Linguistics.hk

word order

I very like it

I very like it.

It may sound somewhat weird to native ears, but a lot of my Chinese students produce sentences like this one. What is weird here is simple. First, the adverb “very” seems to be misplaced. It should either be moved to the end of the sentence, or be replaced with another adverb like “really”. Second, if it is moved to the end, it cannot simply stand there alone but requires another word “much” to follow, as in:

I like it very much.

As usual, this can easily be discarded as an error in grammar, but what is more interesting is the cause of this error.

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October 11, 2008 by Contrastive Analysis Syntax 5

More on the centrifuge

The last few weeks I was totally absorbed by the Olympic Games, which accounted for the absence of new posts on this blog. Now I would like to go back to a topic we discussed earlier. In A natural centrifuge in English, we took a look at the general tendency in English to delay a heavy element until the end of the sentence. In the article, we looked at examples which apparently merely exchange the positions of two elements,

1. This house has a broken window.
2. This house has a window broken by a fallen tree nearby.

but the tendency is actually more profound than this.

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August 29, 2008 by Syntax 1

Impossible is nothing!

Impossible is nothing

“Able was I ere I saw Elba.” – Napolean

Poetic as it may sound, “able was I ere” is not a sentence we may normally use, even if we forgive the archaism of the expression. When you introduce yourself to someone, it is customary to say ”My name is Thomas” rather than “Thomas is my name”. Grammatically speaking, there is nothing in particular that forbids you to say that. The verb ‘to be’ is a so-called copular verb, which means that it acts like an equal sign, signifying that the two nouns or adjectives surrounding it are equal (or at least that is the simplistic view). For an equal sign, then, which one of the two arguments comes first should not be a matter of concern, because they are, after all, equal. But we know that is not true.

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June 25, 2008 by Pragmatics Semantics Syntax 14

Never have I noticed this!

English is a Germanic language, it shares a common ancestor with languages like German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic. However, despite this Germanic origin, English has been heavily influenced by two other languages, namely Latin and French, due to the ruling of England by the Romans in the first century and by the Normans, who spoke a dialect of French, in the 11th. It is estimated that about 70% of all English words ultimately have their roots from Latin or French (which is itself a descendant of Latin). As a result, Present Day English (PDE) is vastly different from other Germanic languages such as German.

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June 3, 2008 by Syntax Typology 2

A natural centrifuge in English

A centrifuge is a machine that makes use of the centrifugal force to separate the different substances in a mixture. After the process, the lighter substances float on the top, whereas the heavier substances sink to the bottom. Surprisingly, a similar process also happens in English.

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May 30, 2008 by Syntax 1