don’t care enough to defend my background on an area I have very little formal training in to strangers. … I’m sure there are other linguists around who would give a much better answer.
I’ve never listened to speakers from Los Angeles… are you certain that they aren’t just using a glottal stop instead of a /t/?