Teacher Discussion Forums

And if I sell my baby to a white slave trader, do I get a reception or a receipt

Then again, there ain't nothing wrong with double negatives either, linguistically , but those same wrong-headed purists get just as huffy about them, too. I certainly agree that the purists are wrong-headed, but it's still a fact (at least in the UK) that they have had, and continue to have, consid...

A third version of events can be found in Derek Bickerton's "Language and Species" (1990) (can't remember the publisher). I don't believe it, but in a spirit of fairness I think I ought to mention it!

I'm with Larry, Vytenis - your diagnosis of "Lithuanian with English words" simply doesn't pan out. Feel dissatisfied by all means, but the clarity and precision of your writing on this forum would put a very large minority, if not a majority, of native English speakers to shame.

[warning] According to my graduate school, this topic doesn't even belong in this forum because "it isn't Applied Linguistics" ( I wanted to do my Masters thesis on the subject, but it was turned down). [/warning] The point, which Iain , Larry and I have vaguely discussed elsewhere, is where does la...

Having these sentences: (1) I told him to never come back again. (2) I told him never to come back again. Which one of them is correct? May I slipt the infinitive after all or not? José [/b] Um, am I the only one who thinks that both sentences are acceptable/syntactically correct, but that there is...

Vytenis wrote:There is no way around it

V.

Why the sad face? Discovering (even if sometimes in a very embarrassing way) the infinite variety of any language that's not your own is a joyous thing. Isn't it?

Aside from that minor quibble, a splendid post, though.

Szwagier's Nutshell Approach :) Good - Conscious learning of a language is not the only, or even the most important, part of learning a language. Every coursebook in the last 20 years that even mentions a distinction between acquisition and learning owes a debt of thanks (however small) to Krashen. ...

decei(p)t or deception?

Actually, I don't completely disagree - the whole field of language evolution is, as Schmidt implies, fairly young, and I would think that Deacon himself would be happy with "an early pass", given that early passes are all that is possible at this stage. I think Schmidt does Deacon a bit of a disser...

I'd be interested to hear, Szwagier, why you think Chomsky is wrong. I've read complaints from evolutionary linguists (they use computer analysis) claiming that there are other simpler theories that can explain the origins of language. And I have ideas of my own. Perhaps, we could start a new threa...

Eggs is fine

I believe it was in one of the Headway series, about 9 years ago, I saw a sentence attributed to Linda McCartney: "Breakfast is eggs." Is that a grammatical sentence or not? And what about: "Eggs are breakfast"? I firmly believe that a Cosmic Censor should hurl such utterances into a black hole, nev...

How much can you play around with word order and the like? What about: This article talks about the foundation of the Social Sciences Faculty, and of its major accomplishments during its five-year existence. PS I also translate (Pol -> Eng), and have the biggest problems with Polish adverbials and a...

Thank you, Lorikeet, for bringing this to the top of the forum.

Vytenis, maybe I have something useful to add, but I'm just back from Andrzejki. I'll have a think about it tomorrow, hangover permitting !