Where English meets Linguistics
Syntax Category
♪♩♫ Joy to the world
The Lord is come… ♫♩♪
Wait, wait. The Lord is come? Isn’t there something wrong? First, we know that come cannot be in the passive voice here, as come is an intransitive verb, it does not have an object, which basically means it cannot have a passive form. On the other hand, if it was in [...]
I very like it.
It may sound somewhat weird to native ears, but a lot of my Chinese students produce sentences like this one. What is weird here is simple. First, the adverb “very” seems to be misplaced. It should either be moved to the end of the sentence, or be replaced with another adverb like [...]
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- Tags: adjective, adverb, Chinese, French, Italian, verb, word order
More on the centrifuge
By: Thomas Tsoi on: Aug 29,2008 In: SyntaxThe last few weeks I was totally absorbed by the Olympic Games, which accounted for the absence of new posts on this blog. Now I would like to go back to a topic we discussed earlier. In A natural centrifuge in English, we took a look at the general tendency in English to delay a [...]
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- Tags: extraposition, German, movement, noun, relative clause, subject, word order
Yesterday I had private lessons with two students who were in form 6 and 7 respectively, and were thus reasonably advanced learners. Nevertheless, both students failed to distinguish between the meanings of even though and even if when they encountered them in an article. Therefore, I think it is justified to create a new category [...]
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- Tags: Chinese, conditional, subjunctive
Back then when I was in Form 3 (Grade 9), I came across this song called “I’ll never get over you getting over me“ from the American group Exposé. I was stuck at the title of the song. No matter how many times I looked at it, I just could not understand what it means. [...]
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- Tags: object, phrase, rhythm
Bridging English and Linguistics
Linguistics is the systematic study of how language works. When referring to the term "langauge", there are two different views on what it is. Some say it is a tool of communication, stressing on its functions; while others say it is a system of symbols, stressing on its forms.
As we have been brought up learning second languages like English in a traditional way, focusing on drilling and memorization; few of us realize that an analytic approach is also very helpful in language learning. The purpose of this web site, therefore, is to raise this awareness, and provide learners who are interested with an alternative to the traditional methodologies.
Highest Rated
- So many negative prefixes
(5 out of 5) - More on the centrifuge (5 out of 5)
- Babylon is fallen (5 out of 5)
- A rebel rebels? Or suspect a suspect?
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Incoming Links
- Linguanaut.co.uk: LANGUAGE - Learning SpanishFurther to my previous plans to attempt to learn Spanish in a week, I'm now postponing the attempt until late December, as I'll have more time then, as I'll have a few days off. That's all for now on that. ...Damon Lord
- Linguanaut.co.uk: ASTRONOMY - Exoplanets discovered!I enjoy a bit of Science Fiction (SF), and one of the staples of SF is the seeing the unexplored planets, alien species, colonising new worlds, etc. These exoplanets, have been, thus far, fictional. Back on planet Earth the biggest ...Damon Lord
