The Innovative Usage Thread

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linguoboy
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by linguoboy »

KathTheDragon wrote:What word should I be using, if not productive?
That depends: What are you trying to express?

There does appear to be a fairly regular pattern[*] in English by which the suffix -ate reflecting Latin -ātus/-ātum/-āta tends to be pronounced /-eːt/ in verbs and /-ət/ in nouns and adjectives. You can call it a "rule" if you like, but I don't see evidence of it being applied to produce new derivations within English. That's why I would not call it "productive". The productive method for forming adjectives from verbs in -ate seems to be adding -ing (e.g. acculturate (1917) > acculturating (1920)) or -ed (e.g. pixelate (1982) > pixelated (1982)).


[*] Examples of exceptions:
Adjectives in /-eːt/: innate, sensate, ornate, prostrate, sedate.
Nouns in in /-eːt/: chemical terms for salts (e.g. acetate, carbonate, nitrate, sulphate), mandate, reprobate.
Verbs in /-ət/: [no examples]

Insofar as I can see a pattern among these exceptions, it's that they tend to be disyllabic. Trisyllabic reprobrate (as an adjective) and insensate both have regional variants in /-ət/, which, however, don't occur in NA English as far as I can tell. So there might be what Ó Siadhail would call a "minor rule" in your dialect which reduces the vowel in these cases, but that's not the same thing as a productive derivation rule. (Insensate and reprobate don't even appear as verbs IMD.)

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by Imralu »

The other day, my flatmate told me something starting with "Ich..." and because I didn't hear the verb, I asked him /du(:) vast/... and then it occurred to me that I had just conjugated "what" as a verb, wassen. I've done that more or less deliberately in the perfect, like Du hast gewasst?" but for some reason it seems weirder that I did that as the main verb in the sentence, and it was not deliberate at all, not as a game but just something the sentence-making parts of my brain told my mouth to do.
Adjectives in /-eːt/
Every time I see Americans writing /eː/ or /oː/ feel a bit weird about it as I can't even imagine an American pronouncing "late" or "pope" a monophthong — even though I've seen it claimed many times that some do. In my head, it always sounds Scottish or Irish or some non-native pronunciation.
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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Imralu wrote:
Adjectives in /-eːt/
Every time I see Americans writing /eː/ or /oː/ feel a bit weird about it as I can't even imagine an American pronouncing "late" or "pope" a monophthong — even though I've seen it claimed many times that some do. In my head, it always sounds Scottish or Irish or some non-native pronunciation.
I've definitely heard monophthongal /oː/. (My family used to vacation in upper Minnesota and that's all you hear from the locals.) If I've heard monophthongal /eː/, then I wasn't particularly conscious of it.

Basically, if you're doing pandialectal phonemic transcription, you have two options: phonemecise these as diphthongs and assume some dialects are monophthongising them or vice-versa. Both approaches are defensible, but it just seems easier to use length. Diphthongal transcriptions inevitably strike me as overly narrow. Based on German, I don't think my /eː/ is actually [eɪ̯] and I know my /oː/ isn't [oʊ̯]. I like using Smith-Trager vowels, but I get so much flak from fools who don't understand them that it's not worth it.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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In the dialect here, here being southeastern Wisconsin, /eɪ oʊ/ tend to be [e o] before consonants and, depending on the speaker and often just free variation*, either [e o] or [ei ou] - note the close offglide - finally or before another vowel. Note that I do not mark these with length, because length is not phonemic in the dialect here.

* I personally consistently used [ei ou] here as a little kid, but now I use [e o] finally and [e~ei ou] before another vowel.
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by finlay »

KathTheDragon wrote:What word should I be using, if not productive?
Productive means that it can be applied to make new words.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Congratulations for repeating that I shouldn't be using 'productive' instead of telling me what to call it instead.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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KathTheDragon wrote:Congratulations for repeating that I shouldn't be using 'productive' instead of telling me what to call it instead.
A "generic tendency"?


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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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KathTheDragon wrote:Congratulations for repeating that I shouldn't be using 'productive' instead of telling me what to call it instead.
"non-productive"

HTH, HAND.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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Can anyone with a knowledge of Chinese help me satisfy a curiosity? Every single Chinese student I have ever taught French has the same accent feature. I can't really describe it much and I can't share audio files from my students but it involves the letter combination <tr> which in French is /tR/ and it sounds like the stop is lightly pronounced. Is anyone here familiar with Chinese speakers of French and could perhaps shed light on what this phenomenon is. It's just remarkable that it seems to be without failure for every single Chinese speaker I've had (and I have no idea if they speak Mandarin or Cantonese, etc.)
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by finlay »

Probably just an unfamiliar consonant cluster. they don't really have them in chinese

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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Viktor77 wrote:Can anyone with a knowledge of Chinese help me satisfy a curiosity? Every single Chinese student I have ever taught French has the same accent feature. I can't really describe it much and I can't share audio files from my students but it involves the letter combination <tr> which in French is /tR/ and it sounds like the stop is lightly pronounced. Is anyone here familiar with Chinese speakers of French and could perhaps shed light on what this phenomenon is. It's just remarkable that it seems to be without failure for every single Chinese speaker I've had (and I have no idea if they speak Mandarin or Cantonese, etc.)
I have heared of Chinese people turning [ʁ] and [ʀ] into [h]. Maybe that's what it is?
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by Travis B. »

Qxentio wrote:
Viktor77 wrote:Can anyone with a knowledge of Chinese help me satisfy a curiosity? Every single Chinese student I have ever taught French has the same accent feature. I can't really describe it much and I can't share audio files from my students but it involves the letter combination <tr> which in French is /tR/ and it sounds like the stop is lightly pronounced. Is anyone here familiar with Chinese speakers of French and could perhaps shed light on what this phenomenon is. It's just remarkable that it seems to be without failure for every single Chinese speaker I've had (and I have no idea if they speak Mandarin or Cantonese, etc.)
I have heared of Chinese people turning [ʁ] and [ʀ] into [h]. Maybe that's what it is?
Considering Mandarin does not have either of those sounds, and it is easy to see them becoming [χ] and then [h], which Mandarin does have...
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by linguoboy »

Travis B. wrote:Considering Mandarin does not have either of those sounds, and it is easy to see them becoming [χ] and then [h], which Mandarin does have...
Mandarin has both [h] and [χ]. (Realisations of Mandarin /x/ vary considerably.)

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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I discovered today that my grandfather misconjugates verbs. I think he's always done this but I just never really noticed it. He says things like "they says" and "she don't." I'm curious why he would do this (my grandma certainly does not do it). All I can think is it's because of his very working class urban raising in the 1930s. Does anyone else have grandparents born and raised in the US who misconjugate verbs? It's stranger yet because it's very random. It's almost as if he's trying to mark something.
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by Sumelic »

Viktor77 wrote:I discovered today that my grandfather misconjugates verbs. I think he's always done this but I just never really noticed it. He says things like "they says" and "she don't." I'm curious why he would do this (my grandma certainly does not do it). All I can think is it's because of his very working class urban raising in the 1930s. Does anyone else have grandparents born and raised in the US who misconjugate verbs? It's stranger yet because it's very random. It's almost as if he's trying to mark something.
"They says" and "She don't" don't seem very random to me. Use of "says" for non—third-person-singular seems to be pretty common in colloquial speech (like "I says") and use of "don't" for third-person-singular seems very common in many varieties of English; see this post: Historical and contemporary usage of “don't” for the third singular person

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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To some extent I think "I says" is what older people say where younger people would say, "I was like". It's not meant to be a literal quotation, but an approximate one for the purposes of storytelling.
linguoboy wrote:There does appear to be a fairly regular pattern[*] in English by which the suffix -ate reflecting Latin -ātus/-ātum/-āta tends to be pronounced /-eːt/ in verbs and /-ət/ in nouns and adjectives.
...
[*] Examples of exceptions:
Adjectives in /-eːt/: innate, sensate, ornate, prostrate, sedate.
Nouns in in /-eːt/: chemical terms for salts (e.g. acetate, carbonate, nitrate, sulphate), mandate, reprobate.
Verbs in /-ət/: [no examples]
Those are only exceptions if you describe the rule overly generally. I think a more accurate description would include the condition that there are both verb and noun/adjective forms of the word. Can you think of any exceptions of adjectives or nouns in /-eːt/ when there's a verb with the same spelling?

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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gmalivuk wrote:Can you think of any exceptions of adjectives or nouns in /-eːt/ when there's a verb with the same spelling?
Mandate is right there staring you in the face.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by gmalivuk »

Hm, I guess I must have missed that amid all the irrelevant examples.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

linguoboy wrote:
gmalivuk wrote:Can you think of any exceptions of adjectives or nouns in /-eːt/ when there's a verb with the same spelling?
Mandate is right there staring you in the face.
As are sedate and prostrate! And so, albeit hidden a little, is reprobate ('hidden' because the verbal use is much less common in modern speech than the nominal and adjectival).

(Wiktionary tells me that 'ornate', 'sensate' and 'innate' are also all verbs, though it marks 'ornate' as obsolete, and I don't think I've ever heard 'sensate' or 'innate'.)

Still, of the seven non-chemical nouns/adjectives you gave, between three and seven are also verbs... not exactly a sea of irrelevent examples!

[My own example: I certainly know people who use collate as a noun, although wiktionary doesn't recognise it. "Act or result of collation", I would say.]
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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Sumelic wrote:"They says" and "She don't" don't seem very random to me. Use of "says" for non—third-person-singular seems to be pretty common in colloquial speech (like "I says") and use of "don't" for third-person-singular seems very common in many varieties of English; see this post: Historical and contemporary usage of “don't” for the third singular person
The "she don't" may just be hypercorrection, I would think, since the 3rd person singular is the only person to be conjugated. I'm wondering now if Gmalivluk hasn't hit on something with -s inflection as a quotative. From what I remember of this particular utterance it did seem like a quotative.

Just because, I wanted to add one more thing. I'm vacationing in a part of the US that has retained a very particular accent from Southwestern England. Today we spoke with some people on Harkers Island, NC, and other remote places of the Outer Banks. While we didn't meet anyone with as strong an accent as has been recorded in documentaries like "The Carolina Brogue," I did hear some of this accent and it was fascinating. It features words like "dingbat" for an outsider, "mummucked" for to be worn out by something and "drime" which is an interjection, perhaps like bullshit. I learned about this accent in my first sociolinguistics class so to see some of it in person was rather neat as a linguist.
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

Post by jal »

Viktor77 wrote:hypercorrection
Either I don't know what a "hypercorrection" is, or you use it wrongly here...


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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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jal wrote:
Viktor77 wrote:hypercorrection
Either I don't know what a "hypercorrection" is, or you use it wrongly here...


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Perhaps it is the wrong terminology? Over generalization maybe?
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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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Viktor77 wrote:Perhaps it is the wrong terminology? Over generalization maybe?
I understood "hypercorrection" as the process of wrongly correcting something because it looks like something else you know is wrong. E.g. a typical (old) Dutch example is someone saying "kopje kofje" for "kopje koffie", since their native dialect has "koppie" for "kopje".

"leveling" springs to mind for a process where generalization is applied. I'm not sure whether that's correct here.


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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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I think levelling is the right word.

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Re: The Innovative Usage Thread

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KathTheDragon wrote:I think levelling is the right word.
That sounds right, actually, thanks.

I use this thread too much but damn is it convenient for these little questions.

Do any Brits here use "palaver" to mean a fuss, a kerfuffle, essentially? The dictionary definition is more along the lines of idle chatter but I have heard this word once or twice used in a situation where it seemed "kerfuffle" would be an appropriate synonym. Does this word have that meaning for you and do you use it or have you heard it used that way? Also does the word belong to a particular register in your opinion?
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