- Dec 2023
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There is nothing logically necessary about dividing time up into past, present, and future, and even given a three-fold distinction, there is no logical requirement that each distinction must be expressed through tense.
Having grown up with theses concepts so divided up, I find it tricky to wrap my head around this idea.
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Like time, modality is a semantic concept; like tense, mood is a grammatical realization of a concept. For the most part, English expresses mood analytically, through a system of modal auxiliaries.
If I'm understanding this right, mood's are not modalities, but modalities can convey moods?
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because they blur the distinction between form (NP or AdjP) and function (subject complement).
This is a small yet daunting phrase to me. I honestly could not think of a way to blur a Np and AdjP. Based on what I've seen in the course thus far they seem to fill pretty distinct roles. To define them in a way that makes them more similar than different shows me the specter of a headache that I don't wish to have.
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Unlike other linking verbs, you can also follow BE with a modifier that indicates a place, either literally or metaphorically:
The idea of "being" seems so weird after looking at how this verb interacts with other verbs.
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With stone or some stone, the mass-noun uses, noun phrase refers to the material; with stones, the count-noun use, the noun phrase refers to individual items. The stone, which can be used for both mass and count nouns, is ambiguous: we may be thinking of either material or an item.
I've seen people use mass nouns in wildly different ways. depending on where you grew up, the importance of putting a determiner in front of a mass noun seems to not be too consistent.
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The proper noun does not need to be the head of the proper name. For example, in the United States of America, the head is states.
If I were to guess this quirk predominantly shows up in formal writing as people tend to address these kinds of things differently informally. I wonder if there are examples of this that don't refer to a collective.
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Labels like NP, VP, etc, tell us the structural form of a constituent.
I appreciate how clear this shortening of these terms are, makes labelling them in sentences a lot easier and more clear.
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As we noted above, however, those phrases may consist of only one word from time to time.
This leaves to wonder if there are any other possible outlier instances of a verb phrase consisting of one word. While I can't think of one, one can't help but wonder if there is some esoteric verb out there that could accidently do that.
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The very test sounds rather odd with these words, as in (23a) ?They were very present at the assembly.
While this test may not work all too well with the example sentence, I can see the test being very helpful to certain types of writers. For some, I can see the very test being quite ressauring for those unsure of how to set a scene.
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We mark (14) as ungrammatical not because it has no sensible interpretation but because her cannot be understood to apply to Genevieve.
Little quirks like these often have me wondering where the line is between a grammatically correct sentence and a functionally acceptable sentence.
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- Sep 2023
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Morphemes can be further divided into several types: free and bound. Free morphemes are the morphemes that can be used by themselves. They’re not dependent on any other morpheme to complete their meaning. Open-class content words (generally speaking, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) such as girl, fish, tree, and love are all considered free morphemes, as are closed-class function words (prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, etc.) such as the, and, for, or it (Hamawand 5). Bound morphemes are another class of morphemes that cannot be used by themselves and are dependent on other morphemes, like the -er in worker.
As someone who used to study computer science, it is interesting that the idea of the most basic element of English writing has a name. It reminded me of how the most fundamental aspect of coding is binary.
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One example is personal blogs, which are often different from more formal news articles. Blog posts have more flexibility to be informal because most people write with a conversational tone to appeal to their audience.
I find it interesting that we have so few opportunities to engage in informal writing in professional or non-informal settings.
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- Aug 2023
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Linguistics takes a descriptive approach to language: it tries to explain things as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. When we study language descriptively, we try to find the unconscious rules that people follow when they say things like sentence (1). On the other hand, the schoolbook approach to language is typically prescriptive. It tries to tell you how you should speak and write.
This will certainly take me some time to get adjusted to properly. My previous experience with these two approaches comes from debate club, where the misuse of either approach could make or break an argument.
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But when they did turn to grammar, as often as not they did so in ways that either had no effect—because the students didn’t understand what the teacher meant—or were counter productive—because the students took away lessons that wound up making their writing worse
This feels like a very common problem when discussing someone's writing. I feel like I've seen this happen in both academic and non-academic settings.
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