zompist bboard

They're pronouns. It's not at all difficult to get pronouns before their antecedent: After she met the magician, Lynn was never the same. He was a barbarian. He was a king. His name was Conan. Did you see that ? That's a new species! So you can do it right, I'm going to have Max demonstrate firing a...

I'm not going to say it's 100% predictable, mostly because I don't feel like doing a lot of research on it right now. :) But I suspect a few rules will handle most of the variation: 1. Unvoice the x finally, or before an unvoiced consonant (as spelled): box, exclaim, excite, expect 2. Use /kʃ/ /gʒ/ ...

Kind of painful to read someone talking about pronunciation with apparently no understanding of allophony or phonetic environment. E.g. you can't have <ia> = [ajej] at the end of a word, and I'm pretty sure four of those x's are allophonic. Mandarin x is not terribly obscure-- Xi'an, Xinjiang, Deng ...

It's I who do that. It's me who does that. I, who loathe the idea, will resist it. Why have they asked me, who doesn't approve of the plan, to implement it. Thanks for the examples. Neat and a little weird! I think I'd agree with you on the first pair. I'd probably say the second in preference to t...

Does anyone have a natlang counterexample at hand? That is, an example where the subclause itself varies depending on whether it's attached to a subject or an object? In my usual English, 'who' with antecedent 'I' has 1s concord, but with antecedent 'me' it has 3s concord. This rule also works when...

If you marry a foreigner, you'll get lots of data. :) My wife is from Peru; she's been here for decades now, but accents can still be difficult for her. It works in reverse too. Talking with Spanish speakers, some are very easy to understand, some are terrible. Certainly the more standard the speech...

The Greek example is great, though keep 'em coming.

I have the Comrie and I had a note to myself to re-read it, so I will make sure I do that.

Malagasy only allows relativization of the subject of a clause. To get anything else you need to change the voice (fortunately there's at least three).

Question for French speakers: are there any phonological adaptations if a clitic pronoun occurs next to an article of the same form? E.g. Faites-le le plus souvent faites-le le soir du 23 décembre Faites-les les lire as opposed to faites-le la main ouverte faites-le la veille faites-les le lire I'm ...

I've always recommended to conlangers that they consider four possible relative situations, where the target noun is (1) subject in both clauses: The player who complains about his team will lose. (2) subject in main, object in subclause: The player that Widowmaker shot was too visible. (3) object i...

FWIW, I think the default hypothesis should be that it's a typo. Speaking as an author: it's astonishing and embarrassing how blatant an error can slip past your eyes if you wrote the thing. I'm perhaps more curious how Anatolia was labeled as Natolia. Some quick Googling shows that Natolia was a pr...

Ooh, I wish I'd had that resource on Old Chinese before. Oh well, there are always 2nd editions. It's tricky... one thing I don't like about some of the syntax textbooks I've read is the foreign language examples! The thing is... I believe in doing syntax , not just learning a particular formalism. ...

OK, thanks to a rare bit of good coding practice, the Atlas links should work now.

I think most of the remaining problems are in the intro sections for languages, which I'll get to eventually. If you see something else, feel free to mention it here!

I know you're being somewhat mischievous, but doesn't it follow right up from the assumption that "this" can now clearly be used as an onomatopoeia/sentence word? Just checking on my linguistic analysis instinct. Well, in standard English "this" is a pronoun— more precisely a pro-NP. Pronouns can't...

Something I saw on Twitter the other day:

This. So much this. All the this.

I'm pretty sure this is impossible according to X-bar theory.

They are so banal it makes me wonder how she ever managed to create something as interesting as Sita Sings the Blues. Because she lived in India (and also surely did way more research for that movie than she did for these cartoons). Once you've spent any amount of time in India, and then you go to ...

If you're really asking "where do I put them in a chart of my consonant inventory", the answer is "wherever it seems most helpful; probably after the velars."

Two new books arrived this week! Adger on Minimalism, and Goldberg on Construction Grammar. Construction Grammar is right up my alley. It relies heavily on Lakoff, who's one of my favorite linguists anyway. It's also compatible with Tomasello's work on child language acquisition (summarized in ALC)....

LB: I'm not sure I can make sense of that unless I delete the initial 'the': [How work gets done] informs (your) rating. Here's one I just saw: Michelle Obama's Memoir Becoming Will Be On Store Shelves a Week After the Midterm Elections No problem unless you miss the italicization, which I did for a...

I finished reading Carnie's book-- 3rd ed., by the way. My overall impression: I'm happy that a lot of old-style generative grammar is still there, pre-Minimalism. A lot of X' theory is either already in McCawley, or seems like a notational variant of earlier theories. Which isn't to say I like ever...

That may well be.

I would note that the tweet came with the photo. So it feels like the writer is trying to say several things at once: "This (waves at photo) was posted on Reddit. It's a copy of Alice. Due to water damage..."

Here's an alternative theory: people say what they've heard. If the people around you say [ɔftn̩], you (may) say it too. (I don't rule out a spelling pronunciation, but we shouldn't resort to this explanation if "saying what other people say" covers it.) I'm skeptical that people are doing amateur e...

Not a garden path, but reading this tweet— "This copy of Alice in Wonderland was posted on Reddit, due to water damage it's grown spores and has actual mushrooms growing out of it." https://twitter.com/SelineSigil9/status/964095705676697605 —my first thought was "Duh, don't post on Reddit, you'll al...

There's also the "editorial we", which led Mark Twain to the dictum that the only people allowed to refer to themselves as "we" are popes, emperors, and people with tapeworms. The "authorial we" is an interesting case. Random example from the book I'm reading: "In chapter 3, we developed the notion ...

Imralu wrote:Does anyone know of another English word with /ln/ in a coda? I can only think of the name Milne.

They're pretty hard to come by, but gamers have come up with "invuln".

The Carnie arrived today, and I'm pleased to report that, reading the first three chapters, I learned almost nothing! That is, the introductory stuff is almost identical to what I know from 25 years ago. So that's nice. The few differences are mostly notational— e.g. apparently we now write D, T for...