@bloody-mary-23 / bloody-mary-23.tumblr.com
The International Phonetic Alphabet consonants found in English, with keywords and relevant parts of the mouth highlighted and colour-coded. (Source.)
Pronouncing each of these in sequence is a very strange and amusing physical sensation, and I highly recommend it.
haha look it’s where those noises live in your dang FACE, TRY IT
i was going to say ‘i have no idea what to do with this information’ but then i realized its a handy guide to generate fake words that sound english
YOU GUYS
there’s a WORD for “I CAN’T EVEN”
Now I wanna know what Webster was claiming had never happened before
The best part of this chart is the pseudowords it generates:
Different canonical word orders by langugage.
Label: S - subject; V - verb; O - object.
Another article unnecessarily criticizing filler words, this time in the New York Times; another blog post debunking it, this time by Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein. Excerpt of the blog post:
Among the many types of discourse markers are a subset sometimes known as verbalized pauses. People who are not linguists also call them “filler words” and “verbal crutches,” but those terms are misleading.
Why don’t we just get rid of them, the NYT article asks. After all, “verbal fillers that can make you sound, you know, nervous or not so smart.”
Well.
These kinds of pauses do give us time to think of what we’ll say next — but that’s not all they do. Compare the examples below with and without the discourse markers.
They allow us to soften disagreement or criticism by making it somewhat more polite.
They emphasize whatever it is we’re going to say next.
They allow us to introduce delicate topics.
They communicate subtle nuances of emotional stance.
They allow us to indicate our degree of certainty.
As you can see, these discourse markers do an immense amount of important social and emotional work for us. They add nuance and richness to our speech. In fact, we can’t be socially appropriate human beings without them. Even if we got rid of particular markers — if we stopped saying um and so and like — we’d just end up using new ones in their place. […]
Mele writes: “Speakers who are well known in their professions but overuse verbal pauses are still perceived as credible because they have built a reputation. Audience members will chalk up those habits to just the way they talk, Ms. Marshall said. … But newcomers who use as many interjections as seasoned professionals will be seen as less credible because they do not have the years of experience.”
Yet he stops short of the obvious conclusion: there’s nothing wrong with using these words. The only people who are critiqued for using them are already low-status, and this critique helps maintain the low status of certain people and groups.
Read the whole post.
A: Your greatest weakness? B: Interpreting semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics A: Could you give an example? B: Yes, I could
active adjective adverb attributive auxiliary verb clause collective noun comparative compound conditional clause conjunction corpus count noun defining relative clause definite article determiner direct speech gerund imperative indefinite article indicative indirect speech infinitive inflection intransitive main clause mass noun modifier mood negative non-restrictive relative clause noun object part of speech participle passive personal pronoun phrasal verb plural possessive pronoun postpositive predicative prefix preposition pronoun proper noun relative clause reported speech restrictive relative clause sentence split infinitive standard English subject subjunctive subordinate clause suffix superlative syntax tense transitive verb verbal noun word class
