Posts (page 2)

I don't know if this is exactly relevant to what we are studying but I find it odd. I have friends that say "I am going to the Walmart" or "I am going to the Kroger". To me this is just completely wrong. I would never add "the" in a sentence like this. But I would say "I am going to the lake" or "I am going to the concert". Does anyone else find this odd? Would it be something similar to what we were talking about in class when discussing "is and are"?

While discussing this topic in class on Thursday I was trying to think of way to use "are" with the sentence "my family is/are _______." So the only thing I could come up with was: "my family are constituents of _____" or "my family are members of _____". Does this work for anyone else? It seems to be the only way I could use "are". That being when the noun after "are" is pluralized to agree with plurality of the phrase "my family". 

I don't know if everyone knows who Yogi Berra is but he is the master at making mistakes that are great examples of what is discussed in Ch.12. Yogi Berra is a legend in Major League Baseball for his accomplishments on the field, and rightly so. But off the field he has been known to have some trouble with his native language of English. Some of his most memorable sayings are: It's like deja vu all over again, I didn't really say everything I said, Tomorrow night is another day, Our similarities are different, We make too many wrong mistakes. There are many more of these and one is funnier than the next.

As I was reading Ch. 10 and Cruse was discussing body parts I was thinking about the lexical gaps we have when talking about our toes. For our fingers we have: index, middle, ring, and pinky finger, but for the toes we only have: big toe and pinky toe. At least as far as I know there are no names, specifically, for the other three in between. Any thoughts or answers? 

Cruse says, in chapter ten, that in English there is no equivalent for the Turkish word ense (the back of the neck), a lexical gap. But he is very mistaken because the word nape denotes exactly that. Just wanted to clear that up because it was bugging me.

On the same topic as my first post how would you all label the words "stream, brook, and creek?" I think there is something about these words in the book. I am interested in knowing if they denote different bodies of water to you or do you use them as being true synonyms? For me brook and creek would be propositional synonyms, but stream would be something slightly larger than creek or brook but smaller than a river. 

I was in my American English class yesterday and taking notes on our discussion. I guess I lost focus for a moment and when I looked back up I saw the sentence "The three streams remained separate to the Mississippi River." Of course if one read this sentence out of context then I believe one would think that the sentence was concerning actual bodies of water. In actuality it was concerning "three streams" of dialects that were separate until they moved further than the Mississippi River, then they started to converge. Just thought this was interesting.

Can the GOE be applied to abstract concepts or do they have to be tangible things like the examples we used in class? The reason I ask this question is that I was thinking about the word or concept of "Love". What would be the features that one would list for this? Would the prototypical "love" be something like: the love between a mother and child, the love of say candy, the love for a hot shower, the list could go on and on. The semantic and pragmatic possibilities for the use of the word are virtually endless. I had enough trouble coming up with features to list for musical instruments! Any thoughts?

Doing the GOE work in class was very interesting from the point of seeing how things are categorized by different people. It is really dependent on rather or not one has been acquainted with an object, term, concept, etc. When there is a list consisting of things that are known to someone then you can get a true rating of something that seems to prototypical. On the other hand if you have a category such as the "sports" one then where very few people that even knew what "skeet shooting" was and were not able to rank it as a sport at all. Maybe I'm missing the point and things that are prototypical are also supposed to be well-known, but it is all very relative to me. Any thoughts?

I was fortunate enough to study in Japan for a year and here are some others that I remember learning:
Waka Waka suru=excitement
Doki Doki suru=heartbeating
Tsuki Tsuki suru=headache
"Suru" is just the copula "to be"

There are tons of these but that's all I can remember at the moment.