Linguistics thread

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2017-03-06, 11:43

Thanks!
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-03-10, 22:44

I'm like, listening to the new Talk The Talk, and I'm thinking structurally like is a Complementizer, no?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Dormouse559 » 2017-03-11, 2:53

Hmm, possibly. I use "like" a lot, and I'm not thinking of any complementizer uses, but I also could just be forgetting something. Do you have any examples?

EDIT: Just figured out what you're probably talking about. :blush: When "like" is synonymous with "as though", it is a complementizer. I got thrown off by how you used it in your post just now, which is different.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-03-11, 20:32

That use yes, definitely a C, but I was thinking of its use as a reporting/quoting marker. Maybe "I was like, let's get going". There's definitely two clauses there, and "let's get going" doesn't seem like a standalone clause to me.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-03-11, 20:35

On a totally different topic, if someone of you doesn't have an MA yet, and wants an excuse to visit Cyprus this April, there's a call for linguistics papers out.
The Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus is pleased to announce the 1st Cyprus Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (CULC), which will be held at the University of Cyprus (New Campus) on the 26th April 2017 from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm. We cordially invite papers reporting undergraduate research on subjects pertaining to theoretical and experimental analysis of language structure and lexicon, language change, language and the mind, speech-language pathology and therapy, computational linguistics, linguistic variation, language and society, language use, language and writing systems, language teaching and assessment, translation, etc.

CULC is the first conference of its nature in Cyprus, and through it, students with a passion in linguistics and interesting ideas will find opportunities to share, discuss, and inspire each other through their work and the work of their peers. If you are an undergraduate student of linguistics or a recent graduate and would like to share interesting research, or have a general interest in linguistics, this event is for you.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Dormouse559 » 2017-03-11, 21:32

md0 wrote:That use yes, definitely a C, but I was thinking of its use as a reporting/quoting marker. Maybe "I was like, let's get going". There's definitely two clauses there, and "let's get going" doesn't seem like a standalone clause to me.
Yeah, you're right. I forgot quotatives are complementizers, too.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-03-11, 21:49

I was also thinking that Turkish -mış has a similar function to this use of like, but my Turkish is rather basic so I can't make any real claims.

Also, I think that in Greek we really cannot embed a finite sentence, so we don't have structures like "I was like, doing something", which is what makes English like interesting to me.
Words like tákha(tes), aspúmen(te) and míshi(mu) take only a subjunctive aspect verb, AFAIK. I really hate not having access to Greek/CyG corpora at times like that, I can't easily test this.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-15, 5:08

md0 wrote:I was also thinking that Turkish -mış has a similar function to this use of like, but my Turkish is rather basic so I can't make any real claims.

I don't think that's quite true because -mış AFAIK is more like 'it is said that...' rather than 'so-and-so said...'.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby voron » 2017-03-16, 21:08

vijayjohn wrote:I don't think that's quite true because -mış AFAIK is more like 'it is said that...' rather than 'so-and-so said...'.

I have noticed I would often use "apparently" or "supposedly" in English where I'd say -mış in Turkish.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Michael » 2017-03-17, 5:14

Is it just me, or has the dubitative suffix -mIş in Azeri shifted morphologically to become a generalized suffix for the past perfect?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-17, 6:46

Michael wrote:Is it just me, or has the dubitative suffix -mIş in Azeri shifted morphologically to become a generalized suffix for the past perfect?

What makes you think it has?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Michael » 2017-03-17, 7:56

vijayjohn wrote:
Michael wrote:Is it just me, or has the dubitative suffix -mIş in Azeri shifted morphologically to become a generalized suffix for the past present perfect?

What makes you think it has?

For one, Öztopçu simply names it the present perfect tense, without specifying whether it's used dubitatively as in Turkish: "This tense expresses an action that is completed at the time of speaking but may have present implications." He adds, "When using the present perfect tense in Azerbaijani, unlike in English, it is possible to give a definite time in the past. In these cases, the present perfect tense is translated into English in the simple past tense."

This seems to go along with the way in which I've observed the suffix used in Azeri media.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-17, 19:31

Why is it considered a dubitative suffix in Turkish? I thought it was supposed to be more like an evidential suffix (so implying something like "I don't know this fact from personal experience; I know it from hearsay, vague recollection, or some other outside source").

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-03-18, 23:12

The Theory-less Science That Will Doom Us All, will doom asylum seekers soon:
http://www.dw.com/en/automatic-speech-a ... a-37980819

And I thought the "prove you're gay" tests for asylum seekers were bad...
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-19, 3:46

I remember my advisor mentioning Nigerians trying to pass for refugees from Sierra Leone during its civil war and saying they didn't do a very good job of it because they assumed Krio was pretty much the same thing as Nigerian Pidgin English and it isn't. He also mentioned Romanians trying to pass for Roma.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Car » 2017-03-19, 10:23

md0 wrote:The Theory-less Science That Will Doom Us All, will doom asylum seekers soon:
http://www.dw.com/en/automatic-speech-a ... a-37980819

And I thought the "prove you're gay" tests for asylum seekers were bad...

Considering that 80 or even 90% of all asylum seeker here come without passports to this day and 2/3 of all asylum applications in the EU were made in Germany, it's only logical that you want to speed up the process. They illegally moved through several safe countries along they way and shouldn't be able to apply for asylum here in the first place if the laws were applied properly, so that seems more than fair enough. You definitely do not only have lots of people pretending to be younger than they actually are (we don't do any age screening), but also lots of people pretending to be from countries they aren't actually from.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-03-19, 10:42

The first thing that came to my mind when I read the article was what's true for me.
I grew up in a refugee settlement (not a camp, but my mum did), of a cold conflict (and not an ongoing one like the people from Syria). As a result, my accent in my native language is neither typical for the place I grew up, nor for the place my family comes from. In refugee settlements, there's a melange, there's a lot of inter-dialectal borrowing, innovations and language change in general. And sociolinguistists identified a lot of ways in which we radically change the way we speak even at a moment's notice.
MidEast refugees usually spend a lot of time in intermediary stops in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and northern Africa, where refugees from a lot of different conflicts live together, before coming to Europe. That's a lot of linguistic influence.

If someone was to subject me to an accent test (say Cyprus goes on a war again and I have to flee because I refuse to take the side of one evil over the other), they will probably miscategorise me. (The obvious flaw in the hypothetical scenario is that unlike Syria, Cyprus is so small that if there's a war here, it's going to affect the whole country anyway)

tl;dr, those tests are bullshit, and making computers do them doesn't improve anything. Political problems cannot be solved with technology, and especially not with "Big Data". Political problems are solved by doing politics.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Car » 2017-03-19, 10:53

I realise the problem, but what do you do if most don't have any papers that show where they are from, you have known for a long time that many get rid of the papers on purpose because it vastly increases their chances of staying, often forever, you know that a certain amount of people are lying and the total number of people is too big and the costs are too high (more than 20 billion euros last year alone)? How would you try to find out who actually deserves the protection, especially considering the number of safe countries they already travelled through?
I really am not in favour of the way the current system works, but apparently, wanting to see our basic law applied and wanting to take in a certain number of people straight from safe areas in the countries or camps in neighbouring countries makes me far-right, as I was told in another forum. :roll:
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2017-03-19, 10:59

I understand Car's point, and automation certainly can be a good thing to help speed up processes that are generating backlog. But even in that article there's a professor who speaks about the dangers of computer analysis not understanding nuance and context. The professor also points to a test she did with German natives listening to audio samples of other German natives who had lived abroad for 5 years. And either most or all of the time the listeners believed the speakers were foreigners. The same professor also used the computer analysis method and got the same results.

Personally I think a solution aimed in the right direction is better than none at all. Hopefully Germany doesn't stop with just this automated system, but perhaps uses it as one tool in a bunch of tools to help verify as much as possible the background of refugees.

Car wrote:I really am not in favour of the way the current system works, but apparently, wanting to see our basic law applied and wanting to take in a certain number of people straight from safe areas in the countries or camps in neighbouring countries makes me far-right, as I was told in another forum. :roll:

I don't think you're far-right at all. While I'm quite liberal, over the years I've become a little more left-of-centre, because I've awoken to the realities of life and that extremely liberal ideals aren't realistic! Maybe those calling you far-right are still naive or blind to certain realities? Maybe they've never had to live in the situation you and Germany are in?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Car » 2017-03-19, 13:04

dEhiN wrote:
Car wrote:I really am not in favour of the way the current system works, but apparently, wanting to see our basic law applied and wanting to take in a certain number of people straight from safe areas in the countries or camps in neighbouring countries makes me far-right, as I was told in another forum. :roll:

I don't think you're far-right at all. While I'm quite liberal, over the years I've become a little more left-of-centre, because I've awoken to the realities of life and that extremely liberal ideals aren't realistic! Maybe those calling you far-right are still naive or blind to certain realities? Maybe they've never had to live in the situation you and Germany are in?

Those people were fellow German living here. The thing is that over night something that was only supported by the far-left before (open borders for everyone) became the consensus here and everyone else was branded as far-right, with the consequence that there was no party in parliament which represented what must have been at least 50% of the country and as such the only bigger party that was critical of it (the AfD) being resurrected over night. If you call everyone who's critical far-right, you shouldn't be surprised if you end up strengthening the far-right.
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