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Category: General Language
What are the negative and positive politeness strategies?
Politeness theory I’m sure I’ve answered this here already. Positive politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve doing good things for them. They concentrate on eliminating distance between people. Negative politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve not doing bad things to them. […]
What does Roman Jakobson mean about poetry: “the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination”?
I understood the words and the phrases, but I had to be edified by some online links, and I’ve got an advantage in that I know why Jakobson said it the way he did. Roman Jakobson Metaphor Project Jacobson – Metaphor and Metonomy Exec summary: there is one takeaway message for poets: FORM MATTERS The […]
Why are most old foreign words still used, despite its semantic void can already be considered filled/supplied by its own words?
Remember: language always has a social context. Always. Why do languages borrow words and phrases? Sometimes: consciously, to fill in a gap in the language, by bilinguals who care about the target language. That takes work. Rather more often: as a transferral of prestige and connotations from the source language, by bilinguals who want to […]
Is there a way to accent an “e” to make it sound like “ah?”
I echo other respondents in expressing frustration at the vagueness of the question. In English, there are two diacritics that can be applied to <e> to change its pronunciation. <è> is occasionally used to ensure that the <e> is pronounced and not silent. Grave accent The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears […]
Why do you love linguistics?
Here is an utterly left-field video I saw today, in the context of my day job (because my CTO is awesome). It’s knowledge management consultancy stuff, but I think it goes some of the way to explaining why I love linguistics: Cynefin Framework: Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or […]
What is the opposite of a girl?
Not satisfied completely with any of the answers, though C.S. Friedman and Michael Alvis are closer to my thinking, and Mack Moore and Kalo Miles are further. Celia is closest in her initial formulation (which Michael does not contradict): Opposites are paired items *in the same conceptual category*, with perfectly opposing (non-overlapping) qualities. To be […]
What IT skills are useful or necessary for linguists and linguistics students?
What they said. For fieldwork, you get a flat-file database for organising your field notes and automatically generating glosses and dictionaries. (A relational database is overkill.) Toolbox (The Field Linguist’s Toolbox) and its predecessor The Linguist’s Shoebox from SIL International are the default tools. Databases are less useful than you might think, though I found […]
Is there a word which can be used to describe a pair of names which are different gendered variants of the same name?
It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word. Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare […]
If a language dies does a culture die also?
Language is one of the primary vehicles of culture, and expressions of cultural distinctiveness. But it is not the only one. When a language dies, the language community has been linguistically assimilated into another community (assuming the community hasn’t been genocided). That is typically associated with cultural assimilation. But not always. As a counterexample to […]
Are there any scientific publications with swear words in them?
Well, there’s the classic ENGLISH SENTENCES WITHOUT OVERT GRAMMATICAL SUBJECTS by Quang Phuc Dong of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (pseudonym of James D. McCawley, 1967), and several others in that vein. But that’s linguists writing about swearing, not swearing per se. (There’s was quite a trend of little “who, me?” bombs in linguistic […]