The Innovative Usage Thread

[Jipí]

...Apparently, some two people here from Vancouver assure me that it's common to refer to your leg as your "foot", it just happens it's not "correct". Do you guys agree it's common?

The same goes for the Swabian/Alemannic- and Bavarian-speaking parts of the Germosphere, AFAIK. For example, a friend who's from a village between Heidelberg and Karlsruhe would point at a scratch on his shin/lower leg and say that his foot hurts.

Furthermore, the German word Bein 'leg', is cognate to English bone, and still exists with that meaning e.g. in the names of the shin (Schienbein) and parts of the skull. However, the use of vuoz and bein corresponds to the modern use of the words Fuß and Bein respectively already in Middle High German according to my MHG dictionary, in that vuoz is not given with "shin" or "leg" as a secondary meaning, and bein not with "bone" as the main meaning.

[sarcasmo]

"Sneak" is a fairly standard example of one of those words where lots of people are uncomfortable over which past participial form is the "correct" one ("snuck"? "sneaked"? neither?). Today I realized that for me, while "snuck" is fine with the past perfect, it's not possible with the present perfect (so I could say [about my dog], "she'd snuck into the dining room", but *"she's snuck into the dining room" is totally ungrammatical) (for the equivalent of the present perfect I'd probably have to go with a circumlocution using "manage" + infinitive: "she's managed to sneak into the dining room"). It's kind of interesting, since off the top of my head I can't think of any other examples of past participial forms that are fine in the past perfect but ungrammatical in the present perfect.

"She's snuck" sounds vaguely British to me (American).

Anyway, the past participial form of sneak is too confusing. I propose sneak>snought, following seek>sought.

[----]

Wouldn't that make it end up being pronounced the same as 'snot'?
EW

[Yng]

Err no, not unless you have some weird merger. /snQt snO:t/

It would be merged with 'snort' for me but I'm non-rhotic

[----]

I don't have a weird merger, I have a perfectly normal merger. I only have [ɔ] before liquids, and everywhere else where in other dialects it would be pronounced that way, it's merged with /a/ for me.

[Lyhoko Leaci]

Sounds like snought [snɑt] and snot [snɑt] to me.

Or is the caught-cot merger weird?

[Christopher Schröder]

Anyway, the past participial form of sneak is too confusing. I propose sneak>snought, following seek>sought.

That doesn't quite work — ea implies [ei] in some Dialects — so it would have to be sneak > snoke on the Pattern of break > broke.

[Travis B.]

Or is the caught-cot merger weird?

Heh - at least from my unmerged perspective, the idea of merging the two seems almost absurd subjectively..

(Yet it only sounds slightly odd when I actually hear it, because my brain treats [ɑ] as a valid phone for both LOT/PALM and THOUGHT/CLOTH despite gravitating towards [a] for the former and [ɒ] for the latter.)

[Pole, the]

Or is the caught-cot merger weird?

Everything in English is weird.

[Bob Johnson]

Anyway, the past participial form of sneak is too confusing. I propose sneak>snought, following seek>sought.

This doesn't change your dialect into something sufficiently unique and special

I propose "I seek" "I have soughten" "I soaked".

[Pinetree]

So, today, I said "I've had colds in the summer all the time". Is this ungrammatical?

[Bob Johnson]

So, today, I said "I've had colds in the summer all the time". Is this ungrammatical?

perfect with "all the time" is a bit of a contradiction, i'd expect either "I get" or "before" instead

[Melteor]

So, today, I said "I've had colds in the summer all the time". Is this ungrammatical?

I might say, "I've always gotten sick in the summer time," if someone asked about allergies. If you replace 'all the time' with 'always' it works for me.

[Pinetree]

So, today, I said "I've had colds in the summer all the time". Is this ungrammatical?

I might say, "I've always gotten sick in the summer time," if someone asked about allergies. If you replace 'all the time' with 'always' it works for me.

Well, I didn't mean that i got them every summer. My dad was surprised that he had a cold, and I was expressing that i wouldn't be surprised about that, because it's happened before, and with some amount of frequency (but not annually).

[Nortaneous]

i get colds in the summer all the time

'had' is ungrammatical for me

[Melteor]

^^Oh, OK, then that really doesn't work for me. I would say, "I get sick all the time even though it's not winter/is summer," or, "I have gotten sick before during/in the summer." I think the scope of "all the time" is too narrow for that, it's more like in recent memory than a comparison across years. I think I would say, more in keeping with the habitual construction, "I'm used to getting sick then/about now/in the summer." It's kind of more ambiguous, but it still might be too strong, like you might even expect to get sick, and possibly only during the summer. It depends how you say it. Adding "all the time" would make it stronger, implying that you get sick periodically during at least a few of the summers.

This 'always' business made me think of a bizarre negative pregnant, "I haven't always gotten sick in the winter." Weird huh? There's a bunch of ways to take it.

[Pinetree]

This 'always' business made me think of a bizarre negative pregnant, "I haven't always gotten sick in the winter." Weird huh? There's a bunch of ways to take it.

Yes. In that case, distinctions would have to be made prosodically:

"I haven't always gotten sick in the winter."
-- Denial of a previous statement that declares that I always get sick in the winter

"I haven't always gotten sick in the winter."
-- Similar to the above, but with a slightly different connotation

"I haven't always gotten sick in the winter."
-- Declaration that I do more than get sick in the winter

"I haven't always gotten sick in the winter."
-- Declaration that I get sick in more seasons than just winter

To stress the "gotten" wouldn't make much sense at all, though.

[Nortaneous]

I haven't always gotten sick in the winter; I'm sick almost every winter, but sometimes I get sick in the fall and it takes until a while into winter to go away.

also: I haven't always gotten sick in the winter; I'm not the one who's allergic to cold here.

[sirred]

Kinda sorta example. My brother was talking to a francophone in English and the francophone ended a sentence with what would normally be "he would" but contracted it to "he'd" on the grounds that we do this elsewhere. So, my brother was left there waiting for the rest of the sentence. We were talking about it later and even though the usage violated the rules of every dialect I am familiar with, we never really thought about it being a rule until then.

[Melteor]

^^'Would' receives full stress so it does not reduce. That's like really basic to the language. Not Only the vowels in 'would' reduce (usually) when they're not stressed, they do pretty much everywhere else in the language. Only vowels than are reduced can reduce further, giving forms like 'he'd' etc. It's not quite the same as the sandhi(?) with vowels that you see in French. And do I need to point out that French doesn't have alternating reduced vowels like English?

Yeah, that's sort of the point. It's something so basic to English useage, the fact that you can't end a sentence with contractions like "he'd" or "he's" and would have to use "he would" or "he is", that it took an L2 speaker violating the rule (by contracting "he would" at the end of a sentence) for either of us to think, "Wait, you can't do that". We hadn't heard the mistake made before and so neither of us thought "it would be a mistake to end a sentence this way", but when we encountered it, the mistake was obvious. It was sort of a "Well Duh!" moment. The rule was just so engrained into how we use English that we never considered the "wrongness" of its violation.
[Edit: Added.]

EDIT: lol I kind of thought you were advocating that for a 2nd. Good catch, though, I'm actually reading Bolinger's Intonation & It's Parts right now and it's a lot more of this.

So, today, I said "I've had colds in the summer all the time". Is this ungrammatical?

I might say, "I've always gotten sick in the summer time," if someone asked about allergies. If you replace 'all the time' with 'always' it works for me.

Well, I didn't mean that i got them every summer. My dad was surprised that he had a cold, and I was expressing that i wouldn't be surprised about that, because it's happened before, and with some amount of frequency (but not annually).

how about,
"I've had colds all the time in/during alotta/abuncha summers."
If you lose "in" it means it was a long cold, and you would have to drop "all the time" too in that case. "Abuncha" maybe groups the summers together loosely vs "alotta". I favor "in" vs "during" if there's no stress on the o- or u-syllable in the following word.

Weirdly enough, I have heard a habitual use, like, "I'm always getting sick in the summer!" that I don't feel would have to be literally "always" but could be hyperbolic generalizing. "All the time" doesn't work here though because it clashes with "summer".

[sirred]

Yeah, that's sort of the point. It's something so basic to English useage, the fact that you can't end a sentence with contractions like "he'd" or "he's" and would have to use "he would" or "he is", that it took an L2 speaker violating the rule (by contracting "he would" at the end of a sentence) for either of us to think, "Wait, you can't do that". We hadn't heard the mistake made before and so neither of us thought "it would be a mistake to end a sentence this way", but when we encountered it, the mistake was obvious. It was sort of a "Well Duh!" moment. The rule was just so engrained into how we use English that we never considered the "wrongness" of its violation.
[Edit: Added.]

[Nortaneous]

My father: "Is there four lanes up ahead?"

"There's" + plural is perfectly valid IMD, but I don't think I could un-invert that and keep the number disagreement... although now that I think of it, I probably could if it's contracted to [z(e)ɚ] or so, I'm not sure

[Shrdlu]

Shouldn't that be "are there four lanes up ahead?". "Are" because "lane" is in plural, "lanes".

[Nortaneous]

in theory, but

also "there's four lanes up ahead" is fine for me, even though it's not Standard

[Ser]

My friends pronounce the <l> of not only <calm>, where the spelling pronunciation is so widespread it's found in dictionaries, but also of <balm>, <palm> and <psalm>.