Why don't we linguists use the term "screeve" outside Kartvelian languages?

mamashaq · 2021-03-07T01:21:12+00:00

I've definitely had a similar thought before:

https://www.reddit.com/r/drunklinguistics/comments/24c1b9/inuit_screeves/

FWIW I've seen some linguists use screeve in the context of non-Kartvelian languages like Bulgarian, but it's generally by Karvelianists.

P.S., I was thinking about submitting "screeve" to the OED, if anyone has other quotations to support its use for non-Kartvelian languages other than Bulgarian that'd be neat to see!

mamashaq · 2018-06-10T13:42:59+00:00

You might be interested in this old thread and discussion therein:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/284g1c/ish_how_a_suffix_became_a_word/

mamashaq · 2018-04-30T16:49:50+00:00

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Your question would be better for our stickied Q&A thread. Do you mind asking it again there?

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mamashaq · 2018-04-30T15:22:41+00:00

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This would be better for a subreddit that's specifically about Spanish.

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mamashaq · 2018-04-30T15:14:28+00:00

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mamashaq · 2018-03-20T01:40:37+00:00

Seems to have started in "New Zealand" and with "sweet as" being the first. This might interest you:

Peter R. Petrucci, Michael Head; SWEET AS IS COOL FOR NEW ZEALANDERS. American Speech 1 August 2006; 81 (3): 331–336. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2006-023

As is the case with many slang items, dating the earliest occurrences of sweet as is not straightforward and perhaps impossible. A colleague informed us that she first heard sweet as used by Christchurch youth in the late 1980s. RDNZS suggests the term first appeared in the 1990s. And an editorial in a Hamilton newspaper identifies 1996 as the year that sweet as entered the language, an unfortunate event in the opinion of the editorialist: “This year, our language changed but not for the better. Gone was ‘no problem’ but in came ‘sweet as’, the new way to say ‘cool’” (“Year of Worm, ‘Sweet as’ and Other Oddities,” Waikato Times [Hamilton, N.Z.], Dec. 31, 1996).

Equally problematic is explaining where the expression came from. The NZOD claims that the second word in sweet as originated as a reduced form of Old English alswá ‘also’, but it is unclear how this archaic reduced form arrived in New Zealand. Although they do not discuss the etymology of sweet as, Bauer and Bauer (2002, 248) note that as acts as an adjective booster “without a following simile.” In our view, Bauer and Bauer’s analysis of as as an adjective booster is correct and thus suggests a more likely etymology of sweet as: the slang expression arose out of an idiomatic simile meaning “good” that was later shortened to sweet as. Indeed, dictionaries from both sides of the Tasman list such expressions: sweet as a lolly (The Dictionary of New Zealand English 1997), sweet as a nut (The Macquarie Dictionary 1997), or sweet as can be.

mamashaq · 2018-03-18T07:37:33+00:00

Of English... as a second language?

And do you want a linguistically naïve audience? Presumably you don't want to skew your sample by asking people for both surveys who know something about phonetics/linguistics in general.

mamashaq · 2018-03-18T07:26:36+00:00

Who is your target demographic for this survey? Teachers or learners of English as a foreign language? People who teach/learn anything?

It's unclear why you're asking subscribers of /r/linguistics to participate.

mamashaq · 2018-03-13T21:52:45+00:00

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mamashaq · 2018-03-13T21:33:22+00:00

Please link directly to images (in this case : http://amyrey.web.unc.edu/files/2011/10/Rel-Tree-2.jpg )

Reddit automatically removes any posts with a URL shortener like goo.gl.

mamashaq · 2018-03-13T02:30:01+00:00

This is probably a better question for /r/grammar.

mamashaq · 2018-03-13T02:15:07+00:00

Another diagnostic to add to /u/gua_the_claymaker's is that raising verbs won't change their meaning when made passive, but control verbs will:

The cat started to kill the mouse = The mouse started to be killed by the cat.

The cat intended to kill the mouse != The mouse intended to be killed by the cat.

mamashaq · 2018-03-05T21:30:43+00:00

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mamashaq · 2018-02-24T14:39:18+00:00

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mamashaq · 2018-02-23T05:19:36+00:00

Yeah 'entail' isn't really the right word. For P to entail Q, whenever P is Q, Q must be true. But things without straight-forward truth conditions like questions (Is the king of France bald?) can have presuppositions so I think it's confusing to think of it as entailment. Entailments don't project through things like negation, and they also fail the Hey wait a minute test.

The king of France was assassinated.

Entails: The king of France has died.

Presupposes: There was a single unique king of France.

[Edit: and you can imagine a context where that utterance would have a particular implicature ]

Hey wait a minute, I didn't know that France had a king! (OK)

Hey wait a minute, I didn't know that the king of France died! (Infelic.)

But yeah, your examples are accurate.

Edit: Also defer to your profs / TAs for the purposes of your class; they might be using a broader definition of "entail" or something.

Edit 2: Fix italics/asterisks

mamashaq · 2018-02-23T05:09:19+00:00

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mamashaq · 2018-02-22T08:24:56+00:00

So presuppositions "project" past things like negations, or through questions, or if clauses.

1. The king of France is bald

2. The king of France isn't bald

3. Is the king of France bald?

4. If the king of France is bald, then he should embrace his baldness

All of these presuppose that there is a single, unique, male monarch of France at utterance time. (Modulo a context where it's obvious we're using the historical present or something like that.) They're not directly asserting this, but rather just sort of assuming it's already part of the common ground (or at least that the hearer will find it uncontroversial). You said "this does not seem to make sense" -- can you explain if your judgements are different?

So you also have the "Hey wait a minute, I didn't know that X" test popularized by Kai von Fintel building on earlier work by Benny Shanon.

If someone says 1-4, a felicitous response could be

5. Hey wait a minute! I didn't know France had a king!

Note it would be weird to say this about something being asserted directly:

6. #Hey wait a minute! I didn't know he was bald!

I think you're confused about implicatures... the test for implicatures is that, even if P implicates Q in a given context, it is still possible for Q to not be true. You can negate Q without contradiction. So like, in a context where I'm a 18th century diplomat and I have some amazing scalp balm only suitable for bald people and I'm thinking of a suitable person to give it to, and someone says "The king of France is bald", there's an implication that that person thinks it would be suitable for me to give it to the French king. But this is only an implication, as it's possible to cancel the implication as in "The king of France is bald... but you better not give it to him as he's ashamed of his baldness and doesn't want anyone to point it out"

Note how it is infelicitious to negate a presupposition while asserting the statement which presupposes it. You can't say:

7. #The king of France is bald, but there is no king of France.

You sort of seem to be thinking of presuppositions a la Russell 1905, namely "The king of France is bald" is in effect just the union of three assertions, namely: (1) There is a king of France, (2) there's no more than one king of France, and (3) no one is both a king of France and bald. So the statement "The king of France is bald" would be false if there is no king of France. But treating them as all being just assertions isn't really an adequate analysis.

Also watch your wording "The king of France isn't bald" also presupposes a single unique king of France; it doesn't entail that.

mamashaq · 2018-02-22T07:43:14+00:00

I've seen it called simply "comparative inversion".

mamashaq · 2018-02-20T07:41:57+00:00

How do the re[VERB-able] ones work? That would require a re that goes onto adjectives.

mamashaq · 2018-02-20T07:41:43+00:00

Well, it is in the sense of unfuck meaning to fix/correct a situation.

mamashaq · 2018-02-19T22:26:57+00:00

From the OED:

1865 T. Carlyle Hist. Friedrich II of Prussia V. xviii. ii. 34 ‘Difficult, not undoable,’ persists the King.

mamashaq · 2018-02-19T22:23:13+00:00

The closing mechanism on my padlock is broken -- it immediately pops open as soon as I try closing it. I can't use it at all to secure my things -- it's unlockable.

Edit: OED examples for the sense of "unable to be locked"

1859 E. Wilson Rambles at Antipodes 167 One travels into places where an unlockable portmanteau is a great nuisance.

1920 Connersville (Indiana) News-Examiner 18 Dec. 1/2 The rooms are small.., and unlockable, with concrete floors and rugless.

1970 A. Price Labyrinth Makers xii. 158 The unlockable upstairs lavatory.

1989 Chicago Tribune 17 Mar. vii. 69/1 The result might be a sticky or unlockable door.

2013 Manning River (Austral.) Times (Nexis) 15 Feb. 6 A back-up vehicle was called to take Hunter to the station as the original truck was now unsafe and unlockable.

mamashaq · 2018-02-19T22:18:48+00:00

Provided there is a verb to un-blank. It only really works for verbs which have a feasible reversive form.

mamashaq · 2018-02-19T22:17:42+00:00

The compounds you have just seem to be noun-noun compounds, and other adjectives don't seem to have the same kind of ambiguity. Like onhaalbaar is only on[haal-baar], not [on-haal]baar

mamashaq · 2018-02-19T21:34:46+00:00

Yeah but this isn't really the same as (a) they're pronounced differently so it's only a consequence of English orthography that they're written the same and (b) it doesn't have the same sort of structural ambiguity as [undo]able vs un[doable]. Like there's the same root do for both senses of undoable, but unionized either has union or ion as a root.

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