Hi everyone,

I'm an MA student in Linguistics doing a survey on attitudes towards the construction (zo)(iets) van in Dutch. A few studies have been done on this construction (syntax, pragmatics, development), but to my knowledge no one has looked at speakers' attitudes towards it. I'm looking for both L1 and L2 (in fact I'm especially interested ( Read more... )

As in, I'm going to "try and" make it to his house earlier, but I can't make any guarantees.

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It makes me want to scream, because I'm a fan of "try to", but I'm curious.

I think this recent edition of Dinosaur Comics wonderfully sums up why linguistic creativity is awesome and prescriptivism is made of fail.

( Cut for image size. )

In prescriptive English grammar, is this correct?

“What am I going to do…what if they kill mother?”

Or should it be:

“What am I going to do… What if they kill mother?”

or some other variant?

In a recent journal entry, I wanted to write "Mary and I both turn 65 next year, me in January, she in December."

But there's some grammatical dissonance there, isn't there? "Me" and "she" can't both be right. But "I in January" sounds hopelessly stilted, and "her in December" just sounds ignorant. What's the answer?

Am I wrong or being too prescriptivist if i cringe when i see people say "AMO este programa!" or other inanimate/not real people? Is this becoming an acceptable alternative to "Me encanta"? Or maybe just in the Americas where the gringo influence is more prevalent? I mean, it really bugs me ( Read more... )