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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Preceding 'look' in response to question
Have read that this increased in popularity starting with US president Obama, but what significance does starting a response with a superfluous 'Look, ...' before giving an answer have?
eg, an ...
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Unusual categorization of slang terms in parts of speech ("cap")
I am not educated in syntax (or any formal linguistics really), so my hypotheses and observations in this question may not be super high-level.
I am a young American English speaker from the Midwest. ...
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Is 'x' the written form for the speech sound ɛks in this sentence?
Consider the following spoken sentence written in phonetic transcription:
lɛt ɛks dɪˈnəʊt ən ˈɛlɪmənt ɒv ðə sɛt ------------1
(I don't know how to do phonetic transcriptions, I used a website for ...
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What is the name for the phenomenon where an English verb that takes a clausal complement either does or does not mark the infinitive with "to"?
Let them go home.
*Let them to go home.
*Allow them go home.
Allow them to go home.
Make them go home.
*Make them to go home.
*Force them go home.
Force them to go home.
What is the reason that &...
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Relation Between Unreal & Past Tense Forms
Background
I am learning English grammar. Having been confused about modal usage, I decided to pick out a book on the subject, coming to "Modality and the English Modals" by F. R. Palmer. In ...
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A better rule for Canadian Raising
I'm a teenager from Chicago with a pretty standard contemporary Midwestern/General American accent (not distinctly Chicago). I'm interested in the phonetic phenomenon of Canadian Raising, in which ...
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There are roughly 46 speech sounds in the English language, however only 26 letters. Why?
There are roughly 44-46 speech sounds in the English language. However, we just have 26 letters which denote some of those 44-46 sounds. Why is that? Why we don't represent each of those 44-46 sounds ...
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Is it possible to have a repeated node appear under the same node? (Syntax Tree) [illustration provided]
Please help me understand these syntax trees (French and English).
For context we are learning about the representation of movement in syntax trees.
From my understanding, we'd have to use an X' under ...
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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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Stress, spirantization and other changes in the word "okay"
I'm a teenager from the Midwest. In the English language, many words have significant variance in their range of possible pronunciations. Some words may sound different from speaker to speaker in ...
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Can an inference be be an implicature and also a presupposition?
A sentence like ‘the boy stopped working’ gives the inference that he was working before. Is this inference an implicature or a presupposition? Is it possible that it is both?
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Passive Constructions
No-one else but me has yet called those passive constructions yet, but I have because I was really not satisfied about the fact that I couldn't differentiate them from one another anyhow.
Do you think ...
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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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Child language acquisition as an explanation for American rounding of the /r/ sound
The English phoneme typically represented by the letter ⟨r⟩ represents a confusing and complicated mess of allophonic realizations, some of which are highly disparate and some of which vary only ...
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Why are intervocalic coronal plosives apparently so unstable in English?
There are a plethora of words in the English language in which the phonemes /t/ and /d/ appear between two vowels, whether they be in adjacent syllables in the same word or in different words as a ...
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Why are some consonant clusters acceptable in some languages and not others and how does this change over time?
As per the question statement: is there a resource available for quickly determining which codal (or onset) consonant clusters are attested in human language? Mark Vandam’s Word Final Coda Typology ...
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Do other languages have correspondences like English's No-Nope and Yeah-Yep?
In the English language, as in others, there are a variety of interjection words. Among these are some comprising an open syllable, like yeah and no. Others end in stop consonants, like yep (or yup) ...
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How do syntacticians explain object pronouns in the subject position ("Me and him" or "Lui et moi")?
Me and a lot of other native English speakers sometimes use object pronouns as the subject of sentences if there's an "and" in the subject. This has been mentioned on Stack Exchange before ...
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Using 'is' after non-denoting phrases
Usually 'is' can be an identity statement 'John is my boss' or a predication like 'John is angry', how about using 'is' for something that refers to no particular idea or object?
For example 'a ...
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Judgment about obligatory de se reading
(1) John himself said he hates himself.
(2) John said he hates himself.
In sentence (1), does he obligatorily refer to John? Or it can refer to other people as well like in sentence (2).
In more ...
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Corporeal - spelling over time [closed]
Note the English phrase 'Corporal Punishment'. I suspect that it is a spelling corruption of Corporeal. I haven't been able to find any information on this online.
Is this just a rule of spelling I'm ...
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Using 'it' in sentences with indefinite noun phrases
I was looking at indefinite noun phrases like 'a man' or specifically sentences of this form:
'If I were to bring a chicken home, my dog would try to eat it.
Why is it that 'a chicken' does not refer, ...
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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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Does PRO satisfy binding condition A?
My assignment requires me to analyze two sentences (* denoting ungrammaticality):
*David realized that they have been spreading lies about himself
David has tended to spread lies about himself
The ...
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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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Is it pure coincidence that English makes plurals with -s, like in French and Spanish?
It is known that the plural -s suffix in English has Germanic origins, and is not a feature imported from French. However, to what extent does the use of -s for plurals in English have to do with ...
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Why are modal verbs in English defective?
Modal verbs exist in many languages; but they are often defective. English is an extreme example where they seem to only have present tense forms; and have no gerund, participle, or infinitive; some ...
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Why does English not use any diacritics?
Why does English not use any diacritics, at least in native words? What is the reason for that?
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I read a paper where I cannot understand why “arrived girl” is incorrect, but “recently arrived girl” is correct: [closed]
Such participles whose corresponding verbs are intransitive verbs. We usually do not say an arrived girl, a departed friend, etc., because they come from their intransitive verbs. However, a past ...
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Is "的" (de) used in Singlish for possession or subordination? Or neither?
In Singlish (Singaporean English creole), is 的 used? And if so, is it used for simple possession ("*Jenny de dog") or for introduction of a subordinate clause? ("*Jenny found last week ...
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Does French retain more Celtic words than English does?
English has very few words left from the Ancient British. I am wondering if the language of the Gauls suffered much the same fate, or whether there are significantly more Celtic substrate words ...
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The sequence of parts of speech in English
Considering the main eight parts of speech, every two adjacent words in a sentence can be one of the possible 64 pairs. The probability of these pairs significantly varies, as some might even be ...
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Could the Midwestern (Wisconsin) L sound be described as a semivowel/glide?
In Midwestern accents, words like "love" (with the L in word initial) the L sounds close to the /j/ glide, but I wonder if anyone has noticed this or come across it.
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Phonology for Loanwords
What is the reason for loanwords to preserve the original pronunciation, but not to be assimilate into the new language?
For example, the German loanword from English Handy (mobile phone), it is ...
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How do "transform into" and "turn into" function syntactically?
He turned into a car
He transformed into a car
What are the syntactic categories of "transform", "turn", and "into" in each sentence?
I think that "turned into&...
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Can "has been" be copular? Can the perfect tenses be copular?
Do any or all of these conjugations of 'be' count as copulae?
I have been a plumber
I could have been a plumber
I have been startled
I think they might not be, because they aren't really ...
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If English adj → adv "-ly" suffix were inflectional, which grammatical category is it related to?
Wikipedia introduces inflection as
a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.
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Geminate consonants by total assimilation in English
Please can someone provide an example of a geminate consonant formed by total assimilation in English?
The closest I can find is from this article written by presumably Professor Ian MacKenzie:
In [...
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Is "illegal" an example of nasal place assimilation in English?
I've read that English has a nasal place assimilation phonological rule,
n → m / _p,b,m
etc.
I was shown an example "illegal", apparently nasal place assimilation of the prefix "in-&...
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is schwa a phoneme in English?
or is it simply an unstressed allophone of unstressed lax vowels? I'm curious because I've heard some people claim that [ə] is not a phoneme and it is just a reduced allophone of all the unstressed ...
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Voiceless Schwa after a plosive consonant
Take American English as an example, what is the difference in sounding between [pʰə̥ˈtʰeɪ̯ɾoʊ̯] and [pʰˈtʰeɪ̯ɾoʊ̯]?
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What languages use a conceptual parallel to the Hebrew verb ירש?
The Hebrew verb ירש is loosely translated to mean "inherit," but does not quite mean the same thing as the English word inherit because the Hebrew verb refers to an heir inheriting his ...
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Suffix in word 'scenario'
Does -io such words like 'scenario', 'oratorio' is considered to be a suffix or a part of a root?
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Is it not plausible that English "wraith" could be connected to Proto-Germanic "*wraith-" or its derivatives?
For wraith, OED has:
1510s, "ghost," Scottish, of uncertain origin. Weekley and Century Dictionary suggest Old Norse vorðr "guardian" in the sense of "guardian angel." ...
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Does a pronoun share the subject of a noun it is referring to?
I have been reading the Cambridge Dictionary punctuation guide (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/punctuation), and a couple of things struck me as queer. Especially the "...
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Are there any dialects of English which ⟨i⟩ in unstress syllable will be realized as [ɪ]?
The pronunciation of "dilute" should be /daɪˈlut/, but according to Wikipedia, another acceptable pronunciation of this word is /dɪˈlut/. So I summarize this rule as "/aɪ/ is realized ...
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Pronunciation of D sound in British English
I could be wrong about this, but the D sound in British English (RP) sounds a little different from the American counterpart. Often when I hear the words "Lady", "Ready", "...
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English toponymy of ‘Wardle’ in Lancashire (near Rochdale) and ‘Wardle’ in Cheshire (near Nantwich)
I found on internet that the name of these two places comes from Old English ‘weard’ (watch) and ‘hyll’ (hill).
‘Wardle’ is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ‘Warhelle’ and as ‘Wardhul’ in ...
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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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