Teacher Discussion Forums

The /y/ sound (also /j/ in some PAs) is phonetically vowel-like, but phonologically it functions, like /w/ and /h/, as a consonant in syllable-initial position at least. Thus: bet, debt, get, het, jet, let, met, net, pet, set, Tet, vet, wet, yet, etc.

May I add that both the grammar-translation and the audiolingual methods were pruned to some extent - and unfortunately so - on their transference to school and language-institute classroom. The g-t method grew out of the system whereby young gentlemen used to have their personal Latin and French tu...

May I add that both the grammar-translation and the audiolingual methods were pruned to some extent - and unfortunately so - on their transference to school and language-institute classroom. The g-t method grew out of the system whereby young gentlemen used to have their personal Latin and French tu...

The longest I'd heard of before was 'in out from underneath below the table'.

The word for 'fat' is spelt dee-eye-cee-kay, not *beep*!!!

6. THE CASE OF THE NON-EXISTENT FUTURE. 6A. Future Tense? EFL/ESL textbooks will often speak confidently of future tenses, grammars of English will often outline future tenses, and on-line English courses commonly include future tenses. Consequently, most people may be more than a little surprised t...

Sorry, the bit about 'don't got' in my last post was supposed to come after mentioning that American can make a distinction between 'have you hotten the money?' and 'have you got the money?'. Cheers, john.

Owing to the inscrutable workings of the language gods, the older 'gotten' is now Standard American, whereas 'got' is now Standard British. It's still mutating, though, as in American Non-Standard 'don't got'.

As a native of the British Isles, I know that the use of the past-tense form in place of the past-participle form is a common feature of - ahem - "uneducated" and/or "working-class" and/or "rural" speech, and has been around for a very long time. It's actually part of a much larger picture. A thousa...

The baseform may have quite a few grammar functions, a notorious case being thge baseform 'cut', which performs four functions: (1) present tense, (2) past tense, (3) past participle, (4) infinitive, and (5) noun. For that reason the term infinitive is still useful. Nor is the complete infinitive ne...

I dislike the term 'reduction', since contractions and the like are not only right and proper, as everyone points out, but more importantly also the perfectly natural, normal, no-tricks application of some basic phonological rules of English which may get overlooked if one only thinks of 'reductions...