Posts (page 2)

A friend of the family came over the other day and my mom was making some coffee and asked "how many sugars?" the response was "I take two sugars." This is interesting because I have always known 'sugar' to be a mass noun that can not be counted but in this situation it refers to a count noun. I think this is one of those fuzy boundaries where it can be both depending on the meaning of 'sugar'. If 'sugar' just means the granulated sugar it would be a mass noun but in this case when you refer to it as two teasppons of 'sugar' or 'two small cubes of sugar' it would be a count noun because you can count how many you desire in your coffee or tea.

What do you all think? Do you accept 'sugar' as a count noun as well as a mass noun?

Hi my name is Alison and I have a problem with tense! Since my writing career (school papers and such) I tend to change my tense midway through the paper. Sometimes I just get confused with which tense to use. Is it 'was' or 'were'? Anyway, after reading about tense in chapter 15 I found that it is secondary tense that I have difficulty with. That is, the relationship between the event time and the speaking time (primary time). My secondary tense caused the sentence to be unclear or interpreted wrong. After going through the class activity regarding John's arrival and Bill's turning off the lights, I became clear of the nine theoretical possibilites of secondary tense. For instance, now I can interpret when the secondary event took place in relation to the primary event.

This is a little different in American Sign Language because if you are refering to an event, past, present or future, you would start out the sentence with a tense marker which is usually a word that expresses tense like "today," "yesterday," "tomorrow," etc. to help the other signer understand the time in which the event occured. This is an important feature of ASL because after you have established the time, or tense, you do not need to refer back to it during the conversation.

Do you all have problems with tense as well? Is it primary tense or secondary tense?

After class today, I thought of a few more possible synonyms that I use in my speech.

start:begin

fall:autumn

chair:seat

disgusting:gross

produce:make

Most I say interchangeably in certain contexts, so would that make them propositional synonyms or near synonyms? What do you all think? And can you think of any synonyms that you use in your natural speech?

I saw another 'dude' commercial like the one we saw in class that I thought was funny. I wonder how many more they will make. They could probably make quite a few more because there are so many different contexts the word could be used in to convey a different meaning. The utterance of the word 'dude' has 9 more expressive meanings in this commercial. Can you tell what each 'dude' utterance means?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikn4BD82_TU

Here are some more ambiguous phrases I read off the website given below. Enjoy!

http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguous_headlines.html

MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH

ASTRONAUT TAKES BLAME FOR GAS IN SPACECRAFT

QUARTER OF A MILLION CHINESE LIVE ON WATER

INCLUDE YOUR CHILDREN WHEN BAKING COOKIES

OLD SCHOOL PILLARS ARE REPLACED BY ALUMNI

GRANDMOTHER OF EIGHT MAKES HOLE IN ONE

HOSPITALS ARE SUED BY 7 FOOT DOCTORS

LAWMEN FROM MEXICO BARBECUE GUESTS

Can you find the word that makes the phrase ambiguous? I think some have lexical ambiguity while others it depends on how you read them (syntactic ambiguity). My favorites are the piranha one and the baking cookies one! lol

Atleast for me. I found the exercise today in class fun but also interesting. I think the book only highlighted on the fact that each individual has their own sense of a prototype for an object or thing. For instance, when GOE rating the cateogry 'flowers' I put a higher GOE rating on it then my other group members because I work some in the floral department at my job so I know more about the different cacti then the average person. Since I have come into contact with blooming cacti I would rate it higher than someone who hasn't. Same with the other categories. If I played skeet shooting or polo on a regular basis or if they were big sports in my culture I would rank them higher than the others on the list. The ratings therefore are bias. I think the book should discuss this further including the potential problems this has on the ratings.  

Sometimes when I'm out to dinner with my boyfriend we would decide to go dutch. Not literally run off to a dutch colony and become associated with the Dutch culture and beliefs but pay our own way. I pay for my meal and you pay for yours. I use this phrase often but never really thought of it as an idiom until now. Wouldn't mean the same if I said "let's go Pennsylvania Dutch!!" :)

I declare that it cannot, atleast in my idiolect, therefore I disagree with Cruse's argument on page 91. I would never utter the sentence "The committee have decide." To me it would have to be "The committee has decided." The other just sounds weird to me. Ungrammatical.

I was recently talking to a friend about a mutually known individual and the qualities that they had. I continued to use the phrases 'positive qualities' and 'negative qualities' throughout my monologue until my friend said to me "You can not have negative qualities." He sounded so sure of himself that I became a little insecure about my word choice. Was he right and I wrong? But being myself I replied "no, no, I think you can?" It was later discovered that it is correct to say 'negative qualities' because in the context of the utterance we were simply discussing attributes which Webster includes in his defintion of qualities. My friend had the semantic meaning for qualities to be 'good' or 'something to be proud of' while I had the general meaning of it being of both 'good' and 'bad.'

I was telling a friend the other day about the some terms in chapter 3 of Alan Cruse's book entitled Meaning in Language, that I had never heard of in the specific domains that the author had discussed. One being the word 'bonk' used in a sexual domain. What does 'bonk' mean really? Does it mean 'to have sex with' just in a different field or style. I've heard such expressions as "he's gone bonkers!" where the word 'bonkers' implies crazy or insane or the so-called onomatopoeic expressions that include 'bonk' as an action such as 'to bonk someone on the head' meaning to hit him with something. So this got me thinking about the word "orgy." This particular word has several different semantic meanings (giving at the link below) such as "any actions or proceedings marked by unbridled indulgence of passions." So then why is it that this word to most only has a sexual implication? That is, when you hear it, the first association that comes to mind is having to deal with sex.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/orgy

I propose a logical rule: if any word used frequently enough to describe a sexual encounter or activity, then that word will be associated with that meaning no matter the context as the individuals first association.