Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Znex]

How do different languages address their pet/farm animals?

The classic English way to address pets is to address them as "children": "boy", "girl", "lad", "lass", "bubba", etc. Of course we also use their names and diminutives: "doggy", "pupper", "puss-puss", "kitty", "Bessie", etc.

Also, any change in pronoun usage in reference to pets, or animals in general? Compared with other non-human entities in any case.

[Linguoboy]

There's an interesting syntactic change in Spanish, which has a feature called the "personal a". This refers to using the preposition a to mark the direct object when this is a person:

Vi basura en la calle. "I saw trash in the street."
Vi a mi hermano por la calle. "I saw my brother in the street."

This has led to it being used to mark "personalised" animals and even objects:

Vi al perrito negrito en la calle. "I saw the little black doggy in the street."
Vi a mi coche en la calle. "I saw my car in the street."

Some speakers generalise personal a to all animals of a certain type (e.g. dogs, horses), whether pets or otherwise. Others are more selective. But I think all of them would accept it being used with unusual animals as long as they are pets (or otherwise personalised/anthropomorphised, such as in a children's programme).

[Travis B.]

Has anyone else noticed speakers of largely standard North American English with a rounded START vowel? (It does not seem to be common amongst people from here, but I hear it in the speech of people not from here, and my daughter sometimes seems to round her START.)

[Linguoboy]

Has anyone else noticed speakers of largely standard North American English with a rounded START vowel? (It does not seem to be common amongst people from here, but I hear it in the speech of people not from here, and my daughter sometimes seems to round her START.)

If anything, the tendency here seems to be towards centralisation or fronting.

[Travis B.]

Has anyone else noticed speakers of largely standard North American English with a rounded START vowel? (It does not seem to be common amongst people from here, but I hear it in the speech of people not from here, and my daughter sometimes seems to round her START.)

If anything, the tendency here seems to be towards centralisation or fronting.

That is what I have heard of other Inland North dialects, but the dialect here preserves back START as [ɑʁ] (albeit not quite as far back as what I hear of many GA-speakers), and indeed, before fortis obstruents it raises it to a fully back [ʌʁ] except in a few words such as farce, parse (but raised pronunciations also occur for this), and Martha.

[Linguoboy]

Oh, on the subject of r-coloured vowels, I realised the other day that my /or/-/ur/ merger is incomplete. I don't have a problem using an originally /or/ vowel in /or/ words, but the converse isn't true. That is, fluoride sounds fine to me with anything from [ʊ] to [ɔ]. But Florida with [ʊ] sounds plain wrong.

I suspect that this may be related to lexical set membership and that the merger fully embraces FORCE words but not NORTH words. (Historically, the two sets did not merge in St Louis and several words from the latter are START words for me.) But it's difficult to say for sure because membership seems to vary considerably by dialect.

[Travis B.]

The dialect here does not merge /ɔr/ and /ʊr/ (tensed to [uʁʷ]) except (as [ɔʁʷ]) in your/you're, fluoro-/fluorine/fluoride, and Moorland Road/Moorland Avenue, and maybe a few other words I cannot remember right now. Note that moor by itself has [uʁʷ] here, not [ɔʁʷ].

[anteallach]

Oh, on the subject of r-coloured vowels, I realised the other day that my /or/-/ur/ merger is incomplete. I don't have a problem using an originally /or/ vowel in /or/ words, but the converse isn't true. That is, fluoride sounds fine to me with anything from [ʊ] to [ɔ]. But Florida with [ʊ] sounds plain wrong.

I suspect that this may be related to lexical set membership and that the merger fully embraces FORCE words but not NORTH words. (Historically, the two sets did not merge in St Louis and several words from the latter are START words for me.) But it's difficult to say for sure because membership seems to vary considerably by dialect.

That's related to a question I had: how do/did North American dialects without the NORTH/FORCE merger treat words like Florida, orange. moral etc. (which in BrE are LOT)?

[Linguoboy]

That's related to a question I had: how do/did North American dialects without the NORTH/FORCE merger treat words like Florida, orange. moral etc. (which in BrE are LOT)?

What do you mean "How do they treat them?" Like what realisations do you get? Anything from [ɔ] (which sounds stereotypically New Yawk to me) or [ɑ] down through [oʊ] (Southeast) and even [ʊ] (Mid-Atlantic).

[Nortaneous]

Has anyone else noticed speakers of largely standard North American English with a rounded START vowel? (It does not seem to be common amongst people from here, but I hear it in the speech of people not from here, and my daughter sometimes seems to round her START.)

Something around [ɔɹ] is common. I have it.

[anteallach]

That's related to a question I had: how do/did North American dialects without the NORTH/FORCE merger treat words like Florida, orange. moral etc. (which in BrE are LOT)?

What do you mean "How do they treat them?" Like what realisations do you get? Anything from [ɔ] (which sounds stereotypically New Yawk to me) or [ɑ] down through [oʊ] (Southeast) and even [ʊ] (Mid-Atlantic).

I mean do they get the NORTH vowel or the FORCE vowel? (Or are all North American dialects which distinguish NORTH and FORCE of the type which align with BrE on this, and just use LOT?)

BrE (well, me):
LOT: orange, moral, coral, Florida
FORCE: oral, story, boring, Dora
NORTH: aural, Laura, stegosaurus, Andorra
with the latter two categories tending to merge, of course.

[mèþru]

The words lot, aural and Laura are different from the vowel in the other words, which sounds the same in all three sets to me.

[Travis B.]

Has anyone else noticed speakers of largely standard North American English with a rounded START vowel? (It does not seem to be common amongst people from here, but I hear it in the speech of people not from here, and my daughter sometimes seems to round her START.)

Something around [ɔɹ] is common. I have it.

What I hear is something more open, more like [ɒɹ], contrasting with [ɔɹ] as in NORTH and FORCE.

[Linguoboy]

That's related to a question I had: how do/did North American dialects without the NORTH/FORCE merger treat words like Florida, orange. moral etc. (which in BrE are LOT)?

What do you mean "How do they treat them?" Like what realisations do you get? Anything from [ɔ] (which sounds stereotypically New Yawk to me) or [ɑ] down through [oʊ] (Southeast) and even [ʊ] (Mid-Atlantic).

I mean do they get the NORTH vowel or the FORCE vowel?

Yes.

My point is that there is a lot of variance, even for individual speakers. Hence why my original post was about realising that the free variation in my own speech wasn't as free as I originally thought. I think what I may actually have is [ɑ ~ o] for NORTH words and [o ~ ʊ] for FORCE, so there's a great deal of overlap but not (yet) a complete merger. (Plus I have [a ~ ɑ] for START words, so there's overlap on that end as well--and that's apart from instances like forest and horror, which are NORTH words that pattern with the START set as a relic of the St Louis-area card-cord merger.) I really can't be sure without a third-party analysis of my natural speech.

[Nortaneous]

That's related to a question I had: how do/did North American dialects without the NORTH/FORCE merger treat words like Florida, orange. moral etc. (which in BrE are LOT)?

What do you mean "How do they treat them?" Like what realisations do you get? Anything from [ɔ] (which sounds stereotypically New Yawk to me) or [ɑ] down through [oʊ] (Southeast) and even [ʊ] (Mid-Atlantic).

I mean do they get the NORTH vowel or the FORCE vowel? (Or are all North American dialects which distinguish NORTH and FORCE of the type which align with BrE on this, and just use LOT?)

dictionary.com's pronunciation guide doesn't have the NORTH-FORCE merger. 'North' is listed as <awr> and 'force' is listed with both <awr> and <ohr>. Words with LOT + r (orange, Florida, moral, horror, forest) are listed with both <awr> and <ohr>.

What I hear is something more open, more like [ɒɹ], contrasting with [ɔɹ] as in NORTH and FORCE.

Does anyone actually have [ɔ]? The onset of the NORTH/FORCE diphthong is pretty high. Not [u‌], but close.

I was talking to a linguistics grad student a while ago who had the opposite outcome from me, and initially I thought it was ɒ > ɔ / _r. It sounded to me like it started with [ɔ]. But I don't think ɒ > ɔ / _r is a thing -- it was probably a merger with START.

[Travis B.]

What I hear is something more open, more like [ɒɹ], contrasting with [ɔɹ] as in NORTH and FORCE.

Does anyone actually have [ɔ]? The onset of the NORTH/FORCE diphthong is pretty high. Not [u‌], but close.

I was talking to a linguistics grad student a while ago who had the opposite outcome from me, and initially I thought it was ɒ > ɔ / _r. It sounded to me like it started with [ɔ]. But I don't think ɒ > ɔ / _r is a thing -- it was probably a merger with START.

I have [ɑʁ] and [ʌʁ], depending on whether the following consonant (even if it is elided!) is fortis or not, for START, and [ɔʁʷ] for merged NORTH/FORCE.

[Pabappa]

In a language where voice and aspect are both derivational (not inflectional), is there a preferred order I should stick to?

E.g. in Pabappa, the word for sing is inherently reflexive . Should "to sing for a long time" be patterned as

1) singing.REFL.DUR , or
2) singing.DUR.REFL ?

In either case, the tense marker goes after the resulting word, since tense is still marked by inflection. Thanks for any help.

[Zaarin]

What I hear is something more open, more like [ɒɹ], contrasting with [ɔɹ] as in NORTH and FORCE.

Does anyone actually have [ɔ]? The onset of the NORTH/FORCE diphthong is pretty high. Not [u‌], but close.

I have /ou/, which is [ɔ] before a liquid, so I have [ɔ] in NORTH/FORCE.

[akam chinjir]

In a language where voice and aspect are both derivational (not inflectional), is there a preferred order I should stick to?

E.g. in Pabappa, the word for sing is inherently reflexive . Should "to sing for a long time" be patterned as

1) singing.REFL.DUR , or
2) singing.DUR.REFL ?

In either case, the tense marker goes after the resulting word, since tense is still marked by inflection. Thanks for any help.

I expect the usual order would put voice closer to the verb than aspect (and I think the main approaches to affix order agree about this); I don't get the impression anyone thinks that affix-ordering among derivational affixes follows different principles from affix-ordering among inflectional affixes (though of course you expect the derivational ones to be inside the inflectional ones). (But there've got to be people around here who know more about this than I do.)

[Seirios]

Does anyone know of a natural language where the grammatical marking of a certain type of oblique object is suppletive based on the number, definiteness, or topicality of the subject of the clause? For example, a language that regularly uses one adposition to mark a certain type of oblique object when the subject is singular, and a different adposition to mark the same type of oblique object when the subject is plural?

To illustrate what I mean, let's imagine a hypothetical version of English where the following grammaticality judgements apply:

I give the book to you. (subject is singular, therefore recipient is marked with to)
*I give the book for you. (ungrammatical or at least very unusual)

*We give the book to you. (ungrammatical or at least very unusual because subject is plural)
We give the book for you. (subject is plural, therefore recipient is marked with for)

Is a pattern like this attested? It doesn't need to be about recipients though; any other common oblique role also counts (causer, instrument, source, goal, location...) And if yes, do you have any information about how it evolved?

No idea if anyone said this in the 10+ ppages between your post and my reply, but French has a similar situation, where for "in some country", you use à, plus article, if the country's name is masculine (usually -> au, contracted with the article, e.g. au Japon; small island countries like Cyprus don't use the article, so, à Chypre), and en, without particle also, if feminine (e.g. en France).

Also check out the post about Spanish above, though it's about anthromorphisation.