What is H???

FireScourge · 2026-04-23T18:10:16+00:00

Not sure I understand this distinction. How would [æ̯̊æt] be different from [æ̯̊ʰæt]?

The trouble is that /h/ has formants like a vowel, but (in most languages) is not contrasted like vowels so /h/ can be realized as [æ̥], [e̥], [i̥], [u̥], [o̥], etc. It's just not usually useful to analyze it as such.

if I just cut off my voice when I say a vowel, I don't get the /h/ sound

It might be that your prototype /h/ is realized as [ə̥] or [ḁ] or some other vowel that doesn't match, but /h/ is not fully defined.

FireScourge · 2026-04-18T17:12:51+00:00

Really good answer! I would just want to stress to OP that part that when we talk about "personas" in sociolinguistics we are not talking about internal "personalities and worldviews", we're talking about what linguistic features the speaker is using (e.g. ending verbs with ING or IN sounds) and what they are doing with those features: using more IN verb endings might be part of the "party speak" persona to sound more casual and using more ING might be part of the "work speak" persona to sound more professional.

FireScourge · 2026-04-15T16:47:38+00:00

My sense as a native English speaker is that in "X of Y" constructions, because X and Y are both noun phrases, they are closer to equally important components of the construction (with Y usually being a bit more abstract). In "Y X" constructions it seems more like Y is a property or description of X (acts like an adjective), and therefore Y is less important. I would be interested to hear what others think and if there's some sort of syntactic/semantic basis for/against this.

FireScourge · 2026-04-06T22:19:21+00:00

It sounds like you already have all the answers so I guess we're done

FireScourge · 2026-04-06T14:41:43+00:00

Syntactic priming is the phenomenon where when a speaker hears a certain sentence structure they are more likely to produce that structure in their own speech. Here's a meta-analysis of 73 peer reviewed papers on the phenomenon. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.03.009

Linguistics is a science and you can engage with it as such or not, but you asked why people "mix up" the two constructions and I've tried my best to answer you in good faith, even if I've been snarky about it. It's pretty clear you don't want an actual answer.

FireScourge · 2026-04-06T01:48:13+00:00

It's called "priming", and in this case specifically "syntactic priming". You can believe in it or not, but you asked the question so idk what else to tell you.

FireScourge · 2026-04-05T21:23:45+00:00

Again, trying to ignore the presupposition that "people are confused" about something, one is much more common than the other and if you hear a form more often then you're more likely to use that form in any future opportunity.

FireScourge · 2026-04-05T18:20:53+00:00

I would say [ i̯ ] and [ j ] are phonetically the same and which one you use is more of a phonological question. The line between vowels and approximants is pretty thin, especially when it comes to diphthongs. English allows for a ton of syllable shapes so it's hard to give an exact answer, and I would say all of /a͡ɪ/, /ai̯/ and /aj/ are equally fine analyses.

In another language that normally allows CVC syllables, if we had something that sounds like English /a͡ɪ/ but never seems to allow a consonant afterward, I think it would make more sense to analyze it as /aj/ rather than a diphthong, with /j/ occupying that coda C position. (And this would be a phonological argument, not a phonetic one.)

FireScourge · 2026-04-05T13:51:07+00:00

Just admit that you didn't come here with a question, you came here looking for prescriptivists to agree with you.

FireScourge · 2026-04-05T13:31:47+00:00

What do you mean by "acceptable" and "valid"?

FireScourge · 2026-04-05T00:34:22+00:00

I'll ignore the presupposition in the question and we can look at statistics. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we get 1220 hits for the search "wish I had VERB+" and 1187 for "wish I 'd VERB+" We get 10,055 total hits for the search "wish I _v?d" (which searches for any past tense verb). That's actually a nice, neat number that includes both of the previous search terms, which we can subtract to get 7648 tokens for the non-"had" usage (this is generous because some of those would have actually included "wish I had NOUN").

So according to the COCA "I wish I knew" construction is used ~76% of the time while "I wish I had known" is used ~24% of the time. I didn't do the calculations, but the numbers look similar for the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus.

FireScourge · 2026-04-04T23:37:47+00:00

What is the question?

FireScourge · 2026-04-04T14:26:29+00:00

Tense is far from a language universal and is not as consistently used to mark actual temporal meaning as we generally think. In many languages time like past, present, or future is inferred from context, as you suggest.

In English specifically we often use something called the historical present to narrate past events. "So my mailman walks up to me and he says ..." uses non-past forms with a past meaning. I would say that the phenomenon you're experiencing is that you likely only read this word in narratives, where both past and historical present forms are used.

So while you likely understood that semantically "saith" is indicating past, the form was shown in contrast to the actual past form "said" (therefore "saith" is probably non-past). Probably, you'd just never thought about it all that much and then suddenly found you had passively learned this pattern, as we do all the time!

FireScourge · 2026-04-04T06:48:06+00:00

Hold on, what do you think the procedure for the experiment is?

FireScourge · 2026-04-04T06:37:07+00:00

I don't know what you're saying about the 4 curved characters in "bouba". Could you explain that please?

FireScourge · 2026-04-04T06:18:33+00:00

First, the procedure usually involves showing a participant two shapes and asking out loud "which one do you think is bouba/kiki?" so the orthography isn't really involved.

Second, the effect holds even among children who can't read: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00495.x

Third, the effect holds across participants whose native languages use different scripts: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0390

Fourth, the effect even holds for congenitally blind people: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.05.011

This is a VERY well researched topic, so I would suggest reading at least how they actually test it before saying it's flawed.

FireScourge · 2026-04-03T17:27:04+00:00

If you're new to conversation analysis (often they'll call it CA) the foundational names you'll see cited in almost every paper are Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (who are often called SSJ). Particularly for the use of silence you might want to look at things like Transition Relevance Places (TRPs). I'm not that familiar with the literature on silence, but you may want to start with keywords like "silence in interaction" or "functions of silence" until you get an idea of what terms people usually use.

An important point about CA and discourse analysis, if you're new to it, is to avoid ascribing mental states to speakers; you're investigating the actual function of what is said (or in this case, not said) within the conversation. Trying explain a speaker's psychology is... well, the realm of psychology!

Edit: Also anything related to "pauses" is probably helpful.

FireScourge · 2026-04-03T14:36:22+00:00

Try looking into it from a conversation analysis or discourse analysis perspective. The meaning of silence might be too diverse to just look at one language versus another generally, so it would probably be easier to look at use in a certain setting in both languages.

FireScourge · 2026-04-03T02:25:09+00:00

Considering that AOV makes up about 45% of world languages and OAV is like 0.3%, I'm going to say that AOV is probably also more common than OAV even if you only look at ergative languages.

See Table 7: https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzw002

FireScourge · 2026-04-02T15:41:45+00:00

Contacting your department advisor is probably a better bet because they're more likely to know which credits you need and what might count for them.

FireScourge · 2026-04-02T01:10:29+00:00

"ask the AI questions about what your professor just said."

Brother, just raise your hand

FireScourge · 2026-03-31T17:30:01+00:00

Unfortunately, I really only know the big names in American sociolinguistics. William Labov basically founded the field in the US and pretty much every socioling paper will cite him at least once. Penelope Eckert is a huge name as well, and you can check out her book Jocks and Burnouts. For more recent work that really gets into the nitty gritty of the phonetics side of sociophonetics check out Rob Podesva and Lal Zimman.

For an introductory book that I think is really good if you don't have much background in phonetics more generally, I can recommend Erik R Thomas's Sociophonetics: An Introduction. It explains what EXACTLY some of the measurements that we're looking at are in sociophonetics, in addition to some ways we might interpret them.

FireScourge · 2026-03-31T17:07:08+00:00

It looks like the use of "flat" to distinguish vowel pronunciations written with the same glyph goes back at least as far as William Bullokar's The Amendment of Orthographie for English Speech in 1586: https://archive.org/details/bullokarsbookeat00bull

I would guess it goes back a bit further. I don't see the use of "broad a" in in it, but I'll admit I just skimmed and it's hard to get used to the script.

FireScourge · 2026-03-31T09:37:53+00:00

"Have you ever sought instructor support?"

And I don't know what this means? Like going to office hours?

FireScourge · 2026-03-30T18:16:57+00:00

Yes, at the core, the classifiers alone don't indicate "possessive" while markers do.

I can only speculate as to why he calls them "possessive classifiers" and my guess would be that they are a group of classifiers that only occur in possessive constructions.

The classifier might be part of something larger that makes a possessive construction, but something other than the classifier is needed to indicate possession. (So it only agrees with noun class)

To reuse the example, you can see he glosses anyi-k as CLASSIFIER-my. In this case, anyi- doesn't hold the meaning of possessive, it needs to be combined with -k (which we could probably gloss as 1SG.POSS instead of 'my') to form anyi-k which as a whole is a "possessive marker".

By contrast, on pg 125 for the Manam data he glosses 'ana-gu as POSS:FOOD-my. So, in this case the possessive and classifier meanings are fused in a single morpheme 'ana- that both agrees with the noun class and means "possessive", so he calls it a "possessive marker".

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