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 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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Do dialects without the meet-meat merger neutralize the distinction in some contexts?
For many dialects of English (including my own) multiple historical lexical sets are merged into one "FLEECE" set (this diaphoneme can be represented with IPA /iː/).
I've read about the basics of the ...
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Does anyone know if there are plans for a 'successor' to Huddleston and Pullum (CamGEL or CGEL)?
Huddleston and Pullum's The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGEL or CGEL) is widely considered a 'successor' to a previous 'great English grammar': Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's ...
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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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What linguistic sources discuss doubled -ed in -edly and -edness words?
Some linguists have written analyses of "double -er suffixation" in English, in formations from particle verbs such as fix up > fixer upper. For example: "Double -er suffixation in ...
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Geographic distribution of ‘I haven’t’ and ‘I’ve not’
The answer to this question on English Language & Usage discusses a possible difference between American and British dialects in their use of ‘I’ve not’ and ‘I haven’t’. I have noticed ‘I’ve not’ ...
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Is there any dialect of English with clusivity?
What it says on the tin. The closest thing that I'm aware of is in Tok Pisin, a creole language which involved English in its creation, which distinguishes “we without you” (mipela) from “we with you” ...
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What historical change(s) shortened vowels in Old and Middle English?
In a 1968 paper by Kiparsky ("Linguistic universals and linguistic change"), a historical-change argument is made for the brace notation of SPE, based on the history of vowel shortening. The premise ...
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Is there evidence that English speakers associate black with bad and/or white with good
Prompted by the recent move towards replacing the terms "blacklist" and "whitelist", I wonder if there is research around the topic of how people feel about the words "black&...
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What happened to the number of english speakers in february 2018?
I recently noticed that English was in front of Mandarin in the Wikipedia list of languages by total number of speakers, so I wondered when it became first. I didn't find any convenient statistics on ...
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Research on development of language of modality in children 8-12?
Let me quickly introduce myself to provide a context for my questions. My PhD research focuses on ways that we can teach primary school children (9-12) ways of handling complex, contradictory and ...
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Dictionary with real IPA and English sandhi rules?
I don't like English dictionaries that use pseudo-IPA to indicate pronunciation. I've seen none indicating that most plosives should be aspirated, but when they're in "sp", "st" and other combinations ...
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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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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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Why are reflexives prohibited in partitive constructions?
In a partitive construction, reflexives do not usually occur:
Julie and Bob are talking about the two of them/*themselves.
The following example is from COCA:
The men, all of them, stared into ...
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What's the geographic distribution of the father/bra split in American English?
In most American English dialects with the father/bother merger, the bother vowel (originally /ɔ/) unrounds, lowers, and merges into the father vowel (originally /ɑ/), with the end result being /ɑ/, ...
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Are the phonetic features of this recording of Booker T. Washington characteristic of any dialect of English?
I ran across this recording of a speech by Booker T. Washington, and was surprised by his pronunciations. (The recording is evidently from 1908.) From what I gathered, for /ɹ/ he uses [ɾ] in onset ...
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Stacking of prepositions in English?
The Cambridge Grammar Of The English Language recognises the existence of intransitive prepositions (p. 612):
The case for allowing prepositions with no complements is most compelling where the same ...
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Where can I find a table/list of all/many languages' plural/singular forms for hours/time?
Even though I'm natively Swedish, I'm seriously unsure if it's "1,1 timme" or "1,1 timmar". That is, what in English would be "1.1 hour" or "1.1 hours".
Even as ...
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Stress bearing suffixes in Optimality Theory
Stress bearing suffixes in English words like Chinese, Japanese, cigarette, fifteen violate the non-finality constraint. Can anyone explain what other constraints outrank non-finality and allows the ...
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Measuring lexical similarity between two arbitrary languages
Pardon me if this question is naive, but I am wondering if there is a way to quantify lexical similarity between two corpora of text, each written in different languages whose alphabets differ greatly....
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Does California vowel shift occur in bilingual Spanish speakers?
I know that recently there has been a lot of research done on the California vowel shift being a key part of a California accent for younger kids who have grown up there.
Knowing that there is a ...
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Does pre-fortis clipping only operate within a syllable? If not, what is its actual scope?
English is known to have a phenomenon of "pre-fortis clipping": in certain contexts, vowel and sonorant phonemes before a fortis/voiceless consonant are realized with shorter duration than the same ...
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Usage of the implicit objective subordinate clause in English
I'm not a fluent english speaker. While speaking this language, we usually prefer the implicit objective subordinate clauses (with subject in the accusative case, if it exists) to the corresponding ...
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Is there an english news corpus available to download for between 1900 and 201X (free or low cost)
I'm attempting a word embedding analysis (think underlying meaning and implications, but computational) of certain keywords through time in the English language, but I am having some difficulty ...
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The pronunciation of the voiced "th" in English
I speak General American English, and I pronounce voiced "th"'s in two different ways. The first, which is how I pronounce it in "the" and "father," feels somewhat like a stop; part of my tongue ...
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Is there any corpus for idioms?
I'm looking for a corpus for English (American, GB, Australian) idioms. Preferably created manually, because I already have two, but they are rather small and were built semi-automatically.
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Patterns of accent changes by non-native English speakers
I am looking for a list of 'accent changes', or pronunciation inaccuracies, non-native English speakers commonly make when speaking English words. The list would obviously be native language specific ...
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Exception to word order in quotative situations
I'm very uneducated in syntax, so I apologize if this question is something really basic that everyone already knows.
English is a subject-verb-object language, and it is known to follow that pattern ...
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Computer analysis of ESL learners' mistakes
This is a very broad question; I'm trying to get a sense of the current state of this subfield of NLP and what relevant resources may already exist, so even tangential answers will be welcome.
To what ...
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Visemes analogue for phoneme pangram?
There are several famous short texts which covers most of the English phonemes.
For example "With tenure, Suzie'd have all the more leisure for yachting, but her publications are no good." ...
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Which books did John read which books? Displacement and reconstruction
In his talk available on YouTube as “Language, Creativity, and the Limits of Understanding” by Professor Noam Chomsky (4-21-16) at 56:36s Noam Chomsky starts talking about the phenomenon of ...
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List of initial consonant clusters in English
At a certain point in a macro I have to determine whether shifting the final consonant(s) of one syllable to the next syllable results in a valid onset. Can anyone point me to a complete list of ...
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Are Russian words пять (five), пясть (fist), пятка (heel) related? What about English "fist"?
I wonder whether the PIE word for five in fact meant "fist", in other words, when people counted, they closed their fingers and when they obtained the closed fist, it was "five"?
...
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Differences in realization of intrusive-r and linking-r?
Are there any good papers that have investigated this? I seemed to notice this with some speakers on television that their intrusive-r's seemed less pronounced than their linking-r's.
I did find a ...
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Where did English get its perfect tense(s) from?
Apologies if this is too basic, but I know very little about linguistics and figured this would be a good place to ask.
English seems like it draws from several other langiuages, notably the romance ...
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Can first order logic represent a past occurring adverbial dependent clause with a present main clause to form the perfect tense?
Can first order logic represent a past occurring adverbial dependent clause with a present main clause to form the perfect tense?
Is this the way to represent an adverbial dependent clause with first ...
user27672
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Aside from English clause adverbs, are there other suborders?
A suborder is a set of related expression elements which are more strictly ordered with respect to each other than they are with respect to other expression elements. This is my own term. I offer ...
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The schwa in [meɪkəθ] for *maketh* in KJV English
This Wiki article seems to suggest that words like makes had lost their final syllable schwa in normal speech already by Chaucer's time (palmeres > palmers is the example they give). The rule, as ...
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State of the art in controlled english languages?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_natural_language lists some controlled languages, of which Attempto Controlled English seems to be the most recent. However, are there any Attempto extensions, ...
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Test for function or content word? (LFG)
This might only apply to LFG, but are there any tests for if a word is functional or content/lexical?
I have been trying to ascertain whether or not there is a lexical 'be' in English. The active '...
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Does "a little" (en) correspond to the same grammatical class as "ein wenig" (de)?
If you want to say in German, "I speak a little German", you would say,
Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch.
The phrase "ein wenig" is reminiscent of the English phrase "a little", but what is ...
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Where can I find a list of English words that contain a rare combination of phonemes
I am looking for a wake up word for a digital product that would be easily detected with a voice recognition engine.
This calls for a word that has a rare combination of phonemes so the product is ...
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How often can the words in a sentence be rearranged to form different but similarly likely setentence
I have a conjecture that given a particular (multi)set of words without knowledge of ordering, then one ordering is normally much more likely than any others.
Its not always true,
Show me flights ...
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Stanford NLP parsers and idioms that have common semantic meaning
I have parsed the following sentence in the Stanford CoreNLP demo page and the Stanford parser demo page. Although both result in a parse that can imply purpose semantics (hinging on the advcl and the ...
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Reference for a standard, systematic, conceptual categorization of count and noncount nouns?
I'm aware of the use of the terms 'count nouns' and 'mass nouns', but this dichotomy doesn't seem to lend itself to a viable explanation to Japanese students of which nouns in English allow for ...
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Particular verbal inflection classes in "The Proclamation of Henry III"
I'm reading a document about "The Proclamation of Henry III", in which the text is presented and a short commentary and glossary follow.
I'm interested in the survival of some of the distinct verbal ...
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Is the Figure-Ground Theory adaptable for inversion in subjunctive condition clauses in English?
People use Figure-Ground Theory to explain inversions. By putting ground before figure, emphasis focus changes.
But how to explain inversion in condition clauses for subjunctive mood?
In English, if ...
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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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Is “actual” both a false friend and a cognate?
English definition of “actual”:
existing in fact; typically as contrasted with what was intended, expected, or believed.
Spanish definition of “actual”:
current, present, contemporary
These are ...
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