Activity for Eric Isaac
Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: What underlying principle is at play for how objective or subjective a natural language instruction is? It seems like what you are hinting at is the degree to which an instruction contains the context required to understand it, answer it, and evaluate the answer. Moreover, the question hints at an objective instruction being one that is almost completely self-contained in these aspects. In the examp... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
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A: Has the word "humor" shifted meaning? Definitions Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the usage of the word humor has expanded to several distinct meanings that are all still in active use. 1. Humor as mood, as shown in good humor. Bad humor is also still in use, as demonstrated in the question, suggesting that this usage isn’t s... (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
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How does phonology-orthography correspondence affect second language acquisition? One difficulty I’ve seen in learning languages is matching orthography to pronunciation - especially vowels. English has several distinct sounds that a native speaker will describe as the vowel ‘e’, for example, while a language like French would use a wider variety of symbols to represent the sam... (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
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A: Vowel insertion phenomenon The closest term I’ve found is anaptyxis, the form of epenthesis that refers to inserting a vowel, but this is still fairly vague. A similar phenomenon is mentioned in this paper, regarding the pronunciation of words ending in -ed, -ly, and -ness. Specifically, the tendency for English speakers to... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
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A: Does humor always spring from surprise? Some believe humor springs from Benign Violations. Basically, that something defies my expectations but I consider it harmless. This is more specific than surprise in that the social context is also considered to be equally important. To your examples, wordplay communicates a number is socially de... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
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A: Possessive vs accusative case for nominalized clauses verbal nouns and gerunds This may be a case where the differences between verbal nouns and gerunds are causing some confusion. In most cases, they are somewhat interchangeable but it should be easier to differentiate in the following sentences. Grammatical 1. She was against his sudden joining o... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
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A: Why do some people say "idea-r", "draw-r-ing" and "china-r"? Focusing on native English speakers from the UK, inserting an r between words is a hyper correction of a phonetic rule in British English; the final r in a word is silent unless followed by a vowel. It doesn’t appear to be considered standard, judging by the teaching material that the UK government p... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
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A: Should translation questions be considered off-topic? Questions about translations could be interesting or useful. For instance, asking about translations that are contested, or wouldn’t be easy to understand by using translation software (perhaps requiring additional cultural input). In this case, the asker should bring both the original text and the t... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
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How do linguists identify the origins of verbal habits that originate from other languages? When an observed verbal habit has more than one potential source, and that source is likely to be a different language or dialect, how do linguists determine the most likely origin? For example, if some speakers of Language A add an extra vowel to certain words, in a way that seems to resemble bot... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
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A: Why do Chinese people say "idear"? The speakers you have encoutered may be adding Erhua which is common in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The '-er' that is added serves various semantic purposes (e.g. diminutive suffix) and is considered standard in PRC issued education and examination guidelines for the Standard Chinese (Mandari... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |