If English were a person you could talk to…

I have decided to run a little competition here on AB.C.

The following statements all came from one professor during a linguistics course. Try to guess what the prof was talking about when each of these was said. The winner gets no prize! Leave your guesses in the comments. Some of these are easier if you know something about linguistics, but some have more to do with general academia. Also, some of these are pretty obvious, but they’re fun, so I’ve included them anyway

(P.S., if you know which prof this is, please don’t name them here - let’s leave their reputation intact… Also, you’re disqualified if you were in the course.)

1. “Maybe cottage cheese evolves… Cottage cheese, I suppose, is a substance… It’s not a controlled substance…”
2. “Oh my god!? Where did the subject go?! But it’s all ok, because it is inflected in the V.”
3. “You don’t want to be like me and produce ‘ox’ with a regular plural. Star ‘Oxz’.”
4. “And then we’re gonna have trouble. We don’t want trouble.”
5. “She had some type of oil all over her.”
6. “Your mind is warpable. Remember this.”
7. “I devoured the soup. Oh dear, cuz it’s poisoned…”
8. “You need to be able to say just… ‘cheese’. Which is why we can say ‘cheese’.”
9. “If English were a person you could talk to in real life, and asked it ‘What is really important to you?’, it’d probably say ‘auxiliary verbs are really big.’”

3 Responses to “If English were a person you could talk to…”

Jonathan Says:
December 1st, 2006 at 12:19 pm

1. Semantics, changes of state? Drugs.
2. Either pro-drop or ellipsis.
3. Productiveness of morphology. OT. And btw, it’s “oxes” or [ɑksɨz], though I suppose underlying it’d be /ɑks+z/
4. Resumtive nouns? That is, using a noun instead of a pronoun for emphasis.
5. Pronouns and binding?
6. Semantics. Pronouns? Or learning.
7. Semantics. Possibly something about pronouns.
8. Productivity or compositionality of language, in a sort of backwards sense.
9. Nice.. English? Oh, and, uh, auxiliaries?

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Aaron Says:
December 1st, 2006 at 4:48 pm

1. Nope
2. Yes, pro-drop
3. It has to do with morphology, but not the productiveness thereof
4. Nope
5. Haha, no.
6. Learning… can you be more specific?
7. Nope
8. Nope.
9. Yes, of course.

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Sam Negin Says:
April 6th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

1) Theories on syntax? Govt. & Binding et al.? or maybe UG?
2) Pro-drop
3) English plural morphology and how it’s different from phonology.
4) Syntax trees?
5) Word categorization in syntax?
6) Language Acquisition
7) Subcat frames
Phrase structure?
9) The importance of being English .. with Auxes … for farming? lol

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