(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

[eldin raigmore]

I think it's an example of rebracketting, reinforced by having two words that are homonyms (rather than, say, something like "helico-pter" > "heli-copter" [> "copter])

Rebracketing! That’s it! Thanks!

[Khemehekis]

We had this di-atom discussion last year:

viewtopic.php?p=316123&hilit=diatom#p316123

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

Is pronouncing the /l/ in words like "folk", "palm", and "almond" a feature of a regional dialect or is it just idiosyncratic? I pronounce the "l" in all these words, but many people don't. Pronouncing the /l/ in "folk" is even considered nonstandard, at least according to Wiktionary. Yet I seem to say it, as well as in the word "folklore".

[eldin raigmore]

Is pronouncing the /l/ in words like "folk", "palm", and "almond" a feature of a regional dialect or is it just idiosyncratic? I pronounce the "l" in all these words, but many people don't. Pronouncing the /l/ in "folk" is even considered nonstandard, at least according to Wiktionary. Yet I seem to say it, as well as in the word "folklore".

KT Tunstall pronounces the /a/ in <palm> as the front near-open unrounded vowel in American English “at, bat, cat, fat, gat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat” etc.; and follows it up by pronouncing both the /l/ and the /m/. I don’t know what part of Scotland she was raised in! Maybe St Andrews, Fife; maybe Los Angeles, California; maybe Kent, Connecticut!

[Khemehekis]

Is pronouncing the /l/ in words like "folk", "palm", and "almond" a feature of a regional dialect or is it just idiosyncratic? I pronounce the "l" in all these words, but many people don't. Pronouncing the /l/ in "folk" is even considered nonstandard, at least according to Wiktionary. Yet I seem to say it, as well as in the word "folklore".

I pronounce the L's in both "palm" and "almond"; where I'm from (Contra Costa County), not pronouncing the L in "almond" sounds weird. I don't pronounce the L's in "folk" and "yolk", though. But one of my grandmothers pronounced the L in "walk".

[Khemehekis]

Is pronouncing the /l/ in words like "folk", "palm", and "almond" a feature of a regional dialect or is it just idiosyncratic? I pronounce the "l" in all these words, but many people don't. Pronouncing the /l/ in "folk" is even considered nonstandard, at least according to Wiktionary. Yet I seem to say it, as well as in the word "folklore".

KT Tunstall pronounces the /a/ in <palm> as the front near-open unrounded vowel in American English “at, bat, cat, fat, gat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat” etc.; and follows it up by pronouncing both the /l/ and the /m/. I don’t know what part of Scotland she was raised in! Maybe St Andrews, Fife; maybe Los Angeles, California; maybe Kent, Connecticut!

Aaaaand the obligatory video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AEoUa0Hlso

Compare my pronunciations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MONw6ZYRobk&t=68s

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

Thanks for the answers

I pronounce the L's in both "palm" and "almond"; where I'm from (Contra Costa County), not pronouncing the L in "almond" sounds weird. I don't pronounce the L's in "folk" and "yolk", though. But one of my grandmothers pronounced the L in "walk".

I am from Napa, so we are from pretty similar areas I don't pronounce the "l" in "yolk" either. "Folk" seems to be an exception, and I'm not even sure if I've always pronounced it that way...

I started pronouncing "almond" as /ˈæ.mənd/ as a joke, but I don't want that to turn into a habit

[eldin raigmore]

I started pronouncing "almond" as /ˈæ.mənd/ as a joke, but I don't want that to turn into a habit

I don’t do that, but I’ve met people who do, and they don’t sound weird to me.
I pronounce the < l > in folk and yolk and almond and talk and walk and salt. Lots of people I’ve talked with don’t; including many who pronounce those < a >s as open central unrounded vowels. For instance my goddaughter used to (before she could read or write or spell) pronounce <salt> to rhyme with the way I pronounce <sot>. When she asked me the reason for the difference I told her I guessed it was “hard to hear an < l > when it comes between an < a > and a < t > like that”. (I think she knew her letters by then. Anyway she seemed to get the gist of my “explanation”! And I bet she remembered it later when she learned how to spell <salt>!)

Aaaaand the obligatory video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AEoUa0Hlso

Compare my pronunciations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MONw6ZYRobk&t=68s

Thanks for both videos!

[Salmoneus]

Is pronouncing the /l/ in words like "folk", "palm", and "almond" a feature of a regional dialect or is it just idiosyncratic? I pronounce the "l" in all these words, but many people don't. Pronouncing the /l/ in "folk" is even considered nonstandard, at least according to Wiktionary. Yet I seem to say it, as well as in the word "folklore".

Are you familiar with Rick Aschmann's US dialect map? He's apparently been doing a survey on this since 2011 (I use the present tense, although the website was last updated in 2018, so who knows if he's still doing it, or even still alive!), but hasn't been able to find any coherent nationwide pattern. Contributors here should e-mail him their data, on the off-chance he's still collecting it.

He says that "most" Ameicans pronounce the /l/ in -alm words, fewer pronounce it in -olk words, and fewer still pronounce it in -alk words.

The one apparent pattern is that all these /l/s are very rare in non-rhotic areas of the US. Otherwise, there isn't even a clear hierarchy (-alm is more common than -olk, but some people have -olk without -alm). And it's lexical - some people have one word but not another, or even in different meanings of the same word (eg 'folk song' vs 'my folks').

"Almond" is an exception among the -alm words, as even people who don't have -alm can have almond.

Outside the US, it's a traditional feature of West Country, which is presumably part of why it occurs in the US (although spelling pronounciation is also possible). There are also individual words that have gained /l/ in other dialects - even in SSBE, "falcon" now has /l/ for most speakers.

There's even one word that goes the other way: Americans (including some who have /l/ in 'folk', etc!) usualy have no /l/ in "polka dot", but UK speakers usually do.

[Khemehekis]

The link to Rick's page:

https://aschmann.net/AmEng/

[Omzinesý]

Where do VSO languages usually position short adverbs like soon, again, unfortunately ... ?

[loglorn]

Where do VSO languages usually position short adverbs like soon, again, unfortunately ... ?

While WALS has no chapter addressing adverbs specifically, there is "Order of Object, Oblique, and Verb" (https://wals.info/chapter/84), which describes oblique as "An oblique phrase is a noun phrase or adpositional phrase (prepositional or postpositional) that functions as an adverbial modifier (or “adjunct”) of the verb." and so is probably the most applicable.

Overwhelmingly (210 versus 3 for XVO and none for VXO), VOX is the most common order, and if single word adverbs pattern at all similarly to oblique phrases i'd expect them to occur after the object.

[Creyeditor]

In combination with chapter 81, you get 45 languages with VOX/VSO order (I guess that means VSOX) and one language with VOX/no dominant order. For attitude adverbs I might expect XVSO to be possible, too. XVO/VSO does not exist in WALS though.

[Sequor]

Where do VSO languages usually position short adverbs like soon, again, unfortunately ... ?

Is "unfortunately" a short adverb?

For what it's worth, Standard Arabic places "soon" at the end, places its adverbial equivalents of "again" at the end as well (literally "from new" cf. French de nouveau, or lit. "a second time", or "another time"), and places the attitudinal "unfortunately" at the beginning before the verb. Standard Arabic is VSO, but it is possible to have some material such as certain types of adverbials or a fronted topic noun phrase before the verb (giving the appearance of SVO).

[Salmoneus]

Where do VSO languages usually position short adverbs like soon, again, unfortunately ... ?

While WALS has no chapter addressing adverbs specifically, there is "Order of Object, Oblique, and Verb" (https://wals.info/chapter/84), which describes oblique as "An oblique phrase is a noun phrase or adpositional phrase (prepositional or postpositional) that functions as an adverbial modifier (or “adjunct”) of the verb." and so is probably the most applicable.

Overwhelmingly (210 versus 3 for XVO and none for VXO), VOX is the most common order, and if single word adverbs pattern at all similarly to oblique phrases i'd expect them to occur after the object.

The problem is, adpositional phrases pattern very differently from short adverbs, since they're influenced by directly opposite tendencies!

Short adverbs cross-linguistically are often placed very close to a verb - they are very 'light' and often fall under, as it were, the penumbra of the verb itself. Adpositional phrases, on the other hand, as very heavy elements, always have a tendency to fall down to sit at the back end of a sentence.

So in English we can say "I quickly slammed the door", but we cannot easily say ?"I under the influence of alcohol slammed the door". [I put a ? there because we can say that if we prosodically bracket off the phrase, because you can put bracket material almost anywhere in English, but this is prosodically very marked as abnormal, and is relatively rare in speech, particularly formal speech, generally occuring only in either 'rambling' speech or in literature]

[Omzinesý]

Interesting discussion. I agree with Salmoneus - once - that light adverbs behave differently.

Where do VSO languages usually position short adverbs like soon, again, unfortunately ... ?

Is "unfortunately" a short adverb?

For what it's worth, Standard Arabic places "soon" at the end, places its adverbial equivalents of "again" at the end as well (literally "from new" cf. French de nouveau, or lit. "a second time", or "another time"), and places the attitudinal "unfortunately" at the beginning before the verb. Standard Arabic is VSO, but it is possible to have some material such as certain types of adverbials or a fronted topic noun phrase before the verb (giving the appearance of SVO).

Of course it depends on each language what is a short adverb. I just meant that their meanings are usually like that. I think English unfortunately can appear without the stressing Salmoneus mentioned, but I can be wrong.

Arabic has so many archaic and modern constructions used in different contexts that its syntax is a mess.
Maybe I have to go though some SVO languages and make qualitative research. Such things are just sorely described usually.

[Creyeditor]

I think it's important to keep in mind that adverbials usually fall into a range of syntactic classes in a given language. The Cinque-hierarchy is a very specific theory of adverb placement, but I think the major insight -- that semantics plays a role in adverb placement -- is on the right track. IIRC, attitude adverbials (like unfortunately), modal adverbs (like maybe), temporal adverbs (like yesterday), and aspectual adverbs (like again) are classes that play a role. Of course prosodic weight/length is also an important factor, as Sal mentioned.

There is a relatively recent typological dissertation on adverbs here: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record ... dswid=-927, maybe you'll find something in there.


Also, some syntactic examples from a recent dissertation on adverb placemenr German just to show how interesting adverb placement is:

Wir wissen, dass wirtschaftlich die USA den Krieg gewonnen hat.
we know that economically the USA the war won has
'We know that: economically, the United States won the war.’

*Wir hörten, dass laut die Leute nach Hilfe gerufen haben.
we heard that loudly the people for help screamed have
'We heard that: loudly, people screamed for help'

[Salmoneus]

FWIW, Wikipedia says that according to Dryer all languages where the verb precedes the object have a strong tendency to have the verb also precede the adverb, at least for manner adverbs.

Given that 'light' adverbs tend to be adjacent to the verb, I'd say there's a strong tendency to have manner adverbs immediately after the verb: VASO. Most if not all languages will also allow at least some "adverbs" 'extracted' from the main clause itself, particularly where the semantics affect the clause as a whole and not really the verb (eg 'unfortunately'). And most languages will also allow at least some adverbs, particularly if long or complex, to fall to the end of the clause.

A stong tendency isn't absolute, of course, and I'm sure there will be AVSO languages, particularly where the VSO order is the result of recent word order shifts. Likewise we could imagine recent-convert VSAO or VSOA languages. [eg, SVAO + verb fronting could lead to VSAO if the adverb is 'left behind', perhaps because its position is analysed as relative to a fixed 'second position']. But I'd expect these to revert to an order with the adverb adjacent to the verb eventually.

The other thing to bear in mind is that verb position rules like 'verb first' (as with 'verb second') can be more or less strict: some languages really won't allow anything in the clause proper to precede the verb, while others will. In a language that won't, this can result in grammaticalisation of some adverbial elements. In Old Irish, the verb having become initial, many pre-verbal elements (the negative particle, 'prepositions', object pronouns) ended up welded to the verb as grammaticalised prefixes (in Old Irish, some adverbs can still stand before the verb, but not many).

Also, some syntactic examples from a recent dissertation on adverb placemenr German just to show how interesting adverb placement is:

Wir wissen, dass wirtschaftlich die USA den Krieg gewonnen hat.
we know that economically the USA the war won has
'We know that: economically, the United States won the war.’

*Wir hörten, dass laut die Leute nach Hilfe gerufen haben.
we heard that loudly the people for help screamed have
'We heard that: loudly, people screamed for help'

FWIW, the english shouldn't have the colon, just a comma.
The difference here is clear, in any case: the second example uses a genuine adverb (something modifying the verb), whereas the former is using a sentential modifier that jsut looks like an adverb (and is confusingly called an 'adverb' in traditional English descriptions). Note that the latter cannot, at least in English, be easily placed in final position, and may even have a different meaning if you try: "The united states won the war economically" (i.e. with the least effort possible, or perhaps though economic means). Diachronically, the 'economically' is just a remnant of a participle phrase: "economically speaking" (i.e. speaking in economic terms) or "considering things economically" or the like, so is external to the main clause.

FWIW, your second example is actually grammatical in English, though... but only in archaic speech. I can imagine "Loudly the people cried unto God" as a Biblical expression, for instance. Presumably this is a relic of English's former greater flexibility of word order.

[Omzinesý]

Ok, maybe I should assume that the most "natural" place is right to the verb.

[Omzinesý]

Does anybody know about (Classical) Nahuatl?
All its nouns are nominalized verbs 'the one who VERBs', though the verbs are often very static.
How does it form patient nominalizations, place nominalizations, instrument nominalizations ...?
Do I first have to derive a verb 'to be VERBed', 'to be VERBed with', 'to be the place of VERBing' or how it goes?