Unanswered Questions
361 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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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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8
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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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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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7
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Look behind you
My aunt observed today that we don't use the reflexive when we say "Look behind you!" or "Walk straight ahead of you." One might indeed expect it; it seems to have the requisite ...
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How is Donald Duck's voice produced, if not by buccal speech?
The Disney character Donald Duck is well known for his nigh unintelligible voice, which was originated by actor Clarence Nash in the 1930s. I have always heard this manner of speaking described as ...
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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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6
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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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6
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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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5
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1
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Are voiced sounds considered "weaker" than voiceless ones? If so, why?
The motivation for asking this question was checking up on the Wikipedia page for Lentition, which says that it can involve "voicing a voiceless consonant", even though it's described as a ...
CommunityBot
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5
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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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90
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How diachronically stable is release type?
Are there examples of languages completely shifting from (vocalic) release of all coda stops to, say, nasal release?
I imagine substrate effects could account for some of these cases (cf. unreleased ...
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130
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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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5
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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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