My apologies to all my readers, I just haven't had all that much time to blog since I started grad school, though I have a lot of things I'd like to blog about! (I'll be making time after finals week next week to catch up on my posting.)
Thanks to the Nom Nom Linguistics Facebook page, I just found out about this Tumblr site called
Linguistics Sample Sentences: http://lingsamplesentences.tumblr.com/
Here you can see a selection of the weirdest / funniest / slightly more obscene examples that linguists use to illustrate various points about the grammars of other languages. Sometimes linguists need these 'weird' examples to see how a language performs a certain function. Sometimes these examples highlight how creative the speakers of a language can be.
And sometimes linguists just choose the weirdest examples for comic relief. (Because talking about grammar.)
In general, I'm told we sound like a violent bunch. If we're trying to study something like transitivity -simply put, the ways in which languages describe an event that involves more than 1 participant- the most common examples you see tend to involve a verb like hit, e.g. John hit Mary or Mary hit John. However, I've even been told that hit is not always the best example of a transitive verb (for the linguists: this is because in some languages, the verb hit may take an argument with locative marking instead of patient marking), so what you really need is a verb like kill to illustrate the point!
Great, even more violence.
I think the weirdest sentence I've had to elicit from a language consultant was "The man cooked me for the chicken." But I'm sure there'll be weirder ones to come!
[Note: the point of such examples is not and should not be to make fun of a language or speakers of a language - if anything, we're both showing appreciation and poking fun at the nature of the science for (a) making linguists ask speakers of a language to say a particularly unnatural utterance; and/or the linguist themself for (b) choosing that particular example to put in a publication just to illustrate a certain point, when another (though less humorous) example would have sufficed. But it's what you have to do if you're trying to work out the genius and creativity underlying any spoken language.]
Thanks to the Nom Nom Linguistics Facebook page, I just found out about this Tumblr site called
Linguistics Sample Sentences: http://lingsamplesentences.tumblr.com/
Here you can see a selection of the weirdest / funniest / slightly more obscene examples that linguists use to illustrate various points about the grammars of other languages. Sometimes linguists need these 'weird' examples to see how a language performs a certain function. Sometimes these examples highlight how creative the speakers of a language can be.
And sometimes linguists just choose the weirdest examples for comic relief. (Because talking about grammar.)
In general, I'm told we sound like a violent bunch. If we're trying to study something like transitivity -simply put, the ways in which languages describe an event that involves more than 1 participant- the most common examples you see tend to involve a verb like hit, e.g. John hit Mary or Mary hit John. However, I've even been told that hit is not always the best example of a transitive verb (for the linguists: this is because in some languages, the verb hit may take an argument with locative marking instead of patient marking), so what you really need is a verb like kill to illustrate the point!
Great, even more violence.
I think the weirdest sentence I've had to elicit from a language consultant was "The man cooked me for the chicken." But I'm sure there'll be weirder ones to come!
[Note: the point of such examples is not and should not be to make fun of a language or speakers of a language - if anything, we're both showing appreciation and poking fun at the nature of the science for (a) making linguists ask speakers of a language to say a particularly unnatural utterance; and/or the linguist themself for (b) choosing that particular example to put in a publication just to illustrate a certain point, when another (though less humorous) example would have sufficed. But it's what you have to do if you're trying to work out the genius and creativity underlying any spoken language.]
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