1257: How to Verb a Noun: Phrases (LITW 2) May 19, 2018
The question for today: how do you verb a noun?
Well as any native English speaker should realize, that is merely a rhetorical question, but it is still an interesting and perhaps entertaining notion. Unlike in Salish, because English syntax relies almost exclusively upon word-order, placing any word, including a noun, adjective, or even preposition in the position of a verb, it will become a verb. What this leads to is a sort of test to see if something is one word or multiple. As you can see in the attached photo, "social justice warrior" (so long as you can overlook the hyphen-misuse) is used as one verb, even though it appears as three words. However, because of the social and linguistic connotations, it has now developed meaning as one word (usually a noun, though here a verb).
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1250: How Turkish Words Get So Long May 12, 2018
Turkish and Finnish agglutination were brought up in the latest the latest Word facts video, but no example was given. In the video it showed how Germanic languages allows for compounding of terms within a single lexical class (e.g having strings of nouns acting together as one word) and polysynthetic languages can attach affixes to indicate meaning that connotes ideas that would belong to multiple lexical classes, but synthetic languages are somewhere in the middle. Turkish, for instance, can pack a lot of information into one word very similarly to polysynthetic languages. As you can see in the chart below, shows that affixes, particularly suffixes (and then infixes) can be added to one word in order to indicate meaning which in English would have to involve prepositions (which is also true of less agglutinative languages like Latin), verbs, and adjectives. There are still more limitations to this than in, say, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), but are still more productive than in English
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1243: Lexical Limitation May 5, 2018
The word 'back' is an adjective, verb, and noun; this sort of productivity is not possible in all languages, but even English has limitations. The uses of 'back' depend upon linguistic context, and that can be given in merely one other word; to make it a noun, add a determiner (e.g. 'the back'), for a verb, add a determiner phrase (e.g. 'I back [the company]), and for an adjective: a noun (e.g. 'back pain'). However, this means, this means that there are contexts in which back cannot exist. For instance, back cannot follow a preposition like "in back" (though "out back" is a phrase on its own), nor can 'back' be a noun and follow determiner phrase, although this is true throughout all of English and should not be terribly special. One could argue that this is only because word-order is so foundational to English grammar, but languages with more inflection tend to have less of this kind of productivity anyway. There is (at least) one language in which there is no such limitation, Salish, and this will be discussed tomorrow.
1242: Pronouns versus Anaphors in English May 4, 2018
English doesn't have a 4th person for verbs, and indeed most languages don't. However, it is with the 4th person that Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) distinguished between when a third person object of a third person subject (e.g. 'him' in "he loves him") is referential or not. Instead, English uses 'himself' and 'him' to show when one is referential and the other is not. Therefore, any direct object pronoun of a third person subject will refer to another person; in “Brian loves him”, ‘him’ can only refers to someone else, always. Where this gets tricky in English but wouldn't necessarily in Greenlandic is when there are multiple clauses, e.g. "Brian said that she loves him" where 'him' could refer to anyone except for the 'she' in question, because even though 'himself' exists, it cannot appear here *"Brian said that she loves himself". These are rules which any English speaker knows without being aware of necessarily.
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1231: Passival pt. 3 Apr 23, 2018
There are a lot of ways to use the passive voice in order to deflect blame. For instance, "mistakes were made" does not reveal who made said mistakes. However, a few verbs allow for this hidden agency to be carried across without the passive, per se. 'Broke' for instance in "my pencil broke" is active in the way that it is formed, but it's passive semantically, because pencils cannot break themselves. This is another example of the passival, which is a generally overlooked and fairly rare middle voice in English. Also, it might be interesting to note that while 'broke' and some other verbs can be active, passive, and passival, intransitive verbs cannot even be passive; no one could say "he has been died" nor "she has been slept" because those verbs do not take objects ever, and in this situation, the subject is also the object.
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1225: Stative versus Dynamic 'be' Apr 17, 2018
There are many forms of the verb 'to be', but there are just about as many uses too, including the equatorial 'be', the 'be' for locative predications, the habitual 'be' to name a few, but none of those relate to psychology as much as the dynamic (and its opposite: stative) 'be'. Of the latter two, both of them relate to predicate adjectives, but in different ways. The dynamic 'be' is used for adjectives that can—semantically—be thought of as impermanent qualities, such as 'humorous', 'sarcastic', or 'angry', whereas stative adjectives describe (you guessed it) the state of something, such as 'tall', 'stone' or, debatably, 'intelligent'. In both cases, the sentence can be phrased as "subject is (adjective)" as in 'the comedian is funny' or 'the statue is stone', like any other predicate adjective. The difference however, is that while one can say "he is being funny", one cannot say "the statue is being stone", or arguably "she is being intelligent"*. How this relates to psychology, perhaps, is that some will emphasize the difference between "I am angry", and "I have anger", claiming that the former—even though it is technically dynamic—gives the speaker the sense that it is stative, and puts people into a state of ascribing qualities to themselves that are temporary. This is highly debated as well, so please write down your own thoughts
*I could not find any strong examples, but if you have any thoughts—or better yet, examples—I'd love to hear them.
1221: People Make Sense of Bad Grammar Apr 13, 2018
People do not just freeze at ungrammaticality, and try instead will try to make sense of things. This is how talking to someone newly learning a language may say something like "I likes it" or a baby may say "I holded it" and this is not impossible to understand, though it is obviously ungrammatical. A prime example of this is most of the entries in the book "English as She is Spoke", the title alone of which shows just this very idea. The famous line "...he speak the frenche as the Frenchmen himselves. The Spanishesmen believe him Spanishing, and the Englishes, Englishmen." In the obvious places where there are linguistic issues, generally what would need to be supplemented to make it sound normal would be words that are phonetically similar (somewhat), and usually syntactically similar to what is already there. In this way, language is less a formula and more a set of clues for interpreting signs.
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1216: Periphrastics: Roundabout Speech Apr 8, 2018
People tend to know when use 'more' and 'most' for the comparative and superlative, and when to use '-er' and '-est', because it relies upon phonetics, but there is some discrepancy. While no native speaker would say 'beautifuler', 'lovelier' and 'more lovely', for example, are both acceptable ways of speaking, even though 'lovelier' is more conventional both historically and linguistically. When a full phrase is used such as 'most happy' or 'more funny', it is referred to as the periphrastic.
The periphrastic refers to anything that, to put it simply, is stated in a phrase when it could be one word. This also happens with verbs, such as 'let's talk' versus 'let's have a talk', or 'he pushed the door' versus 'he gave the door a push', which can be stylistically useful, but does not have any defined linguistic benefits necessarily. These commonly involve 'have', 'do', and 'give', but also 'take'. If you have examples with other words, write it in a comment.
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1039: Flexibility among Nouns Oct 13, 2017
English is fairly flexible when it comes to syntax. Not only is it possible to make many verbs into nouns and vice versa by simply putting it in the sort of context that a noun or verb takes, giving us the ability to say "I'm going to walk" and "I'm going on a walk", but different types of words within one lexical class, such as mass nouns like 'milk' or 'glass' and count nouns like 'shirt' are also somewhat interchangeable, with understood variation in meaning. Though generally mass nouns do not take a pluralizing '-s' like count nouns do (e.g. 'a dog' and 'dogs'), when they do, it means "varieties of", so 'milks' would not refer to an quantity of milk but could denote kinds of milk like whole-fat, skim, chocolate etc. On the other hand, singular count nouns take articles like 'a' or 'the', but when they don't, and are used like mass nouns, it can have several different meanings. For animals, English-speakers can refer to meats by using the singular version of the word with no article, e.g. "I like horses" versus "I like horse". Other times it can mean "bits of", such as, "after that car-crash, there is car/deer/tree/street-sign all over the road", which functions like a mass noun.
1005: Loss of Gender (g.w.6) Sep 9, 2017
It is easy to look at languages like Latin or Old English—now no longer used—that were heavily inflected and each had three genders, and assume that because modern descendants thereof have either lost all or most of those attributes, languages have a tendency to lose gender, or other morphological (or morphophonological) features. Indeed, looking at the way that Indo-European languages have evolved over time, that trend is fairly consistent. Most linguist assume, however, that Proto-Indo-European was both gendered and heavily inflected, so realistically the most likely way it could have evolved was to lose some of that. This did not happen all at one time though, and the loss of gender in English took several centuries, starting in the north of England around the tenth century. At the time of the Norman invasions, many English speaking communities still had gender, which would often be influenced by the Norman French, such as the gender of 'se mona' ('the moon') which started as masculine but became feminine due to the influence of the Norman French 'lune' ('the moon'), before gender was eventually lost. It is theoretically possible that English could regain gender, perhaps on its own, or with influences from other languages like Spanish, which has already had a noticeable impact on certain American dialects, but there is no real way to predict any of this.
1004: Difficulties with Gender in L2 (g.w.5) Sep 8, 2017
While there are some potential benefits of grammatical gender in terms of the speed of recognition of words, gender can make it harder to learn a language, even if one is somewhat familiar with it. Grammatical gender requires extra memorization, in addition to the vocabulary and other features that someone needs to know when learning another language. Even in languages that are closely related, there is no guarantee that cognates will share the same gender. For instance, in Italian and Portuguese, the word for 'milk', 'il latte and 'o leite' respectively is masculine, but in Spanish 'la leche' is feminine. At best this is only something else to remember, but could also be a source of confusion for interlocutors. Furthermore, while some languages like kiSwahili base their system of noun classes on sound alone, in other languages like French or Spanish where gender is mostly arbitrary, the usual gender of the word can appear to change because its sound. For example, in those two languages, a noun starting with a stressed 'a-', regardless of its gender, would take a masculine article. In Spanish, 'agua' is considered feminine because it is modified by feminine adjectives, but it takes the masculine article 'el' to avoid the more cumbersome sounding 'la agua'. Likewise, the French 'amie' is feminine, and would take the feminine 'ma' in 'ma chère amie' ('my dear friend') when the article is separated from the noun, but when the article and noun appear adjacent it appears as 'mon amie'. Nevertheless, if you ever thought that learning French or Spanish with their two genders, Latin or German with their three genders, or even kiSwahili with its eighteen noun classes would be difficult, keep in mind that the South American language Tuyuca has somewhere between 50-140 noun classes.
1003: Benefits of Gender (g.w.4) Sep 7, 2017
If, as has been said in the last few days here, that gender is fairly arbitrary and also has the potential to complicate things, there may not seem to be any use for it. That is not to say every aspect of every grammar has to be reasonable—there is not a reason why some languages rely on word-order to indicate syntax while others use inflection—but at least in that case there needs to be some way to show how the words relate to each other, whereas there does not need to be gender: three quarters of the world's languages do not have it at all. Still, at least one of the possible benefits to grammatical gender is recognition of words. In the paper, Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition [1] written by Casey Lew-Williams and Anne Fernald, it was discussed that children learning Spanish were better able to identify referents when they were given the morphosyntactic cue, and native-speaking adults showed similar results as well. They said "studies show that adults respond more rapidly to nouns preceded by valid cues to grammatical gender than without such cues" [1]. Although it is not necessary to have gender to identify words—otherwise all languages would have gender—there are advantages when it comes to recognition at least.
[1] Lew-Williams, Casey, and Anne Fernald. “Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition.” Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 3, 2007, pp. 193–198. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40064714.
1000: Arbitrariness of Gender (g.w.1) Sep 4, 2017
In languages that have grammatical gender, a noun can be masculine or feminine (or neuter if there is a third gender), but this does not mean that it can be classified as 'male' or 'female' in the way that some people may make it seem. In general, words that relate to biology, such as terms for 'man', 'woman', 'penis', 'vagina' etc. correspond to the grammatical gender of masculine or feminine, but there are some issues with generalization. There is no guarantee that this convention will always be followed, so while the German 'Frau' ('woman') is feminine, the word 'Weib' ('wife' or 'female') is neuter, and likewise 'Eierstock' ('ovary') is masculine. This may appear strange but the reason for this is fairly logical: the terms 'masculine' and 'feminine' were only created to describe trends that were already in use. While there are certainly some patterns in terms of how words related to one idea may belong to one gender or another, once one starts looking at the relationship between grammatical gender and the meaning of certain words, there is no more reason that, in German, most alcohols are masculine, or most words relating to a house are neuter than there is a reason 'Weib' is not feminine. These ideas and more will be explained here in more depth over the next six days.
This is part one out of seven of Word Facts' Gender Week to celebrate the 1000th post. Remember to like, share, and stay tuned for the next six.