Pat’s Polemics

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What to call it?

  02/20/2023       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Most grammatical features are named by linguists so as to convey their function, e.g. conditional, inceptive, conative, concomitive, etc. The coinages are mostly based on (Continue Reading)

Linguistics
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Language hypocrisy

  08/31/2022       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

When we speak of contractions in English like ‘we would have’ reduced to ‘we’d’ve’ the language guardians and scolds label that ‘improper’, ‘slang’, ‘sloppy’, and (Continue Reading)

Linguistics, scolds and guardians, Uncategorized

Idiomaticity

  12/08/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

“I understand what you mean but we don’t say it that way.” How many times have you heard someone tell you that as you foundered (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

Order of Operations

  07/30/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

How do linguists proceed to reasoning about what goes on in the black box known as the LAD – language acquisition device?Here’s a simples example:Spanish-speakers (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

The role of morphology

  04/29/2021       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Reading Matthew’s Morphology inspires observations such as the following: The -s of 3rd p. sg. present is deleted or not present in the subjunctive. However, (Continue Reading)

Linguistics, What I'm Reading Now

Question for linguists

  12/20/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I just read in Medieval and Modern Greek by Robert Browning that Medieval Greek, while borrowing lots of words from Romance languages, could not borrow (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

What is lost with the loss of a language?

  06/11/2020       Pat Barrett      3 Comments

Languages throughout the word are dying off. Language death is when no one is raised from infancy speaking that language. So, despite cries of Foul! (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

Just how complex can sentences be?

  05/29/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I’m going to put those things on the table……. in a box. Reading so much linguistics now, I immediately put this utterance into my file (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

The contentious issue of aspect

  03/27/2020       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I have finished reading Aspect and have observations to make. Aspect has been called one of the most disputed notions in linguistics. Elsewhere on this (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

If you cannot show it, is it real?

  06/26/2019       Pat Barrett      2 Comments

“Show” is not the best word. Thinking about African Diasporic music and the issue of the pulse, I was reminded of the issue of acquisition (Continue Reading)

Foreign language teaching & learning, Linguistics, Music of the African Diaspora

Further notes on how words’ meanings affect thinking

  03/20/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

A while back I wrote: “Again I heard a speaker use the term “urban” as a synonym for Black in the ethnic sense. Earlier, the (Continue Reading)

Culture, Linguistics

Word of the day

  02/16/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The word is “raise” used intransitively. As I was fantasizing about having quad 60 machine guns mounted under the hood of my car to deploy (Continue Reading)

Linguistics, Word of the Day

Serious issues in French

  01/20/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Some 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)

Foreign language teaching & learning, grammar & language change, Linguistics, TPRS

‘Splain this

  01/13/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Quoting 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)

grammar & language change, Linguistics

Which aspect? It all depends…..

  01/04/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

So often here and elsewhere I’ve recounted the hilarious presentation at ACTFL, not meant to be hilarious, on the preterit and imperfect in Spanish. The (Continue Reading)

Linguistics, What I'm Reading Now

taking root

  01/01/2019       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

That phrase occurred to me as I was thinking of how my granddaughter is dealing with her vocabulary in French. Today she stumbled on ‘parce (Continue Reading)

Foreign language teaching & learning, Linguistics

more grammar baloney

  11/28/2018       Pat Barrett      1 Comment

This site, Stack Exchange: English Language & Usage, gripes me no end. You have to have a ‘reputation’ on the site to post anything and (Continue Reading)

Linguistics, Shamans

Up in here

  08/18/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

You hear so many people who do not speak Black dialect use the expression ‘up in here’. The question I have is how much of (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

Does “classical” necessarily denote high quality?

  08/16/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

The term ‘classical’ and ‘classic’ is thrown around so much as to lose meaning, everything from Classical Studies, which refer only to Latin and Ancient (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

How is this feature instantiated?

  08/13/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

In 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)

grammar & language change, Linguistics

Even the educated make mistakes/errors

  08/11/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I’ve been trying to illicit story ideas from students do not spend hardly any time have to reign in These are just a few mistakes (Continue Reading)

Linguistics

Great example of how a quotative works

  07/06/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

My grandson was speaking of a little kid in his karate class and he said, “Christian does not like not pay attention.” The first thing (Continue Reading)

Linguistics, scolds and guardians, What English Teachers Don't Know

Knives redux

  05/25/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I love this example I came up with based on Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct examples of irregular plurals demonstrating the way we get a window (Continue Reading)

Linguistics
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