It was Rachel Maddow, I believe, who said this last night (3/4/19): “He was being dangled a pardon.” The sense, of course, was that a (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
An example of words retaining old meanings
01/30/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhen a word retains an older meaning along with a newer one, the resulting coincidence can be confusing. When on of the meanings is actually (Continue Reading)
The concept underlying the subjunctive
01/29/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe subjunctive, rightly called a mood in the grammatical sense, gets its name from the fact that it ordinarily does not stand alone (though it (Continue Reading)
Serious issues in French
01/20/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentSome where at some time a article on pedagogical issues in French was illicitly copied by me. It had appeared in The Modern Language Journal (Continue Reading)
‘Splain this
01/13/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentQuoting a NYT article: And when a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey and later asked that he end an (Continue Reading)
My Urdu lesson on the election
12/02/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy friend has been gone for over a month now; he’s in India. I hope he’s back. We meet Tuesdays and today is Sunday so (Continue Reading)
non-standard English in writing
11/07/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentHere’s an example of someone who is very accomplished and articulate with a high school education but whose control of standard verb forms is erratic, (Continue Reading)
I coulda shoulda wore a large
11/04/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentI did not write down the source of this but I’m guessing it was a live person I was listening to. The juxtaposition of two (Continue Reading)
How a detailed feature stands out
09/29/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentSome grammatical features seem very detailed, yet, if violated, can cause some interference just by their strangeness. Most of us want our interlocutors to focus (Continue Reading)
How is this feature instantiated?
08/13/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn French there are two ways of indicating possession, one with the preposition ‘de’ and another with the preposition ‘a’. So one can say the (Continue Reading)
How Prescriptivism’s hidden class bias destroys understanding
08/04/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn French there is a feature called liaison whereby the final consonant of only certain words and word combinations attach themselves to the following word (Continue Reading)
The Joys of Participles
06/09/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’ve been reviewing participles and their uses in Urdu by rereading Barker’s little essay on them. It is really quite a bit of material to (Continue Reading)
A 600 Years Old Culture
06/03/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe title of a video of Bafut music recorded in Nigeria, the Delta. It reflects what can happen when a language is transmitted incompletely as, (Continue Reading)
Grammar can be decisive
04/28/2018 Pat Barrett Add Commentichard Engle’s interview of Veselnitskaya contained a crucial item where she labeled her relationship with the Russian prokurator’s office. She called herself an ‘informant’ and (Continue Reading)
Common errors about language
04/28/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy intention is to introduce a series of entries here regarding the basics of fl teaching with a checklist of typical notions held by (Continue Reading)
Example of group genitive -s in dialect
03/23/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe normal way to give the equivalent of French chez = at the place of, home of, business of, etc. (from Latin casa) in Black (Continue Reading)
Good example of deep Black dialect
10/23/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe widow of the slain Green Berets soldier, LaDavid Johnson (there, I did better than Trump) gave an example of deep Black English when she (Continue Reading)
I like you, you like me….
06/10/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhen we find that English ‘like’ used to work like Spanish ‘gustar’, i.e. to say ‘The king likes the queen’ in Old English, we’d have (Continue Reading)
McWhorter on Black English
05/28/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentC-Span had McWhorter discussing his book, Back Talk, Black Talk. In his talk he laid out, in his usual fashion, the structure of discourse on (Continue Reading)
mutenda? That’s English.
04/12/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentOne of my favorite examples of how borrowed words get the grammatical treatment of the receiving language (more than one sputnik is sputniks < Eng. (Continue Reading)
Complexifying sentences structure
12/02/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentI responded to the question (embedded in the response) with trepidation b/c this series of blogs on WordPress rates responses and kicks you off and (Continue Reading)
How cliches wear down expressiveness and why we use them
09/14/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentLiterally how many times have we heard someone say “literally” when they mean no such thing? I heard Trump say something the other day like that (Continue Reading)
The Origin of Cases
04/26/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentFrom David Lightfoot’s The Development of Language, pp. 137-8: he states that cases derive from serial verbs reanalyzed as adpositions, then as case endings. This (Continue Reading)