2214: Delexical or 'Light' Verbs Jan 6, 2021
There are plenty of verbs that people use that are at best semantically incomplete, such as 'take' in "to take a bath" or "to take a test". These and many others are known as light verbs, delexical verbs, or vector verbs. These verbs essentially exist as they are used to complement an object, which is usually a noun. 'Do' and 'have' can fit into this category, but this usage should not be thought of as auxiliary, as the function of indicating grammatical aspect is different.
2210: Are Raise-Rise & Lay-Lie the Same Word? Jan 2, 2021
Ostensibly, the words 'rise' and 'lie' are very syntactically similar. Rare for most verb in English, they both modify apophonically (i.e. with internal vowel changes) to indicate transitivity (i.e. whether the verb takes an object). For instance, all in the present tense:
I raise something up // I rise (*something) up
I lay something down // I lie (*something) down
the latter forms of each being impossible in English. These 4 forms are often considered different words altogether rather than 2, in part because they conjugate differently, past tense perfect:
raise-raised; rise-rose; lay-lain; lie-lay.
Note also that while the intensive form 'arise' exists, there is no 'araise', nor for that matter intensive 'alay' nor 'alie'). While these are therefore almost certainly separate, apophany indicates multiple functions and not only tense or pluralization, so it is not so clear cut. If there is another word you know that indicates transitivity; there are some.
2188: Paucal, Trial, and Greater Plurals Dec 11, 2020
In addition to the dual number, another number besides simply singular and plural is the paucal, which crops up in a number of different languages such as many Oceanic languages, Serbo-Croatian, some Cushitic languages, and Hopi. This is used specifically for a small but unspecified number; in English one would have to use other words like ‘a few’ rather than using morphology. In other languages too there is the trial, used for specifically three objects. There are however, some languages that rather than distinguishing between small numbers distinguish between greater ones. The greater plural—though all grammatical numbers are equally good ☺—is a syntactic category of some languages including Mele-Fila, a Polynesian language, that distinguishes large quantities, relative how much would be expected. This does allow some room for subjective understanding how much is 'a lot' for a given word, but for instance it might be used when discussing thousands of flowers in a park, or just a handful of luxury cars all together. Of course, this distinguishes from the paucal which is just as subjective. Moreover, Mele-Fila and these other languages with a greater plural will generally still use the plural for exact numbers. It should be noted that while this is a general overview, each language will treat these differently, such as Sursurunga which has a ‘lesser-plural’ in its pronoun system, once thought to be a trial number, but actually it can refer to either 3 or 4 people. Indeed Sursurunga has some of the most complicated numerical system for its grammar, distinguishing between singular, dual, (aforementioned) paucal, greater paucal, and plural.
2186: How Pluralization Can Affect Meaning: 'Oczy' vs. 'Oka' Dec 9, 2020
While pluralization may often be merely a necessary aspect of a language's grammar, sometimes it can have an impact on the semantics too. The Polish noun 'oko' means both 'eye' but also 'oil droplet' and while the plural for the first meaning is 'oczy', for the second it is 'oka'. The reason for this distinction is ostensibly due to the so-called dual number, a form of plural used specifically for things which come in pairs. That is why also even if it is more than 2 eyes, or exactly 2 oil droplets being referred to, the same plural forms are used. Indeed, while the dual is used primarily for things which are considered generally to come as pairs but in Polish and also Russian certain forms of nouns will have different forms for referring to 2, 3, or 4 of that noun, but this extension is limited to the genitive or nominative plural for Polish. Uses for the dual beyond this will be the topic tomorrow.
This post is the start of Pluralization Week, to celebrate the 6th anniversary of the blog.
1239: Tense vs. Aspect: 'Do' and 'Have' May 1, 2018
The auxiliary verbs 'have' and 'do' (which is extremely rare outside of a few languages, having been borrowed from Cornish) have similar functions on the surface, but are extremely different. The difference between "I did [verb]" and "I had [verb]" is that while both 'do' and 'have' are often used to indicate past action instead of (or in addition to) conjugating the main verb, they show different grammatical aspects. Simply put, 'do' is for when the action is continuous or perhaps habitual "I did run" which is the imperfect aspect whereas 'have' only refers to that which has (had) an end, "I had run", which is the perfect aspect. This all becomes trickier considering the present tense "I have run" is the present tense but takes place in the past, and "I do run" is clunky; most people opt for simply 'I run' and only use 'do' for the negative form, or for emphasis.
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1228: English Right-Hand Rule Apr 20, 2018
There is a reason why negative affixes are going to be prefixes in English is the same reason why derivational affixes such as '-al', '-ness' and '-ate' will be suffixes. English has what is called the "English right-hand rule" which states that usually, the right-most element is the head of the word, and will determine the syntax and or meaning. This is true of most adjectives, compounds where the first element acts almost like an adjective, and affixes. With the latter, negating prefixes such as 'in-', 'un-' and 'non-' all can be attached to adjectives (among other things) and the word will still remain an adjective (or whatever else) whereas the aforementioned suffixes will all make a word of one part of speech become a word of another lexical class. This is the case with most affixes in other Germanic languages as well, though there are a few notable exceptions within each, and is one of many significant reasons why English will not be considered a Romance language despite strong influences from vocabulary.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk
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.
1218: Inflection for Proper Nouns Apr 10, 2018
In heavily inflected languages like Kalaallisut (a.k.a West Greenlandic), names change in form where necessary for case. For instance, the capital of Greenland, Nuuk in English, is also 'Nuuk' in the ergative case, but in the locative (i.e. locations like "in Nuuk") becomes 'Nuumi'. This is also true of names for people etc.. With English however, there is a general aversion to modifying proper nouns. Partly this is because case is limited in English, but even where there is case such as the genitive -'s following an [s] or [z] in a coda, the word doesn't change, such as "chris's (dog)". The other reason is that it is conceptually odd; the other common inflectional morphology in English is with the plural, but it is uncommon for there ever to be a plural proper noun. For more on this, see the video about proper nouns out today.
1140: Stress-Timing Jan 22, 2018
Certain languages like English, Thai, and Persian have what is called 'stress-timing'. This is the notion that while syllables may differ in length, the perceived amount of time stressing is the same, which is in contrast to syllable-timed languages like French, Welsh, Icelandic, and Mandarin as a form of isochrony wherein syllables are perceived as the same length as each other. These categories are rough and somewhat subjective, lacking definitive empirical evidence, but are widely accepted by many linguists. What this means is that, for example, an utterance like 'bid for peace' in which there are two stressed syllables on either side of an unstressed syllable, the unstressed syllable, in this case 'for' is pronounced for longer than it would were it not between two stressed syllables. Most of the world's languages are classified as stress-timed. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.