English questions

[Kuchigakatai]

I usually ask questions I have about English in the Miscellany Thread, but seeing how it's been overtaken in the past few days by the ongoing interesting discussion with priscianic, maybe I should finally open a thread of them. Anyone can use this thread too for little English questions of course. And so, my question this time:

Do you guys accept using "sometimes" at the end of a sentence? E.g. "Mandarin does something similar with adverbial phrases sometimes." If you do, do you pronounce it differently than how it'd sound in "Mandarin sometimes does something similar with adverbial phrases"?

I have this annoying intuition that in the former sentence it's pronounced /ˈsɐmˈtaɪmz/ but in the latter it's /ˈsɐmtaɪmz/, but I suspect I might be wrong. It sounds weird to say, but I'm not entirely sure how this particular word works, even after all these years...

[Pabappa]

Yes, I would use it in that position, and for me it always has initial stress like /ˈsɐmtaɪmz/. If there is any context in which I'd stress both syllables, I'd spell it out as two words ... but I cant think of a context in which I would do even that.

[Vardelm]

Depends. If I'm not trying to accentuate "sometimes", then there's a difference in pronunciation, about like you mention. I think that's more result of how tones rise & fall over the course of a sentence (suprasegmentals???) rather than "sometimes" itself.

If I do accentuate "sometimes" - in either sentence - the pronunciation is closer, with both being /ˈsɐmtaɪmz/.

[Linguoboy]

Yeah, I notice a difference in cadence but not in word stress. And I use it both places.

[bradrn]

I usually ask questions I have about English in the Miscellany Thread, but seeing how it's been overtaken in the past few days by the ongoing interesting discussion with priscianic, maybe I should finally open a thread of them. Anyone can use this thread too for little English questions of course.

Thank you so much for this! I’m a native English speaker, but occasionally I notice an interesting construction which I’m a loss to explain — so it will be nice to have a place to ask about those.

Do you guys accept using "sometimes" at the end of a sentence? E.g. "Mandarin does something similar with adverbial phrases sometimes." If you do, do you pronounce it differently than how it'd sound in "Mandarin sometimes does something similar with adverbial phrases"?

Both are acceptable for me, and both have the same pronunciation.

Related question: does anyone accept ‘also’ at the end of a sentence? I never used to, but last year I had a Belgian maths lecturer who consistently placed it there, and by now I’ve long gotten used to it (although I probably wouldn’t accept it in a written text).

[Linguoboy]

Related question: does anyone accept ‘also’ at the end of a sentence? I never used to, but last year I had a Belgian maths lecturer who consistently placed it there, and by now I’ve long gotten used to it (although I probably wouldn’t accept it in a written text).

You mean like "Mandarin does something similar also"? Sounds fine to me. (Normally I would prefer "too" here but the homophony with "similar to" makes that infelicitous in this case.)

[bradrn]

Related question: does anyone accept ‘also’ at the end of a sentence? I never used to, but last year I had a Belgian maths lecturer who consistently placed it there, and by now I’ve long gotten used to it (although I probably wouldn’t accept it in a written text).

You mean like "Mandarin does something similar also"? Sounds fine to me. (Normally I would prefer "too" here but the homophony with "similar to" makes that infelicitous in this case.)

Yes, exactly like that. (Though I prefer “Mandarin also does something similar”.)

[Linguoboy]

Yes, exactly like that. (Though I prefer “Mandarin also does something similar”.)

There's a slight difference in emphasis, I think. I feel like placing "also" after "Mandarin" makes no assumptions about the listener's prior knowledge while having "also" at the end implies this is new information or information a previous speaker failed to account for where it was relevant. If I had to insert "you know" at the end, it sounds more natural to put "also" immediately before it than to put it immediately after the subject.

[Travis B.]

Also does not seem exactly natural to me in that position. I personally would probably put as well there myself.

[Pabappa]

Phrase-final also is typically a sign of a non-native speaker. It's perfectly grammatical .... its just that native speakers usually prefer to use too except possibly in very formal speech where "too" might sound chgildish.

[Travis B.]

As for phrase-final things, one thing I notice myself doing is phrase final so - where I will say a sentence normally up to so, then drop everything after it. Anyone else notice this?

[Kuchigakatai]

As for phrase-final things, one thing I notice myself doing is phrase final so - where I will say a sentence normally up to so, then drop everything after it. Anyone else notice this?

Could you provide an example?

If you're talking about "[sentence], so..." at the end of a sentence, you can even find that in print, in more colloquial contexts like comics.

[Travis B.]

As for phrase-final things, one thing I notice myself doing is phrase final so - where I will say a sentence normally up to so, then drop everything after it. Anyone else notice this?

Could you provide an example?

If you're talking about "[sentence], so..." at the end of a sentence, you can even find that in print, in more colloquial contexts like comics.

Yes that's it.

An example would be "I tried to kill the Jabberwock, so..."

[Travis B.]

I see some mentions of this in the comments to this Language Log post and I found a a whole Atlantic article on this.

[Kuchigakatai]

TvTropes used to have a whole article about the related "[sentence], so yeah.", making fun of it and with various published examples, but I just found the admins deleted it as irrelevant:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/remarks.php ... ain.SoYeah

And of course the whole history was blanked too, to prevent anyone from making use of what there was. Deletionists man, they get on my nerves.

[Travis B.]

To me, deletionists are destroyers of knowledge, plain and simple.

[Raphael]

Earlier today, over in Ephemera, I asked a question that started with the phrase

"has any of you ever had the feeling [...]"

Now I wonder if that question was anywhere close to complying with the usual rules of English grammar.

[zompist]

"has any of you ever had the feeling [...]"
Now I wonder if that question was anywhere close to complying with the usual rules of English grammar.

This is one area where Google do some corpus lingustics for us.

"has any of you" -> 9 million Ghits (Google hits)
"have any of you" > 155 million Ghits

FWIW "have" sounds better to me. Technically "any" is the head here and should determine agreement, and it's indeterminate number. But the "you" kind of takes over.

(Compare "A number of you have passed the test." A number is singular, but "has" sounds awful there.)

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[Raphael]

How did the word "club", in English, come to mean both a tool for hitting people, animals, or golf balls, and a specific type of social institution or organization?