zompist bboard

Do you "go for" one, "take" one, "have" one, "do" one, or what? Similarly for a shower, a nap, a rest, a look, and so on. How about languages other than English, if they have a comparable idiom? I can either go for or take a walk. I only take most of the others, though I would not take a rest; I wo...

I'm doing another university library trip on Sunday, this time I will remedy last time's mistake of not getting any morphology books! Lol. Currently I'm discovering how cognitive grammar takes a philosophically/politically approach from transformational generative grammar, which is sort of relevant ...

Semantically they are basically the same, but pragmatically they are not. Compare: Someone sitting beside me on the train asked me a question. A woman sitting beside me on the train asked me a question. Some woman sitting beside me on the train asked me a question. Surely you recognize the differen...

I think you are coming to a good conclusion. The importance is not so much in the names, but in the actual patterns of usage. Thus we call words that act like verbs verbs (being marked for Tense, Aspect, Mood, Personal Agreement) and so forth, but when one comes to trickier categories (usually func...

His - third person singular masculine possessive pronoun? Therefore - conjunction? What's the PoS of "and" and "or" then? Good: The man and the woman went to the store. Bad: The man therefore the woman went to the store. There's no reason all conjunctions would have to work in that particular sente...

Wow, lots of posts to respond to! :) Thank you all for taking the time to respond helpfully! I especially like the lists and examples, even though I'm not going to respond to them in this post; have to think about them and mentally digest them first. I'll try to answer all questions asked of me but ...

I always assumed "some guy" or "some woman" was just a gender-specified version of "somebody" or "someone"; those are pretty universal terms across English dialects, aren't they? Maybe a bit perjorative, but "that woman", "that man", "those people" are also considered mildly perjorative in my diale...

Read "Describing Morphosyntax": http://www.amazon.com/Describing-Morphosyntax-Guide-Field-Linguists/dp/0521588057 This is unfortunately not available at any libraries I have access to. :( Also, wikipedia says, "Since the Greek grammar of 2nd century BC, parts of speech have been defined by morpholo...

@CaesarVincens What I'm mainly interested in is learning about things that are hidden or absent in English, so I have a more universal pool of options to draw on when inventing how my conlang will work grammatically. I'm interested in things like noun cases, especially ones that aren't found in Lati...

Read "Describing Morphosyntax": http://www.amazon.com/Describing-Morphosyntax-Guide-Field-Linguists/dp/0521588057 This is unfortunately not available at any libraries I have access to. :( Also, wikipedia says, "Since the Greek grammar of 2nd century BC, parts of speech have been defined by morpholo...

roninbodhisattva wrote:What's the book?

Cambridge Studies In Linguistics #102: Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives, by Mark C. Baker
http://www.amazon.com/Lexical-Categorie ... +cambridge

"The clothes are in soaking." and the similar phrase about napping occur in my dialect and nearby ones. (Pennsylvania, US) The primary ethnic ancestry (and presumably linguistic influence) in this area is Polish and German, less Italian and Irish. Just my personal opinion, but I think the importance...

I have a book about lexical categories from a local university library, but it's too high-level for me, :oops: I don't have the educational background to be able to read it. Anyone want to recommend a webpage or book about lexical categories that would be good for someone deciding what lexical categ...

I always assumed "some guy" or "some woman" was just a gender-specified version of "somebody" or "someone"; those are pretty universal terms across English dialects, aren't they? Maybe a bit perjorative, but "that woman", "that man", "those people" are also considered mildly perjorative in my dialec...

"I'll give you a dollar. No wait, hold on, I'll give you a five dollars." This specifically meant "a five dollar bill", and could not be used to mean "a stack of five $1 bills".

I don't think that analysis is correct at all. I have never seen a native speaker make most of the lolcat mistakes unless doing so intentionally, and I've never seen my ESL students produce fragments quite like the doge. There is actually some deeper analysis of this very comparison. In any case, t...

ObsequiousNewt wrote:Yes, no, yes. I have something like [meɻ̩ʷ] vs [mɛɻʷ]

Interesting! For me they are both [meiɹ] or [mei˞]. Same as "may" and "air". There's almost a [j] in it, because [iə] sounds a lot like [j], and [iɹ] is similar, but not quite the same.

Verbs are more the purview of lolcats, no? I think lolcats are supposed to make the type of mistakes that uneducated native speakers make (spelling, mondegreens), while doge is supposed to make the type of mistakes that people who are learning English (or whatever language the lol is in) as a secon...

Eheh, I have to finish my consonants before I can delve into syntax. I'm looking forward to syntax though, because my original inspirations for what the language could be like mostly fall into that category.

Here is the Know Your Meme page for Doge. Yes it's kind of like lolspeak, and l33+$p34k before that. Slanguage
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge

I feel like I understand better now how this stuff with the IPA creating symbols and using them to communicate sounds works. ^_^ I was under the mistaken impression that it was objective and more or less perfect because it's such a widely agreed-on authority and has been for years, but instead it se...

But would you accept "you can definitely see you" as grammatical, Nessari? I'm sure people would say that phrase around here, though not as a complete sentence. "You can see you have been defeated." is definitely grammatical to me. "You can see you are about to run out of time." "You can see you wi...

@Salmoneus What about describing the sounds of a language so someone unfamiliar with that language can pronounce it properly? If I used ɔ, which the language doesn't actually have, then anyone reading my "pronunciation guide" would actually be pronouncing the language wrong.

I grew up in Erie, so I'm from a neighboring isogloss, if not the exact same one. Do you have these homophone pairs too: mere and mirror mayor and mare (female horse) crayon and cran(berry) People often think that's the most unusual trait of my dialect. On the other hand I have a different vowel in ...

Oh I copied the wrong symbol. *blush* let me just edit that...

And thanks! *helps self to pickles and tea*