Search results for 'tag:Dates tag:Inflections' matching tags 'Dates' and 'Inflections'

lINGUISTICS as a conversation

noel gomez — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:39:42 GMT

Good day! Hi there! i just would like to know if Lingustics can be used as a tool for everyday's conversations, public speaking and many more; how does it benefit us and what are its effects to us. Thankyou. I just would like to sahre something i've read about linguistics - its history and unique characteristics. Correct me if i'm wrong. The article goes like this:

Wikipedia

Main article: Arabic grammar

Due to the rapid expansion of Islam in the 8th century, many people learned Arabic as a lingua franca. For this reason, the earliest grammatical treatises on Arabic are often written by non-native speakers.

The earliest grammarian who is known to us is Ê¿Abd AllÄh ibn AbÄ« Isá¸¥Äq al-á¸¤aá¸ramÄ« (d. 735-736 AD, 117 AH). The efforts of three generations of grammarians culminated in the book of the Persian linguist SibÄwayhi (c. 760-793).

Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (Ø§ÙÙØªØ§Ø¨ ÙÙ Ø§ÙÙØÙ, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.

Traditionally, the Arabic grammatical sciences are divided into five branches:

al-luÄ¡ah (lexicon) concerned with collecting and explaining vocabulary

at-taá¹£rÄ«f (morphology) determining the form of the individual words

an-naá¸¥w (syntax) primarily concerned with inflection (irÄb) which had already been lost in dialects.

al-iÅ¡tiqÄq (derivation) examining the origin of the words

al-balÄÄ¡ah (rhetoric) which elucidates construct quality

Thanks!

Re: I want to learn to speak clearly-What do I have to know/do?

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:35:36 GMT

I also have also had problems speaking clearly and coherently, making me seem less intelligent that i think i am. And as a result i have lost opportunties for relationships i had very much hoped for, so i had to be determined to work out my speaking problem. I think there are many reasons for me rambling non-sensically in person, some are:

1)feeling shy/inadquate/self conscious compared to those i am speaking with, and trying to impress too much (probably from having bad experiences with my fumbling language and social skills).

2) not having much experience/practice at expressing my thoughts verbally

3) not really sitting down and thinking my thoughts through logically and forming them well to myself before i go and sprout my opinions off.

4) not being formally taught the right way to structure my sentences. i dont know why i can speak so much more clearly on paper than in person.

But the way have attempted to fix this problem is by writing down on some paper some rules for me to follow when i am having my say in a conversation. (i collect these rules from books i read on communication at the library). and reading over those rules every night before bed, and asking myself: did i break any of those rules that day?, and what happend when i did?, and how could I have done it differently?. and trying to do better the next day.

Some of the rules on my list are these:

1) When a comment is made to you that was meant as a conversation starter, do not give one word answers, and NEVER EVER just start and continue talking until the other person interrupts you. Give brief responses, with clear pauses in it for interruption. You will either look like a mute or a babbling fool if you do anything else. Give brief but complete answers with a definite pause at the end to hand the conversation back over clearly. Donât just talk until you are interrupted. Give pauses for people to interject, and also this sounds much more powerful and simple. Most people are taught to not interrupt. and it can make people feel distressed if you donât, and then frustrated and bored. many people either talk too much or too little as their response. dont make your message too long or too short.

2) dont try to say too many things at once. make one point at a time, decide what is the most important thing you want to say is, and say that, and then hand the conversation back over.

3) when you tell a story or make a point, say the main idea first, and then add supporting detail afterwards (usually just one supporting detailafterwards, not 600). eg an example, a statistic, a story to support your point. keep it short and simple and you will have more weight to your words. and sound more powerful and authoriative and easy to listen to. dont make it hard work for them to listen to you. be economical with your words.

4) dont say anything without saying why you think that, so they understand why you feel that way. or else it sounds bossy, and opinionated, and not worth listening to.

5) pause before you speak, it sounds authorative. and also gives you time to think. think before you speak, dont just regurgitate information, its amazing how much structure you mind can give to your thoughts in 2 seconds.

6) The value of information depends on its relevance, how up to date it is, how complete it is, the timing that it is received, its impartiality, and its presentation.

7) becareful how you end your message. dont weaken your point by saying anything that could contradict your message, at the end of your message. just leave nothign at the end. to give your message structure, my english teacher used to say "tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them". there should be a beginnign a middle and an end to your paragraph.

8) know what the purpose/goal of your message is before you give one. all communication is desgined to either inform, entertain, or persuade, or all.

9) make sure you use correct grammar, and use downwards inflections with your voice when you talk to sound more authorative and you can show if you are about to end your message or keep going talkign or not. keep it simple, with a main point first, and some kind of examples to help them understand, and then let them have their say.

* body language plays a large roll as well, but i am just saying some points about how i try to structure my messages now.

these are just some things on my list.

i hope it helps.

Re: phrasal verbs

Kvinchuca — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 01:23:28 GMT

Phrasal Verbs, A New Approach To Learning

âI donât understandâ he said, âI just donât understandâ.

These words from a student in early 2003 set me off on a quest to resolve a problem that has for centuries defeated teacher and student alike.

My student, JosÃ© GarcÃa Bes, like millions before him, wanted an explanation that I was unable to give him. âThere is no apparent logic behind phrasal verbsâ I told him âyou will just have to memorise them like everyone elseâ. JosÃ© was not a man to be so easily fobbed off with such a glib reply. âThere is logic behind all language, we simply have to find itâ.

It was then that JosÃ© stopped being my student and became my colleague and co-explorer in the uncharted realms of the English language.

We spent around on average 40 hours a week, analyzing the seemingly impossible, I spent many extra hours on the internet reading thousands of references, papers discussions etc., but we appeared to be getting nowhere. If there was a logical approach, then the logic was so tortured that we too had to think in a completely different manner. Fortunately I had a good man with me, for JosÃ© is one of Argentinaâs most brilliant minds.

One of the principle problems we faced was the question of what constitutes a phrasal verb. There is no consensus of opinion among lexicographers and what may be described in one dictionary as a phrasal verb, in others it appeared as a normal verb or as an idiomatic phrase. English lacks a governing body such as the Real Academia EspaÃ±ola or the AcadÃ©mie FranÃ§aise, so who is to say what is what, and who is right or wrong.

In our work we have identified 41 particles, with other verbs they are adverbs or prepositions that radically change their properties when conjoined with simple verbs to form phrasal verbs.

Our studies have resulted in what we think is a startling breakthrough, and has provided a simple way to teach and learn these most used and little understood foundations of spoken English.

Each particle represents a unique part of medieval society, or events and or ubiquitous locations within the medieval world. Without wishing to give the game away, as we are publishing our findings in 2005, I would suggest you read the explanation below with an imaginative approach.

Around/About

Around/about suggests situations, actions, attitudes and certain activities that took place around the medieval town centre or market-place, but unrelated to commercial activities such as buying or selling and overwhelmingly suggest the following: idleness, time-wasting, and non-production, people who are common, badly behaved, ill-mannered, clownish, unsophisticated, lacking control and being spectators at a show.

Several verbs give a clue as to the meaning of around/about: fool, horse, lark, play and slap.

Here we have key elements of street theatre dating from medieval times that continue to be widely represented in many parts of rural England and can be seen in the performances of todayâs Morris Dancers. Morris Dancing is a traditional pastime in many parts of England performed in the open air as a form of street theatre. The dancers are troupes of men who continue the traditions of folk-dancing and mummerâs plays ( a simplistic type of early theatre depicting the struggle between good and evil, often religious in content but retaining pagan symbolism from the pre-Christian era). For more information go to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance

The street theatre in those days was ribald, bawdy and unrefined, with unambiguous use of references to bodily functions as a basis for much of their humour and comedy, which today we call âtoilet humourâ

The spectators would crowd around/about, sit, lie, roll, hang, wait, gad, and mill around/about.

The actors were looked down on by the upper-classes as vagabonds, wastrels, prostitutes and sturdy beggars, and as such subject to imprisonment and hard-labour. âI see sheâs going around with that boy againâ. Here we suspect that âthat boyâ is not someone who you would like your daughter to go about with, the inference is tacit, yet is obvious when one hears the words spoken because the inflection of the voice makes it so. This is one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, that the profoundly deaf native speakers have difficulties with phrasal verbs. If they cannot hear the subtleties of the voice, they are only left with the words, which confound the listener as they confound the foreign student.

The public was entertained by the antics of the players who often poked fun at people in the audience as well as within their own group of actors, as still happens today at many morris dancing events. Two of the most important protagonists of these ancient plays remain with us in the morris dancing teams, the fool and the hobby-horse.

The fool, armed with an inflated pigâs bladder on a stick would hit victims, selected at random from the audience (knock sb/sth around/about). Slap means to hit with the open hand to cause a painful stinging sensation but little or no damage. The fool would hit people with a slapstick, a device made of wood with a loose, hinged section. When a blow is delivered with the stick it produces a loud crack that gives the spectator the impression that the blow was hard, violent and obviously painful, whereas the exact opposite is true. From this comes the expression âslapstick comedyâ.

The fool would lark around/about (lark being a derivative of laik, meaning to play or not do work, and is still commonly used in many parts of northern England).

The antics of the fool appealed to the coarser nature of the crowd with references to ***, bum, fart, ***, bugger and ***. He may even poke, sniff, scratch, touching his victim in a genuine or simulated sexual manner in order to get cheap laughs from the victims friends and other spectators, who then fall or roll about/around laughing.

Sniffing around the crowd, the clown could show delight at some apparent perfume and conjure flowers the clothing of a victim of his attentions, or showing disgust at some apparent stench, produce a dead rat, cheers and laughs all round.

It is no coincidence that todayâs morris dancers delight the crowds by performing in the street, but always outside a pub or country inn. The dancing appears to have only two reasons for being. One is to dance to entertain and the other is to spend the money collected from the bystanders on alcoholic drink, such as beer or cider and hence the chosen venue being outside the pub.

When drinking a toast to the health of the company these days, glasses are raised and gently tapped together. Medieval revellers under the influence of large amounts of alcohol were less refined, clashing their metal tankards together so that beer or wine sloshed (spilled) out of their drinking vessels and onto the table or floor.

To slosh money around/about, now means to have money to waste, as in the wasted beer that is spilled.

Horse around/about comes from the hobby-horse, a regular protagonist in mummerâs plays and a common feature in many morris teams. For more information go to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby-horse

The hobby-horse capering around could quite easily knock over a small child or bump into one of the spectators, thus meaning to behave in a way that is both careless and potentially dangerous.

Our journey into the world of phrasal verbs has taken us down many thorny paths, with more than a few dead-ends. We have not been able to accommodate each and every verb that has been decided by consensus of opinion to be a phrasal verb, but this can be explained by the fact that the language is evolving. Many phrasal verbs are modern, such as âlog onâ, âswitch offâ etc. and have nothing to do with the medieval world, yet we have identified a common base for some modern phrasal verbs within the context of our explanation.

So if you can wait a little while until our publication is available, hold on, you can look forward to an easier way to master these demons and learn a little history at the same time. We are forging ahead and if our plans do not fall through, you should be able to count on seeing it in February.

For further information contact me at

Grammatical Cases and the English Language

Crux_online — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:08:50 GMT

Good day, all!

Read through....the question is at the end.

English cases, though no longer taught as such, are still somewhat present and remnants of the cases in Old English. During the time between say, 1300 and the present, we lost most of the inflections that were present before 1300, but some of the words -- particularly the possessive pronouns -- retained their inflections.

The four cases of Old English are:

Nominative
Genative
Accusative
Dative/Instrumental

The Nominative case gets its name from the idea that it is the 'naming' case. It identifies the subject of the sentence by name.

The Genative case gets its name by pointing out the 'genesis' of the noun. "Brother of mine", "Goblet of silver". Generally, anywhere 'of' is used, the object of the preposition will be in the Genative case.

Now Accusative and Dative leave me baffled. How did they get their names?

Accusative seems to bring to mind one accusing another. Even in Russian, ÐÐ¸Ð½Ð¸ÑÐµÐ»ÑÐ½ÑÐ¹ (vi-NI-tyl-ni) is the name of the Accusative case and the root verb of that is ÐÐ¸Ð½Ð¸ÑÑ (vi-NIT), to blame, accuse. But how does that apply to the case of a noun in the general role of Direct Object? Or is the premise of Accusative case being equivalent to the Direct Object faulty altogether?

Dative conjures in me the idea of dates. In linguistics, the Dative case is generally used to indicate the Indirect Object. The question becomes, "how/where does the concept of date intersect with the idea of Indirect Object?

Now naturally there are prepositions that require a specific case. In English all prepositions require the Accusative case (the Dative case seems all but lost in Modern English). In German hilfen, to help, requires the Dative, whereas sehen, to see, requires an Accusative object. Whereas this makes perfect sense, there are other that make no sense. This is not the thread for that discussion.

My question, after all that, is this:

Where did the different grammatical cases get there names?

Thanks!

Re: Your being?

taiwandave — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:05:58 GMT

Miriam,

Many thanks for your thoughtful expansion of Pem's analysis. I'll first address the specific questions you've raised, then re-state more thoroughly the case which the Cambridge book is making for the gerund's redefinition.

Consider the following two sentences:

1. I can't stand your being here.
2. I can't stand your haircut.

A dependent genitive such as "your" requires a noun object. What follows a dependent genitive is, therefore, surely a noun or noun-like. This fact supports the conclusion that "being" in [1] is what is traditionally called a gerund.

The suggestion that "being" might be a verb with "your" as its subject seems absurd: a dependent genitive (e.g. your, our, my, their) cannot fill this role. The following are ungrammatical:

3. His car is blue, but my is red.
4. Our is the right way.

We are traditionally taught that the gerund is a noun-like form that retains some of the characteristics of a verb, and as such is distinct from the present participle. This is, as you noted, a very confusing concept in English grammar.

Some -ing forms really are full-fledged nouns: words such as "building" are, as you said, completely nominalised. But does "building" in "that building is over there" really belong in same category as "being" in [1]? To say that a word is part-noun, part-verb: does that not violate the very idea of what a noun is?

The Cambridge authors would sooner bend other grammatical rules than blur the fundamental distinction between noun and verb. For example, they would consider the dependent genitive in a sentence such as [1] to be a acting as a subject, something that [3] and [4] show as being completely ungrammatical. This they justify in part by pointing out other ways that the dependent genitive in [1] behaves differently from that in [2]. For example, what happens when it is omitted:

5. I can't stand being here.
6. I can't stand haircut.

In [5], the meaning has changed but it is not ungrammatical. They see this as showing "subject-like" behaviour on the part of the dependent genitive, analogous to a to-infinitival that remains grammatical when stripped of its subject:

7. I arranged for him to leave the country.
8. I arranged to leave the country.

Note that the authors consider the "for" in [7] as belonging to the category of subordinators, and to be marking the beginning of a subordinate clause in which "for him" is the subject of the to-infinitival.

At this point I'd like to add a disclaimer of my own. My background is electrical engineering, not English. When I recently took on some English teaching work, I realized that I knew very little about grammar. Since none of the other teachers at the school -- and I'm curious if this is typical -- knew much about grammar, I realized I'd have to learn it on my own. The books I initially found weren't satisfactory, so I ordered Quirk's "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language". While on Amazon, I read a review that mentioned the Cambridge book so I ordered it as well.

I had previously assumed that English grammar was a static field: that it had been boiled down to a set of fixed rules and lists of exceptions, and that any controversy as there once may have been had long since died out. I was surprised and excited to realize that quite the opposite is true.

The rules of grammar as traditionally taught represent a view of linguistics that is decades out of date. Yet linguistics research has up to now had very little influence on commonly-accepted methods of analyzing English grammar. Why? Because it tends to be so dense and jargon-saturated that no one but linguists can understand it. With the publication of the Cambridge book, that has changed. It's clear, it's understandable, and it represents a serious challenge to the old ways of thinking about grammar.

While I've made my best attempts to paraphrase some of the points that the book is making, whatever I write is obviously a very poor (possibly even misleading) substitute for reading the book itself -- something I'd urge you to do.

I'll conclude with a verbatim excerpt concerning the topic we're discussing:

A gerund is traditionally understood as a word derived from a verb base which functions as or like a noun, as in:

Destroying the files was a serious mistake.
I regret destroying the files.

"Destroying the files" could be replaced by "the destruction of the files", where "destruction" is clearly a noun. The formulation "as or like" is used in talking of the functional resemblance between a gerund or a noun, leaving open the issue of whether the word is a verb or a noun. Dictionaries tend to define the gerund as a verbal noun, but there are strong grounds for analysing "destroying" in [both sentences] as a verb, and for drawing a distinction between such words and others ending in -ing which genuinely are nouns and which we refer to as "gerundial nouns":

He was expelled for killing the birds. [form of verb]
She had witnessed the killing of the birds. [gerundial noun]

The verb-forms are traditionally divided into gerunds and present participles, as illustrated in:

Gerunds:
Inviting the twins was a bad mistake.
We're thinking of giving them one more chance.
I remember seeing them together.
She found talking to Pat surprisingly stressful.

Present participles:
Those living alone are most at risk.
Not having read his book, I can't comment.
She is mowing the lawn.
We saw him leaving the post office.
I caught them reading my mail.

Historically the gerund and present participle of traditional grammar have different sources, but in Modern English the forms are identical. No verb shows any difference in forms in [the above examples], not even "be". The historical difference is of no relevance to the analysis of the current inflectional system. We reject an analysis that has gerund and present participle as different forms syncretized throughout the class of verbs. We have therefore just one inflectional form of the verb marked by the -ing suffix; we label it with the compound term "gerund-participle" for the verb-form, as there is no reason to give priority to one or the other of the traditional terms.

This grammar also takes the view that even from the point of view of syntax (as opposed to inflection) the distinction between gerund and present participle is not viable, and we will therefore also not talk of gerund and present participle constructions.

In summary, words with a verb base and the -ing suffix fall into the following three classes:

1. She had witnessed the killing of the birds. [gerundial noun]

2. a. He was expelled for killing the birds. [gerund-participle form of verb]
b. They are entertaining the prime minister. [gerund-participle form of verb]

3. The show was entertaining. [participial adjective]

-----------

Note: following is the definition they give for the term "syncretism":

When two or more lexemes are identical we say there is "syncretism" between them, or that they are "syncretized". For example, there is syncretism between the preterite [past tense] and past participle of "want": both are realized as "wanted".

Re: Grammar, Grammar! What is it?

kitkattail — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 03:13:17 GMT

Here is what the dictionary has to say:

Main Entry: gramÂ·mar
Pronunciation: 'gra-m&r
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English gramere, from Middle French gramaire, modification of Latin grammatica, from Greek grammatikE, from feminine of grammatikos of letters, from grammat-, gramma -- more at GRAM
Date: 14th century
1 a : the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and relations in the sentence b : a study of what is to be preferred and what avoided in inflection and syntax
2 a : the characteristic system of inflections and syntax of a language b : a system of rules that defines the grammatical structure of a language
3 a : a grammar textbook b : speech or writing evaluated according to its conformity to grammatical rules
4 : the principles or rules of an art, science, or technique
- gramÂ·marÂ·iÂ·an /gr&-'mer-E-&n, -'mar-/ noun

(From Merriam-Webster's online site, www.m-w.com.