Questions tagged [english]
A Germanic language, which originated from England, and is considered the leading language in international communication. For non-linguistic questions about the English language, visit one of our sister sites English Language & Usage or English Language Learners.
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Are the Croatian word "struna" (string of a musical instrument) and the English word "string" related? [closed]
So, are the Croatian word "struna" (string of a musical instrument) and the English word "string" related? And, if so, why does the English word contain -ng, while the Croatian ...
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Why are voiceless plosives (p, t, k) unaspirated after /s/?
Take for example English voiceless plosives such as /p t k/ which are aspirated at the start of a stressed syllable and before a vowel as in kill, tar, pie:
[kʰɪl]
[tʰɑː(r)]
[pʰaɪ]
But after a ...
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Aspiration of Voiceless Affricate in English
My question is about the voiceless affricate /tʃ/ ( CHair, maTCH, baTCH, strucTure) as it is used in ENGLISH:
English has two affricates: the /tʃ/ in "chair" and the /dʒ/ in "jar".
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Do non-tonal languages evolve into tonal languages?
I have read that the language in China did not always use tones or was less reliant on them. Native speakers have emphasized to me how much more compactly the same idea can be expressed in Mandarin ...
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We typically say rates are 'hiked' and cuts are 'swingeing' - is there a term to describe this?
You never really hear of interest rates 'going up', they're always 'hiked'.. and government cuts are rarely 'deep' or 'severe',. they're 'swingeing'. Is there a word/term for either this use of ...
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Chomsky on licensing parasitic gaps in English
Chomsky (1995: 69) says (115) that "(115b) is ruled out for independent reasons of control theory." What reasons?
(115) a. the book that you filed [without PRO reading e]
b. *the book that ...
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Are there languages where grammatical parallelism does not matter?
English has a strong preference for parallelism (Wikipedia link), even though sentences lacking parallelism are still considered grammatically correct:
Good:
She likes cooking, jogging, and reading.
...
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Emphasis through capitalizing the first letters of words
I've begun to see this style of emphasis used more frequently, like in the following passage:
People whose careers depend on the great stuff working as advertised may decide instead that they Simply ...
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How to represent and distinguish between inflected and related words in English dictionary?
In English we have these words:
create
created
creates
creating
creator
creation
creationism
creativity
creative
I am unsure which one is an inflection, and which one is a new word. Created and ...
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I'd like for this to be a word. Why isn't it?
I am a high school student with a question, and I am not entirely sure this is the right place to voice it. I often encounter situations where I want to use a word to describe a specific situation I'm ...
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Does English have genuine literary conversation without the use of Latin and Greek words?
The most languages have their own literary and original way of conversation and writing, which is different from common conversation. This dichotomy between the speech of the courtiers and the ...
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Why do so many loan words have a different pronunciations of letters like X and Q (among others)?
I have been thinking about the following question quite a bit recently: why do other languages, which often do not even use the Latin alphabet, seemingly get to decide on the way their words get ...
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The Origin of the Word 'Mammoth' [closed]
As per the Wiktionary article the origin of the world is Russian:
From obsolete Russian ма́мант (mámant), modern ма́монт (mámont), probably from a Uralic language, such as Proto-Mansi *mē̮ŋ-ońt (“...
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Information Selection with Because
I'm having difficulty with the extraction of information from sentences containing the word "because."
I was analyzing a text about the advantages and disadvantages of open-plan offices. ...
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The acceptability of verbal phrase ellipsis and subject-auxiliary inversion in triple modal sentences
I have been researching on multiple modal constructions, which is a feature used in the Southern United States. Unlike Standard English, this dialect allows more than one modal auxiliary per clause.
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What is the name of this sound change, and do we have it in English?
I'm a Persian, I'm from Iran, and I speak Farsi.
Here, we have a very strange rule that we turn آ into و in informal conversations.
For example:
خانه = house (formal) /kh a ne/
خونه = house (informal) ...
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Is there any type of app that trains my english skills?
I like to write some more in english and for that I want to improve my vocabulary (and overall grammar skills). Is there an app that focuses on teaching new words and explains their meaning? I know ...
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Why is the vowel in “caught” in General American English transcribed to /ɔ/
The /ɔ/ sounds (as in “caught”/“bought”) in RP and GA sound very distinct to me. The one in GA sounds more like /ɒ/ to me.
Why isn’t it transcribed to /ɒ/ in the dictionary?
And I wonder what the ...
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Similar and cognate words between Swedish and Iranian are related to which historical era?
I have been studying languages and history for more than thirty years but I am still in surprise how some of Indo-European languages that has separated thousands years ago from each other still ...
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What is one-place predicate and two-place predicate?
When I read some linguistic articles, I encountered two names. One is called a "one-place predicate" and the other is a "two-place" predicate. So what are the definitions of these ...
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Impossible bigrams in the English Language
Is there a list that contains every two letter combination that is not found in any English words? I have searched for a very long time and found nothing. It would also be useful if I had three letter ...
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Phrase structure tree of a Wh question [closed]
The sentence would be "Whose dirty underwear is this?".
I assume that the base (is that called deep structure sentence?) would be "This is whose dirty underwear" but I'm not sure what ...
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Was the word 'vehicle' first used as a concrete noun or as an abstract noun?
So I recently learned that the word 'vehicle' was first used in the 1650s and that got me thinking about the way in which it was first used, and whether this use would've been literal or metaphorical. ...
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What is the difference between attributive adjective and predicative adjective?
When I began to read articles related to English adjectives, I often encountered these two names: "predicative adjectives" and "attributive adjectives". It seems that the author ...
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What is a psych verb?
As mentioned in this comment by John Lawler to this question I asked yesterday, know is not a psych verb.
What is a psych verb? I've heard this term before and vaguely guessed that it was a word ...
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Does "and" come from the PIE word for "and"?
From the etymology of and:
Old English and, ond, originally meaning "thereupon, next," from Proto-Germanic *unda (cf. Old Saxon endi, Old Frisian anda, Middle Dutch ende, Old High German enti, ...
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By what mechanism do `want` and `know` fail to form commands?
Verbs like want and know seem to resist being used in imperative constructions. In particular, it does not seem possible to use them to command people to change their mind about what they want or to ...
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Question about prepositions in English idioms
I have noticed that many idioms in English include a fixed preposition at the same time that the complement of the preposition is free, e.g.
a. light a fire under X
b. carry a torch for X
c. cast a ...
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Are there any studies on some English passive verb constructions currently being replaced by new intransitive senses?
In the past couple of years I've noticed a new trend in younger generations of native English speakers, at least in American English and Australian English. But I can't find it discussed anywhere on ...
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What are the contemporary schools of linguistics? [closed]
What are the contemporary schools of linguistics?
Which of them are more influential and which are more promising?
Which schools do the following books on English grammars belong to:
Huddleston & ...
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Are the Croatian word "radije" (rather) and English word "rather" related?
The Croatian word "radije" means "rather". Is it related to English "rather"? On one hand, it seems that they can't be, as the Croatian 'd' (in "radije") ...
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Is morphology of English mostly done by its etymology?
I have the following observations and not sure if they are correct.
Whenever I want to learn about the morphology of a word in English, e.g. the affixes and root of the word, my search on the ...
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Why did English lose declensions while German retained them?
Why did (or more specifically what caused) English lose declensions whilst they were retained in German? I ask as I have recently been reading into the various Germanic languages and it struck me that ...
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How does Chinese function so well without determiners and a lot of the subtle detail that English has?
I have been typing into Google Translate and Yabla all day (Yabla is basically a Chinese glossing tool), trying to get a sense at how simple English sentences with prepositions are translated into ...
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Why in English words is [o] followed by [ʊ]?
The close-mid back rounded vowel is, according to Wikipedia, "usually diphthongized to [oʊ]".
Examples: row, also.
In fact, in the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary I didn't see o ...
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Can dialects of English have phonetic aspirated consonants?
Although the traditional phonemic assignment of English <j> and <ch> are /dʒ/ and /tʃ/, respectively, I believe there's an argument to be made that these are realized in some American ...
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Do modal auxiliaries in English never change their forms?
Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics says that in English:
The modal auxiliaries never change their form: they occupy the T-
head position in their own right.
The non-modal auxiliaries, like main ...
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Allophones of dental fricatives (/θ/, /ð/) in English
I've noticed in my own speech (West Riding of Yorkshire, male, born in the '90s) two different ways I have of pronouncing phonemes /θ/ and /ð/:
The tip of my tongue sits in the gap between my top and ...
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Searching for an English Whats-app Corpus
I am searching an English Whats-app Corpus in order to analyse a linguistic phenomena. I had some difficulties to find one and maybe some of you can help me out. It is only for corpus driven study and ...
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Does the concept of slang exist in cultures without established written or formal education traditions?
In English and, presumably, many of the world's other commonly spoken languages, there exists a rough category of words considered slang. This concept is not quite the same as taboo (many slang words ...
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Tomorrow, he should pretend he *was* on a bus
"He is afraid of flying. When he flies tomorrow, he should pretend he was on a bus instead of an airplane."
I uttered the above statement in a recent conversation. Of course, I could replace the "...
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What are the current views on the existence of a "zero article" in English?
As is well known, under certain circumstances in English, there can be acceptable noun phrases (NPs) that lack a determiner. Some cases include:
(i) "indefinite uncountable nominals" (There ...
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Is there a phonological rule or process that dictates the choice between voiced and unvoiced "th" in the English word "with"?
There are two different pronunciations recorded for the "th" sound in the English word "with" in most dictionaries (Webster, OED). I was wondering if one or the other is preferred ...
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Axioms in English: If we try to find the root meaning of every English word in the dictionary,which word will we land on the most [duplicate]
Assume an alien has landed on Earth and wants to learn English with the help of an English Dictionary.
He looks up the meaning of "the".
Meaning of "the":
"denoting one or more people or things ...
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Where can I find a set of Spanish-English comparable texts? ***(Not translations)***
This is my very first post, I hope I'm making myself clear.
What I'm asking for is a set of texts that are equivalent in both languages in terms of difficulty, word frequency and register (i.e. two ...
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How can a language-learner determine the root, prefix, and suffix of a word in English, if they know its language of origin?
Many English vocabulary-building books (for example, Merriam-Webster Vocabulary Builder, Word Power Made Easy) break the meaning of words down into three pieces: prefix + root + suffix.
On the website ...
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Which regularly used writing scripts commonly spoken are not alphabetic? [closed]
I believe Japanese and Chinese are more logographic and the rest are simply alphabetic or abugida/abjad/alphabetic.
Using Wikipedia as a reference it appears their definition of an alphabetic is not ...
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Is there evidence of a disposition for certain ethnicities/races to learn certain languages? [closed]
For example would those of Chinese descent have a disposition to learn Chinese? Chinese is a quite different having more logographic characters then say English which is alphabetic.
Another example ...
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Letter “o” with Ogonek in Early Middle English Orthography?
Edit: looking at this again, I wonder if the editors of the Wikipedia article mentioned below (from which the transcription comes) just transcribed the manuscript incorrectly, and the “ogonek” I am ...
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Study of the English language
In the United Kingdom, the study of the English language (insofar as it extends to secondary and sixth-form education) entails what many might refer to as "analytical reading". In other ...
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