Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[bradrn]

I thought this would be the most appropriate thread to post this link to a database of Turkic lexical items: https://turkic.elegantlexicon.com/

We used to have an entire thread for these sorts of things, on the previous incarnation of the forum -- I think it was just called the "Language Resources Thread". Does anyone know why that didn't get re-started over here? I thought it was both useful and interesting in itself.

It did get restarted here, though it hasn’t had any posts for a while: https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=173.

[fusijui]

We used to have an entire thread for these sorts of things, on the previous incarnation of the forum -- I think it was just called the "Language Resources Thread". Does anyone know why that didn't get re-started over here? I thought it was both useful and interesting in itself.

It did get restarted here, though it hasn’t had any posts for a while: https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=173.

Thanks! I didn't know (or didn't remember) it was floating around down there in the older pages.

Linkrot being what it is, it probably isn't worth going back to the old forum's resource thread and copying them here -- at least, that's my justification for not making the effort

[Ephraim]

One clarification: is a frequentative just another aspect along the same lines? Your explanation mentions distributives and iteratives, but not frequentatives, and those PDFs you linked also don’t seem to mention frequentatives, all of which makes me suspect that frequentatives may have somewhat different semantics.

Yeah, the terms iterative and frequentative are often used more or less interchangeably. Some author make a distinction. The term iterative may be preferred for ”smaller” repetitions and frequentative for ”larger” repetition. The dividing line might be between event-internal and event-external repetition, or between repetition on a single occasion and repetition over multiple occasions. Or perhaps something else. I think the term ”frequentative” is more common for forms that also indicate some type of habituality, and it may also be used for forms indicating that something happens often (i.e. frequently). Habituality and ”often” are associated with repetition over multiple occasions rather than on a single occasion, so this is in line with the frequentative involving ”larger” repetitions.

Now, I assume you have read the Wikipedia articles for ”Iterative aspect” and ”Frequentative” which both states that one term should not be confused with the other, before going on to do exactly that. Note that while one article is called ”Iterative aspect” and says that this term should not be confused with ”Frequentative aspect”, the other article is simply called ”Frequentative” and talks about "frequentative forms" or "frequentative verbs", not "frequentative aspect".

I think the distinction that Wikipedia tries to make is that frequentatives are more lexicalized in some sense. The article states that ”The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a frequentative.” Thus, frequentatives in the Wikipedia sense almost by definition mark event-internal pluractionality. This is obviously inconsistent with the distinction described above. But to confuse things even more, the Wikipedia article for iterative aspect claims that it is also called ”event-internal pluractionality”...

-

Note that both iteratives and frequentatives involve distributivity in that the action is in some way distributed over multiple points in time. If we’re only dealing with the time dimension, it’s not entirely clear how the term ”distributive (aspect)” fits into the picture. However, many languages have more general distributive forms, that may involve distribution over a number of possible dimensions, such as time, location, participants etc.

Well, of course the exact definition of perfectivity depends on the language, but for this question I was mostly thinking about it in terms of Dahl’s summary of a typical perfective event:

A [perfective] verb will typically denote a single event, seen as an unanalysed whole, with a well-defined result or end-state, located in the past. More often than not, the event will be punctual, or at least, it will be seen as a single transition from one state to its opposite, the duration of which can be disregarded.

I think what I'm most confused about is how (and why) it would be grouped as being perfective or imperfective. Your example "he bled all over the place" is at least semantically perfectly compatible with both the perfective and imperfective aspect. Note that your example is also compatible with the progressive aspect in English (which can be thought of as a subtype of the imperfective).

But that being said, there is a somewhat complicated association between pluractionality (including iteratives and frequentatives) and the imperfective aspect.

[Neon Fox]

Quick terminological question: what aspect would you call something like ‘he bled all over the place’? (If it even has an established name, that is.) I’m guessing it’s an instance of the distributive, but I’m not too sure about that given that I’m pretty uncertain as to what the distributive aspect even is.

And a follow-up question: would such an aspect be more readily grouped as being perfective or imperfective, semantically? I’d guess imperfective (or at least non-perfective), given the absence of a clear end-state, the fact that the internal structure of the event is being considered, and the fact that such an event is decidedly non-punctual — but again, I’m not entirely sure.

I'm not sure why you'd call "all over the place" part of the aspect of the verb. "Bled" is the simple past; "all over the place" is a phrasal adverb. When you remove "all over the place", nothing about the tense or aspect of the verb changes. It answers the question "Where did he bleed?", not "When did he bleed?" or "For how long did he bleed?" or "What else was going on while he was bleeding?"

[bradrn]

One clarification: is a frequentative just another aspect along the same lines? Your explanation mentions distributives and iteratives, but not frequentatives, and those PDFs you linked also don’t seem to mention frequentatives, all of which makes me suspect that frequentatives may have somewhat different semantics.

Yeah, the terms iterative and frequentative are often used more or less interchangeably. Some author make a distinction. The term iterative may be preferred for ”smaller” repetitions and frequentative for ”larger” repetition. The dividing line might be between event-internal and event-external repetition, or between repetition on a single occasion and repetition over multiple occasions. Or perhaps something else. I think the term ”frequentative” is more common for forms that also indicate some type of habituality, and it may also be used for forms indicating that something happens often (i.e. frequently). Habituality and ”often” are associated with repetition over multiple occasions rather than on a single occasion, so this is in line with the frequentative involving ”larger” repetitions.

Thanks for clarifying this!

Now, I assume you have read the Wikipedia articles for ”Iterative aspect” and ”Frequentative” which both states that one term should not be confused with the other, before going on to do exactly that. Note that while one article is called ”Iterative aspect” and says that this term should not be confused with ”Frequentative aspect”, the other article is simply called ”Frequentative” and talks about "frequentative forms" or "frequentative verbs", not "frequentative aspect".

I think the distinction that Wikipedia tries to make is that frequentatives are more lexicalized in some sense. The article states that ”The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a frequentative.” Thus, frequentatives in the Wikipedia sense almost by definition mark event-internal pluractionality. This is obviously inconsistent with the distinction described above. But to confuse things even more, the Wikipedia article for iterative aspect claims that it is also called ”event-internal pluractionality”...

Yes, I have indeed read the Wikipedia articles on those aspects — and there you have discovered precisely the reason why I am so hopelessly confused about the subject. Some of Wikipedia’s linguistics articles are actually quite good; sadly, those on aspect are not among them.

Well, of course the exact definition of perfectivity depends on the language, but for this question I was mostly thinking about it in terms of Dahl’s summary of a typical perfective event:

A [perfective] verb will typically denote a single event, seen as an unanalysed whole, with a well-defined result or end-state, located in the past. More often than not, the event will be punctual, or at least, it will be seen as a single transition from one state to its opposite, the duration of which can be disregarded.

I think what I'm most confused about is how (and why) it would be grouped as being perfective or imperfective. Your example "he bled all over the place" is at least semantically perfectly compatible with both the perfective and imperfective aspect. Note that your example is also compatible with the progressive aspect in English (which can be thought of as a subtype of the imperfective).

This is true. I suppose what I was asking was more like: does that aspect seem more similar to a prototypical perfective event or to a prototypical imperfective event?

But that being said, there is a somewhat complicated association between pluractionality (including iteratives and frequentatives) and the imperfective aspect.

That sounds a bit like what I was looking for — do you have any more details?

Quick terminological question: what aspect would you call something like ‘he bled all over the place’? (If it even has an established name, that is.) I’m guessing it’s an instance of the distributive, but I’m not too sure about that given that I’m pretty uncertain as to what the distributive aspect even is.

And a follow-up question: would such an aspect be more readily grouped as being perfective or imperfective, semantically? I’d guess imperfective (or at least non-perfective), given the absence of a clear end-state, the fact that the internal structure of the event is being considered, and the fact that such an event is decidedly non-punctual — but again, I’m not entirely sure.

I'm not sure why you'd call "all over the place" part of the aspect of the verb. "Bled" is the simple past; "all over the place" is a phrasal adverb. When you remove "all over the place", nothing about the tense or aspect of the verb changes. It answers the question "Where did he bleed?", not "When did he bleed?" or "For how long did he bleed?" or "What else was going on while he was bleeding?"

I don’t know, it just seemed like the sort of thing one might find in an aspectual system. It certainly doesn’t seem any less aspect-like than some of the other aspects which have been recognised (e.g. the ‘perambulative’).

[Qwynegold]

I'm not sure why you'd call "all over the place" part of the aspect of the verb. "Bled" is the simple past; "all over the place" is a phrasal adverb. When you remove "all over the place", nothing about the tense or aspect of the verb changes. It answers the question "Where did he bleed?", not "When did he bleed?" or "For how long did he bleed?" or "What else was going on while he was bleeding?"

Surely he's not talking about English, but a hypothetical conlang verb that is conjugated to mean "bled all over the place"?

Anyhow, one little point about something that was said earlier; I believe the frequentative in Finnish is a derivational thing rather than an aspect, because you can't use it with just any verb. I don't know if other languages have something called a frequentative, and which is truely and aspect.

[Ephraim]

But that being said, there is a somewhat complicated association between pluractionality (including iteratives and frequentatives) and the imperfective aspect.

That sounds a bit like what I was looking for — do you have any more details?

I can try to give an explanation, but despite this being a pretty long post, there’s a lot more to say on this subject (and I’m probably mistaken on some points...). Also, I’m going to be using English examples, which is not ideal since English doesn’t have much in terms of pluractional marking. However, I think the points about repetitions are still relevant here.

Anyway, it’s a sort of indirect association. Plurality in and of situations, and plurality in general, can affect the Aktionsart of the scenario, and the Aktionsart can in turn affect the choice of aspect.

Let's start with defining multiple levels of actional content, from the lowest level to the highest level:

• Phase: The smallest unit of action. Every situation has at least one phase, and every phase belongs to at most one situation.
• Situation: The "basic" unit of action. This is more or less the action denoted by a given verb happening once, with singular participants. However, there can still be singular situations with multiple participants or on multiple locations, perhaps because many participants act together in some way (see collectivity). A dynamic situation is an event, a static situation is a state. Every occasion has at least one situation, and every situation belongs to at most one occasion.
• Occasion: A unit of time that might contain multiple situations that are in some way connected to each other. At the moment, we're not too concerned about the distinction between a single occasion and multiple occasions. Every scenario has at least one occasion and every occasion belongs to at most one scenario.
• Scenario: The totality of phases, situations and occasions. There can only be one scenario.

See for example Cusic, David Dowell (1981) Verbal Plurality and Aspect (Dissertation) p. 64–71, although his terminology is slightly different than mine. I'm afraid this is another area where the terminology is a mess, and there is little agreement about what to call the different levels. This just happens to be my preferred way of naming them. You will find a lot of variation in the literature. Also, not everyone would agree that this system of levels is a good model. In particular, the strict division between the different levels might be a bit shaky. See for example Součková (2011):
https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstr ... sequence=6
(in particular 1.6.2 and 1.8.1)

I'm going to assume you are already familiar with the concept of Aktionsart. Here, I'm adopting a fairly standard model of Aktionsart with three main distinctions: dynamic vs static, punctual vs durative and telic vs atelic.

Repetition at a lower level can affect the Aktionsart at a higher level

Let's take a simple English sentence as an example:
"He won."
This scenario involves a single situation and a single occasion. The situation is dynamic, punctual and telic, and therefore, the occasion and scenario are also dynamic, punctual and telic. For simplicity, we're not going to care about occasions from now on.

Now, consider the following example:
"He won five times."
This scenario involves five situations (we're going to assume they did not happen at the same time). Each situation is dynamic, punctual and telic. The scenario is still dynamic but it is no longer punctual, since it can no longer be thought of as occurring at a single point in time. Since we are still dealing with a bounded quantity of situations, the scenario is still telic.

Let's look at another example example:
"He kept on winning."
This scenario involves an unbounded number of situations. Each situation is still dynamic, punctual and telic and the scenario is still dynamic. The scenario is durative and not punctual for the same reason as in the last example. However, this time the scenario is atelic, since there it no longer has a natural limit. An unbounded repetition at a lower level can cause atelicity at a higher level.

In English, in- and for-time adverbials can be used as a diagnostic for telicity:
He won five times in/*for two hours. (=telic scenario)
He kept winning *in/for two hours. (=atelic scenario)

This is very much related to the way that unbounded objects can make the scenario atelic:
She built a chair in/*for two hours. (=telic scenario)
She built chairs *in/for two hours. (=atelic scenario)

Now, let's look at how Aktionsart can affect the choice of aspect. I'm going to take the core meaning of the perfective aspect to be ’viewing the scenario from the outside’ and of the imperfective aspect to be ’viewing the scenario from the inside’. I also quite like the explanation on Glottopedia, which has some nice diagrams (their ”situation” probably corresponds to my ”scenario”):
http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Aspect
http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Perfective

1. Punctual scenarios are semantically incompatible with the imperfective aspect
A scenario that is conceptualized as taking place at a single point in time can’t really be viewed from the inside. If you have a single punctual situation, you also have a punctual scenenario. Therefore, you would expect perfective marking.

However, punctual situations are not necessarily incompatible with the imperfective aspect. As we saw above, repetition of punctual situations create a durative scenario. Prototypically punctual verbs may or may not require special pluractional marking to be used with the imperfective aspect. In English, the progressive aspect can give rise to an iterative interpretation without any other marking (typically with so called semelfactives):
”She was knocking on the door.” (repeated punctual situations = durative scenario)

Another strategy for using prototypically punctual verbs in the imperfective aspect is to have them refer to some related durative situation rather than the punctual nuclear situation itself. In English, the progressive aspect can be used to refer to the build-up phase (typically with so called achievements):
”Bob was dying when they found him, but the doctors were able to save his life.” (durative situation = durative scenario)
Note that in this example, Bob didn’t actually die.

Durative scenarios are semantically compatible with both the perfective and the imperfective aspect.

2. Perfectives may require telicity at some level
Depending on the language, the choice between perfective and imperfective aspect may be sensitive to telicity at some level.

My understanding is that this is one of the main distinctions between what Dahl calls Romance-style and Slavic-style aspect. Slavic-style perfectives require telic scenarios, whereas Romance-style perfectives can be combined with either telic or atelic scenarios (this might be an oversimplification). The English simple past vs simple progressive opposition is much closer to Romance-style aspect than to Slavic-style in this regard.

Telic scenarios would normally be compatible with both the perfective and the imperfective aspect but there could be some restrictions. It is questionable whether the English past progressive is compatible with telic scenarios formed from bounded repetition:
?”She was winning five times.”

Possible conflict between 1 and 2
You may have noticed that for atelic punctual scenarios, 1 and 2 could come into conflict. However, there is a lot of disagreement over whether there is such a thing as atelic punctual situations. This may ultimately come down to your definition of telicity. Clearly, semelfactives (”he coughed”, ”she knocked”) are in some way different from achievements (”she won”, ”he died”), but it may not be a difference in telicity. I may be mistake here, but I think Russian requires perfective verbs for all punctual scenarios (it also has a morphological way of marking so calles semelfactive verbs, and I’m not sure how well they corresponds to semelfactives in the Aktionsart sense). This might suggest that Russian treats all punctual scenarios as telic. This may be the case for English as well:
She coughed five times in/*for two hours. (bounded repetition of semelfactives = telic scenario, which doesn’t make sense if the simple situation is atelic)

Some further notes on the relationship between pluractionality, iteratives and iterative interpretations
The English examples above involve iterative semantics, but they don’t involve morphological iteratives or pluractionals. Součková (2011), link above (see 1.3.3–5), talks about different sources of iterative interpretations (or iterative readings). She primarily talks about three sources:
– Imperfective aspect (see the English example under 1 above)
– ”Iterative Aktionsart”
– Pluractionality

Note that her use of the term ”Aktionsart” differs from the model I outlined above (hence the quotation marks). She is dealing with overt marking of ”Aktionsart” and pluractionality. The distinction between her ”iterative Aktionsart” and pluractionality is that the former only has an interative interpretation, whereas the latter has the iterative interpretation as one of its many interpretations (others being for example participant-based). I’m tempted to think of the former as a subtype of pluractionality, though, rather than as a type of Aktionsart marking.

[bradrn]

Thanks for clarifying! So, if my understanding of what you’re saying is correct: if the number of events is unbounded, iterativity can imply atelicity, which in turn is correlated with imperfectivity (often in a language-dependent way). Is my understanding correct?

_________________________


Oh, and another question on light verbs (you didn’t seriously think I’d run out of questions, right?): are there any languages which make extensive use of both light verb constructions and serial verb constructions? Finding languages with one or the other seems to be pretty easy, but it seems difficult to find languages with both.

[2+3 Clusivity]

Quick terminological question: what aspect would you call something like ‘he bled all over the place’? (If it even has an established name, that is.) I’m guessing it’s an instance of the distributive, but I’m not too sure about that given that I’m pretty uncertain as to what the distributive aspect even is.

Broadly speaking, I'd say this falls under the concept of pluractionality. More narrowly, you can decompose that plurality into a few axis:

>plurality of arguments (typically S or O but occasionally also considering A; also typically employing a minimal-augmented number structure)
>plurality of event (this appears to have a lot of sub-types: iterative, habitual, frequentative, etc. In general, I think you could distinguish the plurality of on overall event versus the plurality of actions within a given event)
>Plurality of setting/ground (... "all over the place" ...)

For the latter, I've seen "distributive" but this seems to cause confusion with distributive numerals/plurality (e.g., each man carried three loads). I've also seen, for example, distributive used for plurality of arguments in descriptions of Navajo--see Wiki for example. I've also seen "Repetitive/perambulative" used for a sense were the spatial endpoint of an action is de-emphasized (i.e., walk -> walk all over).

I think the main thing is just pick a term, describe it, and be aware of past terminological vicissitudes.


EDIT: just saw ephraim's post. See their response. Haha. Very good.

[Neon Fox]

I'm not sure why you'd call "all over the place" part of the aspect of the verb. "Bled" is the simple past; "all over the place" is a phrasal adverb. When you remove "all over the place", nothing about the tense or aspect of the verb changes. It answers the question "Where did he bleed?", not "When did he bleed?" or "For how long did he bleed?" or "What else was going on while he was bleeding?"

Surely he's not talking about English, but a hypothetical conlang verb that is conjugated to mean "bled all over the place"?

That may be so, but IMO such a conjugation would not be aspect. It'd be, I dunno, intensive or emphatic or something. Consider the particle -qu' in tlhIngan Hol: you can add it to make a sentence more, well, intense. nuqneH 'What do you want?' vs nuqneHqu' 'What the hell do you want?' Or, perhaps more to the point, the difference between puq­pu’ 'children' and puq­mey 'children scattered around, children all over the place'. And yes, tlhIngan Hol is a conlang, but Okrand is a linguist. There are several aspect markers in the language (in fact it doesn't have tense), and neither -qu' nor -mey is on that list.

[Ephraim]

Thanks for clarifying! So, if my understanding of what you’re saying is correct: if the number of events is unbounded, iterativity can imply atelicity, which in turn is correlated with imperfectivity (often in a language-dependent way). Is my understanding correct?

Yeah, that seems basically correct.
- An unbounded number of events (or phases, or occasions) can make the scenario atelic. Note that telicity could then be (re)introduced by some sort of limit that applies to the scenario as a whole rather than to each individual event individually (this may be a question of distributivity).
- Atelic scenarios can, in turn, be correlated with imperfective aspect, since the perfective aspect in some languages require telicity at some level (even without this restriction, it’s possible that there is a statistical correlation, but I haven’t looked into it). But it should be stressed that this is language-dependent.

To this I would also add:
- Punctual scenarios are semantically incompatible with the imperfective aspect. This doesn’t mean that punctual events or prototypically punctual verbs are necessarily incompatible with the imperfective aspect. It depends on the language.
- Imperfective aspect can give rise to an iterative interpretation even without overt iterative markers (see the previous point for a motivation). Again, this might be language dependent.
- I imagine there is a diachronic pathway from iterative markers to markers of imperfective aspect, but I haven’t looked too much into this.

[Qwynegold]

I'm not sure why you'd call "all over the place" part of the aspect of the verb. "Bled" is the simple past; "all over the place" is a phrasal adverb. When you remove "all over the place", nothing about the tense or aspect of the verb changes. It answers the question "Where did he bleed?", not "When did he bleed?" or "For how long did he bleed?" or "What else was going on while he was bleeding?"

Surely he's not talking about English, but a hypothetical conlang verb that is conjugated to mean "bled all over the place"?

That may be so, but IMO such a conjugation would not be aspect. It'd be, I dunno, intensive or emphatic or something. Consider the particle -qu' in tlhIngan Hol: you can add it to make a sentence more, well, intense. nuqneH 'What do you want?' vs nuqneHqu' 'What the hell do you want?' Or, perhaps more to the point, the difference between puq­pu’ 'children' and puq­mey 'children scattered around, children all over the place'. And yes, tlhIngan Hol is a conlang, but Okrand is a linguist. There are several aspect markers in the language (in fact it doesn't have tense), and neither -qu' nor -mey is on that list.

Okay. I don't really have an opinion on whether it's an aspect or not. However, I don't see much similarity between the iterative/frequentative and intensifiers. And surely puq­mey is a noun?

[Ephraim]

Okay. I don't really have an opinion on whether it's an aspect or not. However, I don't see much similarity between the iterative/frequentative and intensifiers.

It is actually pretty common for markers of repeated action to be extended to marking more intense action. After all, a single intense event could often have a similar result as a series of repeated events of less intensity. Compare this to nominal marking, where languages often use the same or related words for marking a large size, a large number of countable nouns, and a large amount of a mass noun.

Perhaps surprisingly, markers of repeated action can just as well be extended to have the opposite meaning, namely marking smaller or less intense action. This also makes some sense, since you could often substitute an action of ”normal intensity” for a series of smaller actions.

Cusic (cited above) gives the following secondary meanings that are associated with markers of repetition in various languages:

diminutive: do lots of little actions
cumulative: do and do until something results
durative–continuative: keep on doing and doing
conative: make lots of attempts to do
incassative: do actions aimlessly
tentative: do a little, not enough

intensive: do hard
augmentative: do alot, or to many
excessive: do too much

[Pabappa]

Is he saying that languages with a diminutive for nouns will often also use the same diminutive affix on verbs to indicate repeated small actions? Or just using that term for a different meaning than what Im used to?

The others dont seem like they'd match up with noun affixes at all.

[Ephraim]

Is he saying that languages with a diminutive for nouns will often also use the same diminutive affix on verbs to indicate repeated small actions? Or just using that term for a different meaning than what Im used to?

The others dont seem like they'd match up with noun affixes at all.

No, these are just his labels for different meanings that can get associated with (verbal) markers of repetition. In other words, iterative markers in some languages can have a ’diminutive interpretation’ in addition to simple repetition. So this is a different use of the term ”diminutive” from the more familiar nominal diminutives. He’s also not talking about dedicated diminutive marking on verb, but rather about extended uses of iteratives and related categories.

[Qwynegold]

Okay. I don't really have an opinion on whether it's an aspect or not. However, I don't see much similarity between the iterative/frequentative and intensifiers.

It is actually pretty common for markers of repeated action to be extended to marking more intense action. After all, a single intense event could often have a similar result as a series of repeated events of less intensity. Compare this to nominal marking, where languages often use the same or related words for marking a large size, a large number of countable nouns, and a large amount of a mass noun.

Perhaps surprisingly, markers of repeated action can just as well be extended to have the opposite meaning, namely marking smaller or less intense action. This also makes some sense, since you could often substitute an action of ”normal intensity” for a series of smaller actions.

That's interesting, I did not know this.

[bradrn]

I don't know if this belongs here or elseewhere, but anyway: According to this tweet, Trump said:

But so I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.

Your task is to parse it according to a syntactic theory of your choosing and explain what it means.

(Replying to this here because I’m more interested in the linguistic side of this than the political side.)

I think that this just has a lot of self-repair. Striking out the repaired bits:

But so I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.

That is:

But so I think we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.

Which of course is parsable with any syntactic theory you want (though the exact semantics are up for debate).

I believe that quite a lot of conversational speech is like this, actually. zompist gives a lovely example of this (taken from real speech) in the LCK:

An’ s- an’... we were discussing, it tur-, it comes down, he s- he says, I-I-you’ve talked about thi- si- i- about this many times. I said, it came down t’ this: our main difference, I feel that a government, i- the main thing, is th- the purpose of the government is, what is best for the country. … He says governments, an’ you know he keeps- he talks about governments, they sh- the thing that they sh’d do is what’s right or wrong.

And with the self-repair crossed out:

An’ s- an’... we were discussing, it tur-, it comes down, he s- he says, I-I-you’ve talked about thi- si- i- about this many times. I said, it came down t’ this: our main difference, I feel that a government, i- the main thing, is th- the purpose of the government is, what is best for the country. … He says governments, an’ you know he keeps- he talks about governments, they sh- the thing that they sh’d do is what’s right or wrong.

The odd thing isn’t really hearing it in the first place, but hearing it in a formal (non-conversational) context!

[Linguoboy]

It is fascinating to me what common words the iPhone autocomplete pretends not to know. Today's discovery: "abduction". (I'm sure somebody somewhere has compiled a complete list, but I prefer to suss them out one by one.)

[Qwynegold]

I started this new project (as if I don't have enough projects going on already) of recording my vowels (in Finnish) and measuring them in Praat. It was a really long time ago since I last worked with this, so I don't remember very well how to use the program, or what practices you should follow. So far I've done 1/3 of the words on my list, and I have discovered that vowel length varies a lot! According to Wikipedia, stressed vowels are supposed to be a bit longer than unstressed vowels, but so far in my data I have the following average lengths:

Short, stressed vowels: 80.875 ms (min. 44 ms, max. 118 ms)
Short, unstressed vowels: 112.583 ms (min. 71 ms, max. 194 ms)
Long, stressed vowels: 254.375 ms (min. 174 ms, max. 326 ms)
Long, unstressed vowels: 195 ms (only two data points, 185 ms and 205 ms)

Many of the unstressed vowels occur word-finally, where it can be a little tricky to find a good cut-off point.* So I'm wondering if that's what's skewing things. Should I avoid measuring word-final vowels? But then again, it seems to me like vowels before plosives sometimes get very long too (I have no data on that though), and it's very difficult to measure in that position as well.

*Often times there are some dark bands high up on the spectrogram that end before the dark bands in the lower regions. So I have been setting the cut-off point at where higher bands end. So there's always quite a bit of something that's clearly visible in the waveform that gets cut away, though listening to the bits after the cut-off I can't really hear anything.

[Creyeditor]

That sounds very fascinating. Has this been done before for Finnish?
Here are my thoughts on measuring vowel length. There is phonetic final vowel lengthening in many languages. This can happen at the end of words, phrases or utterances. Since this is very variable, I would try to measure vowels somewhere else.
The lower bands might just be voicing that continues? Vibration of the vocal cords often does not end at the same time as other articulatory gestures of an utterance. That's why some languages (like Hausa) have a phonetic glottal after short utterance final vowels.
Also, what is your reading pace? Are you trying to pronounce everything very clearly? A slow tempo often pumps up the vowel length a lot. Professional studys often use carrier sentences. The target word is then part of that sentence. It usually does not occur sentence-initially or sentence-finally. This means that you get less utterance final lengthening and you can control a bit for reading pace, e.g. you do not get a list intonation. It is important to note that the relative length of stressed and long vowels (in relation to short/unstressed vowels) is language specific. IIRC, some language have 1:2 ratios and others go as low as 5:6. Vowel length is easier to measure between plosives in my experience, because (modulo lenition) there are clear cut-off points. The "silence" in the signal can serve as a cue for the segment boundary. On the other hand, some language devoice vowels between voiceless plosives, which makes it harder to measure them, since the signal and the formants are weaker. That's what I can recall about measuring vowel length.
And here are my thoughts on measuring other stuff apart from length, in case you are planning to do this. In my experience, measuring formant value works in most environments, but these are easily influenced by place of articulation and laterals/nasals. This is less prominent towards the (temporal) middle portion of the vowel. That's what I did to minimize any influence of neighbouring consonants here. If you want to measure pitch (f0), it's easier to do this between sonorants. The reason is that you want a continous pitch measurement, e.g. in order to track down extreme pitch jumps that Praat measured, but that are not real and that can be corrected in the settings.