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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Lateral Approximant v. s. Lateral consonant
Reference
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants#Velarized_alveolar_lateral_approximant
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_consonant
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Why don't certain antonym pairs get rearranged often?
Why don't certain antonym pairs get rearranged often? We have little and big, small and large, but almost never hear little and large.
Another example: weak and strong, soft and tough, but never weak ...
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Category & Function
I have the next two sentences, and I'm asked to state the function and category of the parts in bold. I am introduced to the concepts of function and category, but I was applying what I learned about ...
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Any languages beside English where one goes"back and forth" rather than "forth and back"?
Are there languages beside English in which one goes "back and forth" rather than, as is logical, "forth and back"? One typically goes "forth and back" or similarly in ...
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What is the logic behind "I am X years old"?
(I posted this on the English Language Learners SE but apparently it isn't a good fit because it's a "why" question, so it was suggested by multiple users I post it here instead.)
In some ...
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Is a truly nonsensical grammatically correct sentence possible? [closed]
Most "nonsensical" or "meaningless" sentences can be interpreted to mean something that isn't total nonsense:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously: "Nondescript immature ...
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History of perfect tenses
I am thinking about the history of the verb "have". Why is the verb "have" used as an auxiliary verb in the perfect tenses? When did it start to be used that way?
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Looking for linguistics book my dad had when i was young
Hello linguistics people...
When I was young, one of the books in my father's library had a unique conceit: it aimed to improve the English language. So it proposed changes, and from then on the ...
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Are there any more optimal tactile alphabets than Braille?
Sorry if this is the wrong stackexchange to ask this.
Consider how QWERTY was the first keyboard layout, but isn't nearly optimal (e.g. Dvorak is much better and used overwhelmingly by top speed-...
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Can someone share with me an article in which the author claims that the get passive is not a passive (or at least a true passive)?
Can someone share with me an article in which the author claims that the get passive is not a passive (or at least a true passive)?
I need an article in which the author says that he or she doesn't ...
user36925
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Is there a list of common English verbs with all of the inflectional "principal parts"?
I am looking for a list of common English verbs (1000 to 2000 most-frequent) which gives the distinct inflectional forms (spelled: pronunciation is irrelevant). For example, "sits, sit, sat, sat, ...
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Correlation between the English -wise and German -weise suffixes
The English meaning of -wise is the following.
-wise adverb combining form
Definition of -wise (Entry 5 of 5)
1a : in the manner of
crabwise fanwise
b : in the position or direction of
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Why did the Latin word marmor became French marbre (which is in present day English marble)?
I would like to know what process suffered the Latin word marmor when it was borrowed in French and became marbre. I know that the process from French marbre to English marble is dissimilation, i.e. ...
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Do we have evidence of the transition from -mentum to -ment?
Several English words end in -ment: augment, document, movement, moment, segment, etc.
According to several dictionaries, the English -ment suffix is in many cases traced to the French -ment, which in ...
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Why are English diphthongs not analysed as a vowel and a glide?
The English language has the diphthongs /eɪ aɪ ɔɪ aʊ əʊ/, analysed differently in some accents. They end in sounds that are very close to [j] and [w], yet are analysed as unsyllabic [ɪ] and [ʊ]. Since ...
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What are some rules that native speakers instinctively know about English that non-native speakers usually don't? [closed]
For example, the famous tweet quoting Forsyth,
[A]djectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little ...
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Why /əl/ in English sounds like [o]?
I am not a native English speaker. Recently i study some phonetics to improve my english pronunciation (and also french which i am currently studying). I noticed many words with phoneme /əl/ sound ...
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Native English speakers: worse understanding of other accents?
In this video, Lily Tomlin (an American) doesn't really understand what Kevin Bridges is saying at all with his Scottish accent. She also says she doesn't fully understand what Chris Hemswoth (an ...
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AmE feature related to American multiculturalism?
I speak with a (General) American accent. Native non-American English speakers sometimes tell me that "you pronounce every single syllable in every word." I've also stumbled upon very ...
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The A sound in Ask and At
I was reading a book on rhetoric today and it had the following table of pronounciation:
The thing I find confusing about this table is that I pronounce the A in "ask" and "at" ...
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How to recognize Heads [closed]
I'm reading "Introduction to English linguistics" and in the chapter 4, there is a paragraph that I don't understand :
The other crucial cluster of properties of heads concern their ...
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Concise IPA dictionary
For decades I have used "A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English" by Kenyon and Knott as a concise and accessible tool in learning the IPA. The fact that it's still in print must mean ...
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Is there any other Phonetic notation other than IPA? [duplicate]
I'm wondering is there any other Phonetic notation other than IPA — that is easy to understand by Native English speakers
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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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OVS in English dialogue
English is an SVO language. When writing dialogue, especially in literature, writing a sentence with the speech first is considered grammatically correct. Take for example this extract from Ursula K ...
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Is there such a thing as attributive vs. modifier uses of adj? Is un rojo carro vs. un carro rojo the same difference as 红房子 vs. 红的房子？
In teaching Spanish I often explain the difference between pre-nominal adjectives and post-nominal adjectives as the difference between an English noun phrase in which the adjective is stressed, and ...
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Does English have animate/inanimate distinction?
I know we have the "'S" genitive and the "X of Y" but I don't exactly understand the rules of using these even as a native English speaker and I'm unsure if English makes other ...
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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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Do constructs like "going to do" and "ir a hacer" share a common origin?
I'm curious about the linguistic background between these phrases because they don't make sense word-for-word in either language, but they work almost identically. Wikipedia says that a similar form ...
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Which language is more complex, English or French? Is it even possible to objectively measure a language's complexity?
OK, so I'm a native English speaker who learned French as a teenager and I have a friend who is French and learned English as a teenager (so the opposite).
The other day he was telling me how easy ...
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Singular countable nouns that don't require determinatives?
The English determiners wikipedia page says
The determinative function is typically obligatory in a singular, countable, common noun phrase (compare I have *a* new cat to I have new cat).
and
In ...
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Is Hebrew more efficient and more grammatically logical than English? [closed]
Grammatically logical - this is possible, vs zeh yachol lhiyot. Let's break down the English way for a moment -- the words don't actually connect with each other in a logical sequence. 'This is' has ...
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How did the j get the dʒ sound?
The j getting the dʒ is very weird, how did the letter j get the dʒ sound?
Why not a /j/ sound as in "yes"?
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When teaching word stress to ESL students, is it worth teaching secondary stress placement?
I often incorporate stress training into my classes as it is very important for intelligibility (as better awareness of stress placement will give students clearer speaking and better listening skills)...
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With the English sibilant 's' (voiceless alveolar sibilant) could the tip of the tongue be touching the back of the upper teeth?
The wikipedia's Voiceless alveolar sibilants section states:
The voiceless alveolar sibilant is a common consonant sound in vocal languages. It is the sound in English words such as sea and pass, and ...
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Is derivation through valency change common cross-linguistically?
Sorry if this question doesn't make much sense, it's still a half-formed shower thought at this point. In my linguistics class yesterday we were going over ergative-absolutive alignment, and the ...
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Why words in many romance languages don't have more than one part of speech, unlike words in English
I have recently just realized that in English, sometimes the same word will have different part of speech depends on the way you pronounce it.
For example, record can be a noun or a verb depends on ...
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Etymology of words in English translations
I posted this in English but they suggested this site. The question was about the English language because of roughly 50/50 Germanic/Latin roots. Anyhow here it is...
I have often daydreamed about ...
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Does "Inchoative Construction" mean constructions with intransitive inchoative verbs?
The following is the sentence I extracted from a book, Binding Theory, written by Daniel Burning.
The fact that a language like English, which lacks a simple reflexive, has extremely few reflexive ...
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On the use of possessive pronouns instead of definite articles in AmE
Consider the following examples:
I have to go now, my Uber driver has arrived.
So, have you already learned your ABCs?
I now will put my eggs into the dry ingredients.
All of these are examples of a ...
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Korean tense/lax vs. English tense/lax
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology, English has "tense" sounds: "p", "t", "ch", and &...
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Why can't you treat prepositions as simply noun/verb modifiers (i.e. as adjectives or adverbs)?
I am working on a conlang and have (for many months/years?) been perplexed by the prepositions. They standout because they are extremely hard to pinpoint what they actually mean, unlike a noun or verb,...
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Why is there a proxy reading in this sentence from Reuland (2011)?
For English, himself can function as proxy reading, for instance,
One of the well-known properties of reflexive pronouns is their ability to
have "proxy readings." This is illustrated in (1) ...
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How does "own" affect binding?
How does own affect binding relationships?
I am studying binding theory as it applies to English. I have learned that own can influence the binding relations. For example:
(1) John is his boss.
The ...
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Why do people with a British accent make an "r" sound at the end of words ending in an "ah" sound
I'm American so I've seen this in so many movies and just wondering, what's up with that?
Example: We will not need those blankets in Russia-r.
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Why do we spell 'aaaah' with an 'h' at the end?
In English, we generally spell 'Ah', 'Aah', or 'Aaaaaah' (as it seems, any number of a's is possible) with an 'h' at the end. Someone just asked me why and I have been searching all over the internet ...
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What are the stress-distinguished minimal pairs in English?
I already know of two non-homograph ones: insight and billow.
Insight /ˈɪnsʌɪt/ is phonemically identical to incite /ɪn'sʌɪt/ except for where the stress falls (first syllable in insight, second ...
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"Ser"/"estar" acquisition in bilingual children (English-Spanish)
For the last week I've been wondering about how bilingual children (English-Spanish) might struggle with the acquisition of the "ser"/"estar" copulas, considering how these are ...
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When are prepositional phrases sibling to leaf nodes?
In syntax trees in English, can prepositional phrases, modifying either verbs or nouns, ever be sibling to the verb or noun itself for example and not a verb phrase/noun phrase?
I've heard the correct ...
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Do other languages using the Latin alphabet borrow diacritics from one another?
I've always found the convention of borrowing diacritics on foreign names and occasionally words (although the latter is less standard) from other languages with Latin alphabets in written English to ...
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