Gritchka's New Writeups

plain form (idea)

2006-01-07T21:09:04Z

The plain form of a verb is an uninflected or less-inflected form that is used in several roles. The term 'plain form' is used when no specific traditional term (such as present tense or infinitive) is suitable. The two languages most commonly described as having a plain form are English and Japanese. In both of these the plain form is the form that occurs in a dictionary, and other forms of the verb can generally be regarded as built up from it.

Japanese plain form

To dispose of Japanese briefly: the form ending in -u or -ru is used as (1) the main clause form of the verb in familiar (non-polite) style, and (2) the form used in subordinate clauses even in polite style. See the node Japanese verbs for details.

English plain form

uses

In English the plain form is the bare form of the verb (i.e. without any inflection at all). It is used (1) after some auxiliary verbs, (2) in clauses marked with the infinitive particle t…

sentence (idea)

2005-12-21T21:42:22Z

I have no idea how you would define a sentence. There's no good reason to expect it to be possible to, actually. Language just doesn't break up into neat fragments: sentences, clauses, phrases, words, morphemes, phonemes, they're all convenient fictions as rough approximations to units of a certain size; but if you push them too hard they break apart in your hands.

For practical purposes I take a sentence to be defined (i.e. delimited) by beginning with a capital letter and ending with a full stop. This is absurd, from a linguistic point of view. The written form of a language should be a completely superficial, irrelevant overlay on the actual language, and should have no bearing on its grammar. Most languages have no written form; we're still left with the task of picking out something like 'sentences' in them.

We don't pause in speech at punctuation marks. Fluent language is a continuous gabble, and disfluencies are likely to occur right in the middle of…

Turkish (thing)

2005-04-28T15:11:39Z

Unicode note. In addition to Western European accented letters ç ö ü (made as ç ö ü) Turkish has special letters that can be made as follows:

&#286;  Ğ   &#287;  ğ   G-breve (yumuşak-G)
&#304;  İ               I dotted capital
            &#305;  ı   I undotted lowercase
&#350;  Ş   &#351;  ş   S-cedilla

To what follows there are, as with any language, numerous minor exceptions: a full grammar would note them, but my sketch of the system does not need to. A few words, mainly borrowings from Arabic, partly disobey the general principles of Turkish.

Vowel harmony and agglutination

The pervasive features of Turkish grammar are vowel harmony and agglutination. It is actually a fairly easy language at an early level, once the vowel harmony is mastered, and before you get too far into the verbs. The eight vowels pattern neatly into binary…

Logic and Pragmatics of Attributive and Referential (idea)

2005-04-26T09:21:28Z

A long and technical essay about the word 'the'. Embark at your peril.

Keith Donnellan in his 1966 paper 'Reference and Definite Descriptions' introduces the distinction between attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions. The two uses differ in how they contribute to the truth conditions of an utterance containing them.

The pragmatics of this distinction can not be discussed in isolation. Before I do so I need to explore the logical structures of the two uses, and afterwards I need to compare possible semantic origins for them.

1. Overview

With an attributive use the descriptive part is essential: the definite description denotes precisely the thing satisfying it. This accords with Russell's (1905) original analysis of definite descriptions, as an implicit conjunction of assertions. Strawson (1950) by contrast thought of definite descriptions as introducing references into utterances. Donnellan (19…

FOXP2 (thing)

2005-04-22T20:43:41Z

FOXP2 is the only known gene so far for human language. It was isolated in recent years from the study of a family, variously called K, K(E), or KE, who suffer from defects in it and in whom the defects are inherited in a classic Mendelian manner. Yet it is hard to say what deficits in language it causes, and even harder to say how it causes them.

There are of course numerous general conditions that affect, among other things, language: learning/intelligence impairments such as Down's Syndrome and Williams Syndrome have some linguistic effect, but it is not all that large. People with Down's Syndrome mostly use human languages in a pretty similar way to other humans, and Williams children are linguistically inventive. Also, of course, physical defects of the tongue or larynx or ears can prevent normal language being made or understood. But these are not specifically defects of the linguistic system.

From the other direction, there must be many specifically or largely…

roll (thing)

2005-04-15T21:42:28Z

In phonetics, a roll is a sound made by repeatedly and quickly moving a free-standing part in the mouth. There are three objects that can roll in this way: the tip of the tongue, the uvula, and the lips. The resulting sounds are called a lingual roll, a uvular roll, and a bilabial roll.

The lingual roll is the more familiar "rolled R" used in Italian, and in an exaggerated Scottish accent. Most English speakers notoriously have a hard time rolling their R's. Worldwide it's pretty common, and it's actually English that has the strange R sound.

What happens is that the tip of the tongue very quickly flicks up and taps the alveolar ridge behind the upper teeth. If it does this just once it's called a flap or a tap. (These two terms are distinct, but I'm not sure you could justify the difference in pure physical terms.) But if there are two or more taps/flaps in quick succession, it's called a roll. When an Italian or Finnish speaker produces a rolled…