Unanswered Questions
173 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Is there a word for "mouth transitions" which describes the movement of a mouth which is saying one word, but preparing for the next?
I think I can produce every individual phoneme in standard-ish spoken Mandarin.
However, if I want to speak fluently I have to watch videos of people speaking and closely watch their mouths, because ...
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Term for non-homograph homophone synonyms?
In Japanese, 熱い and 暑い are both read atsui and both mean 'hot'. The former pertains to an object (e.g. hot coffee) and the latter to weather.
In French 'cuissot' and 'cuisseau' have the same ...
- 507
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What currency does the term "flip sense verb" have in linguistics?
In a recent comment on the question Ergative Verbs and some discussion about them, jlawler introduced a term I had not previously encountered:
The rose smells good is completely different; this ...
CommunityBot
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6
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Is there a term for a mental prototype changing?
Years ago, if I heard the word bird I thought about a sparrow since I live in western Pennsylvania and there are sparrows everywhere. But now, if I hear the word bird I picture a blue, two-dimensional ...
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What kind of syntax diagrams are these, found in a book on legal writing?
These don't look like syntax trees in undergrad linguistics syntax textbooks. Do linguists use these diagrams? What are they called?
Page 343.
Diagrams for grammatical analysis are visual aids to ...
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5
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Do puns necessarily involve referring to two (or more) extant words?
What exactly constitutes a pun? Do the words in the pun have to both be extant, or can one be a nonce/nonsense word? — Over the years, I've heard numerous usages of "puns" where one word in the ...
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Did Chomsky originate the term "rewrite rule"?
The earliest mention of the term "rewrite rule" that I am able to find - in the context of phrase structure grammars - is in Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" (1957).
Did he originate the term?
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L1 memories being recalled in my L2
The situation is as follows: I have been studying my L2 for approximately 4 years. I have spent a total of 10 months immersed in the L2 environment. My current stint has been for 5 months and counting....
- 14.8k
4
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What's the name for using a letter to represent its name's sound?
It's often whimsical to substitute a single letter for a group of letters phonetically identical to the letter's name.
Such as rewriting "barbecue" as "bar-b-q", or the entirety of William Steig's ...
- 31.1k
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Is there a name for this type of language divergence and isolation?
In South Australia there is a region called the Barossa Valley. At some point [after WW2? not sure] it was settled by a lot of German farmers who bought land and started dairy farms. They applied ...
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Extension of "synesis"
In traditional grammar, synesis refers to inflection being determined by underlying semantics instead of morphological agreement; the most familiar instance in English is expressions like The ...
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Second and third language "search"
In my third or fourth language, when I don't know a word or phrase, I substitute a word from my other non-native language rather than the one I obviously know in my native language. Or if I'm looking ...
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Can "lexical development" and "vocabulary development" be used interchangeably?
I haven't quite been able to find the answer to this question online. I'm writing a paper for my first linguistics class and I realized one of the sources that I've been using refers to vocabulary ...
CommunityBot
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Term for universally-used quote with additional, non-compositional meaning
There exist certain fixed expressions which people use to convey quite specific meanings and (at least to me) always invoke a famous saying which is assumed to be common knowledge, such as
I am not a ...
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What is the term for when a word can not be translated directly?
I was wondering if there's any term in linguistics when the word cannot be translated in just one/two words. I mean when it's really hard to explain the meaning, because there's no such thing in your ...
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