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well a good pronunciation implies intelligibility; I'd just like to add, if you've heard Richard Burton in "World of the Worlds" you know what excellent pronunciation sounds like. I was also impressed by Andreas Katsulas's articulation in his Babylon 5 performances. Iain http://www.andreaskatsulas....

That's the point! In romance languages infinitives are one single word (dançar/danzar) and English deals with bare infinitive (dance) to-infinitive (to dance) and the progressive form as the infinitive (dancing). I wouldn't describe dancing as an infinitive form. The point of the latin name is that...

"I willingly and courageously step in the lion's den, in full knowledge that it might be my last act." I thought hacer was the infinitive, not para hacer , which would translate as "in order to make|do". So, it's not possible to fit a word into the infinitive, in the same way it's not possible to fi...

One idea I had was "Word Association". In a group one person thinks of a word and the next person has to think of a related word. Beforehand you explain that anyone can ask to have a word recorded and explained later. As you go round, you collect words, that some students know, but not everyone. Whe...

What I am poking my elbow into your ribs about, Iain , is your assertion, a few posts ago, that: Today's breakfast is bacon and eggs . is a "natural" sounding sentence. I never said that it was natural sounding, I said that it was more natural sounding, there is a spectrum of difference. I'm still ...

Larry, I really don't see why you're laughing your head off. I've suggested that there's nothing grammatically wrong with it. You countered with "it sounds so wrong". If you think it's wrong, explain to me please, why you think that. Just because you've not met it before isn't sufficient reason to d...

Restauranteurs say things like "Today's Special is X", so it looks to me that "Today's Breakfast is Bacon and Eggs" is very close to that and hence more natural sounding than "Breakfast is Eggs".

What I originally meant was that Bacon and Eggs is more likely to be breakfast than just eggs.

Iain

"Breakfast is eggs." Is that a grammatical sentence or not? And what about: "Eggs are breakfast"? They sound a little strange, but I think they're both grammatical. More natural sounding is "Today's breakfast is bacon and eggs. "Bacon and eggs" is a lexical element, I don't see any reason why we ca...

It seems to me that if we want to understand what language is, we have to have a coherent theory of where it comes from, and it rapidly became clear to me that Pinker's account of where language comes from evolutionarily is full of holes - on account of his being generally Chomskyan in his approach...

Scots (or Lallans meaning lowlands) is the form of speech used in lowland Scotland, and parts of Northern Ireland and border ares of the Republic of Ireland. Although, there has been some dispute as to whether Scots is a dialect of English, or a separate language in its own right, the British gover...

What they leave behind for the original principal verb to express is aspect. He goes to school >- he does go to school/he is going to school She saw the show >- she has/had seen/been seeing the show Where are the auxiliaries in your examples? He is going to school - where is the verb being helped? ...

You not like eggs then?

Iain

Yeah Larry, undoubtly the people who are really the onwer of the real language are the real grammarians and the ones which one should look at to get the real thing, but the question that is always risen is how to set these knowledge in classroom, how to tell the pupils that this is not wrong in a s...

Are pronunciation and accent the same thing? :? Costas, where did you learn "Cheers". You're in Brazil, right? I think these words aren't exactly the same but they're very closely related. In general, how a child sounds a word is normally governed, not by choice, but simply by the language sounds s...

Wow, I wrote that ages ago. Drip feed - I was considering that some students only learn a foreign language for a few hours a week. I used to have Spanish lessons for three hours a week, and I read a bit, it's very bity. I was trying to contrast this type of learning with the constant learning that a...