Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: "Gorol" <gorol@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 Jul 2006 20:12:00 -0700
Joachim Pense wrote:
Am 16 Jul 2006 15:02:10 -0700 schrieb Gorol:
Joachim Pense wrote:
Am 16 Jul 2006 03:48:54 -0700 schrieb Gorol:
Joachim Pense wrote:
Am 16 Jul 2006 00:13:38 -0700 schrieb calm_weather:
Joachim Pense wrote:
.......
he'll go
Peter's going
we've done it
"he'll" a case of "he"?
he'll is an abbreviation of "he will".
So, what?
You're is an abbreviation of "you are", with a vowel change. The
common error (among native speakers of English) of writing "your"
instead of "you're" shows that it's not considered to be an
abbreviation for anything else by many.
There are many cases of "abbreviations" becoming inflective forms in
many languages.
Joachim
In other words, there may be such inflection in English in a couple of
centuries. You'll have to wait for it ;-)
No. It's there. Now.
Joachim
No, it's not. Just read a grammar ;-)
Good point. How do linguists today see the role that the grammar
that's taught to language learners (L1 or L2) has as a part of the
language system itself (because it is in the minds of the speakers and
controls partially their usage).
English is maybe special, because it's perhaps taught to more
foreigners than native language speakers.
That said, there is a variation of grammatical analyses.
For example, the -ing form of the verb is often taught to be two
homophonous, but different forms (participle and gerund). Others say
it's one form that's used in different ways.
If English were a newly discovered language, anyone writing a grammar
for it would probably not describe the -ing form as being two forms in
disguise.
If English were a newly discovered language, that grammarian could as
well describe "he'll, I've, Peter's" as inflective forms rather than
contractions (not probable, because the long forms "he will, I have,
Peter is" also exist and their relation to the contracted forms is
fairly obvious). My question was, if she did, would linguistics
provide her with an appropriate terminology, and if other languages
are known where forms like these exist and are not easily derivable
from other constructions?
Joachim
As for the -ing forms, you mix two things together. Of course, it is
one form, which has two functions. This dichotomy is known since
Saussure and has been formalized e.g. by the Praguian ling. school.
It's well described e.b. in Coseriu's Introduction into general
linguistics.
As for the contracted English form, try to imagine writing a formal
grammar for a computer. All parsers I know first "decontract" that
forms before analyzing the input sentence morphologically. If I
simplify, when this is possible the "suffixes" are no inflection.
As for other languages, there are "floating" suffixes in Silesian,
sometimes at a stabilized position, which is however mostly given by
prosody. These forms can be traced back historically, but
synchronically they are just (unaccented) morphemes with a specific
meaning. Maybe this is what you meant. Example - past tense:
widziol(e)ch (I saw - inflection), widziol zech/jo widziol/widziol jo
(I saw - analytical).
.
- References:
- Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: Joachim Pense
- Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: calm_weather
- Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: Joachim Pense
- Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: Gorol
- Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: Joachim Pense
- Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: Gorol
- Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
- From: Joachim Pense
- Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English
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