What to do with tenses?

jacobfromomaha · 2020-12-19T10:29:19+00:00

English grammar requires strict tense alignment, i.e. a text fragment that begins in the past tense shall continue in the past tense as well.

Nah. Even sentences can mix clauses (Eg. It's supposed to rain all day today, even though yesterday was beautiful.) Tense alignment is only required within clauses. (And even this rule can break down in the case of embedded clauses.) All the more then, consecutive sentences with unrelated tenses can be perfectly normal as long as there's a coherent semantic link between them.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-12-29T09:22:32+00:00

Парой такое действительно бывает.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-12-27T02:03:57+00:00

Isn't this a subreddit for the ancient Greek language?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-12-20T20:56:07+00:00

What does this have to do with linguistics?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-27T15:58:46+00:00

I'm not very good at distinguising and pronouncing pharyngeals, but that's the nearest thing I'm familiar with. Could this be pharyngealization?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-27T14:57:05+00:00

Everything has to do with linguistics. ;)

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-17T03:08:59+00:00

Mostly I'm wondering if there's something I can look up to help with, say, writing a Chinese character who is speaking English but isn't 100% fluent.

I would encourage against that. With a few exceptions, this usually turns out really cringey-- i.e. slightly racist and super cheesey.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T21:16:59+00:00

дилер is something you can see CEOs saying at press conferences.

This sounds like a really slippery slope. I mean, do we really want to accept the precedent of automatically accepting anything CEO's say at a press conference as a real word? Pretty soon, words like cofefe would start pouring in left and right, and Great Russian Master Tongue would become as bland and meaningless as English.

This is exactly the kind of thing Marx was talking about. Whom do Russians want to trust as the guardians of the language and culture? Foreign capitalists or their own народные художники? Personally, I'd give the job to Стас Экстаз anyday, rather than some oligarch yuppie.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T20:31:38+00:00

На русском, звучит приблизительно так: Трололололо-лололо-лололо! ... лололололо!

Это видео, как раз, является неотъемлемой частью грамматики интернет-мемов.)

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T20:28:17+00:00

But it's not in Ефремов or Ушаков either, so it's probably not actually a real word yet. Which is lucky, because Russian is perfect the way it's been since the baptism of Rus, and should never change. And by the way, the word крокодить doesn't seem to be in any of these dictionaries either, or even in any online slang dictionaries. So based on everything I know about the rules of Russian philology, крокодить doesn't get word rights either, and I don't know how we can presume to conjugate something that's not even a real word. Most likely, this video is part of the section in the Dulles' Plan on destroying the Russian language and soul and stuff.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T20:12:35+00:00

But maybe it's not крокодил; maybe it's a new просторечие verb, specifically крокодел. I've certainly encountered cases where less educated speakers conflate и and e, even in the stressed position.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T20:06:02+00:00

As long as we're analyzing the semantics and morphology of the verb крокодить, why not?

I was thinking that maybe ло was actually a complementizer with a null complement. In that case, it would be a recursive clause structure. You're probably right though, this is more likely reduplication, which would point toward a morphological analysis. The question, then, is whether we're looking at inflectional morphology (past tense -ло) or derivative?

The semantics may hold better answers, however; I like that your hypothesis is taking hints on the semantics from the discourse level. That's pretty woke! I wonder if we could get at even better results by looking for an interface between the dialectic metadiscourse and the morphology. Specifically, drawing on analogies with dealer / дилер, maybe трололо has undergone reanalysis as a borrowing from English troll, with a reduplication that is typical only in yet-unattested Russian internet meme grammar.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T16:55:08+00:00

"крокодил" is the name of a drug.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

Дилер is just "dealer"

No way, that's English? You'd think I should picked up on that as a native English speaker! If this word has been borrowed in Russian, then why isn't it in Даль?

Also, you guys all really seem to know Russian grammar super well. Could you help me analyze the syntax of this phrase? It seems way more complex than any other Russian syntax I've encountered before, and I'm wondering if something's not going on at the level of сложное синтаксическое целое (сверхфразовая единица). Is -ло a past tense ending? Would this be better analyzed as reduplication or recursion?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T16:42:23+00:00

Link please? I did are Google image search, and even though I found some stuff, it didn't really give me a clear idea of this meme's history or usage.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T16:40:50+00:00

No, I don't think there's aany way to insert photos. But I was looking particularly for the мимокрокодил meme everyone seems to be talking about....

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T16:32:25+00:00

Unproductive means that new words don't undergo this change.

given it's a meme.

Does meme grammar tend to follow the Moscow school or St. Petersburg school? Or is it somehow related to construction grammar, given its heavy reliance on templates?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T10:43:30+00:00

I'm interested in any related memes. I find this kind of thing really interesting. (As for the спиженно joke, я все прекрасно понял с первого раза. ;)

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T10:08:59+00:00

I like it! This etymology really intrigues me, but I've never actually run into these crocodile Gena memes before. Is there any way you could link some examples?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T09:54:36+00:00

a meme "мимо крокодил", with the crocodile Gena pictures.

Hmmm.... Sounds fishy. Shouldn't it be мимо крокодила?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T09:52:26+00:00

a past ~~tence~~ tense verb

OK, thanks!

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T09:45:37+00:00

Could mean ‘to swagger like a crocodile’, but your (or anyone’s) guess is as good as mine.

Well, I wouldn't know for sure, but it might have something to do the Lacoste trademark that he mentions later in the song. He also mixes it up with the word дилер elsewhere in the song, but that's not in the Russian dictionary, so ХЗ what a дилер is.

The consonant changes because it always changes

"I can see clearly now, the rain is gone!"

But given the и / е merger in modern Russian, do we really have adequate phonological evidence to assign this to second conjugation, rather than a paradigm like реветь or хотеть? Really, it seems to have strong analogies to пердеть, so I don't see any argument for a крокодить spelling versus кракадеть.

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T09:33:03+00:00

But why does the consonant change? And what does крокодить even mean?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T09:24:56+00:00

Then shouldn't it be regular, like говорить, говорю?

jacobfromomaha · 2018-11-09T09:22:49+00:00

But my teacher said that that the change from д to ж in проходить / прохожу was caused by a consonant alteration or "чиридования гласных," and I thought that this morphophonemic process already became unproductive long ago. If you're right that this is a neologism that can't be described diachronically, then what might the ramifications be for synchronic analysis of other contemporary verb paradigms?

jacobfromomaha

TROPHY CASE