language change and slang
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Posted by Stan Carey on May 07, 2013
New vocabulary appears constantly: we invent words, or more usually modify existing ones, to meet the needs of expression – or just for fun. Sometimes, too, existing words get repurposed, switching grammatical classes or incorporating new ones: verbs and adjectives are converted into nouns, and vice versa. This attracts predictable criticism, but it’s a thoroughly [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 29, 2013
If you had asked me as a teenager what a stakeholder was, I might have guessed “assistant vampire killer”. Why else would you hold a stake, after all? But of course the word is less literal than that – the stake in stakeholder is the degree to which someone is involved in something, financially or [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on April 22, 2013
My recent posts (here and here) discussed verbs like teach and disappoint, which are both transitive and intransitive: she teaches (English); the festival didn’t disappoint (anyone). The grammatical subject, and the meaning of the verb, are much the same whether there’s an object or not. Today I will focus on another, quite different, way in [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on April 08, 2013
Last week’s post focused on the thousands of verbs that are classified in dictionaries as ‘transitive/intransitive’. I also mentioned particular circumstances in which ‘transitive-only’ verbs typically occur without objects. Today’s post will develop this theme, this time in relation to a group of verbs that seem to be consistently ‘losing’ their objects in certain text-types. [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on April 02, 2013
In dictionaries generally – whether intended for native speakers or for learners – the majority of verbs (or verb senses) have one of three main labels: ‘transitive’, ‘intransitive’, or ‘transitive/intransitive’, according to whether they have a direct object or not. A major advantage of learner’s dictionaries, of course, is that they include clear up-to-date examples [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 01, 2013
Michael recently wrote a clear and commonsense post on the difference between who and whom, basing his observations on corpus data and avoiding simplistic rules that have little to do with actual usage. He found, unsurprisingly, that whom is “in steady long-term decline”. I’m the sort of person for whom a whom-discussion is irresistible, so [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 21, 2013
The venue for this year’s TESOL Convention evokes memories of the long-running TV series about the Texas oil business. When Dallas was first aired on British TV in 1978, it brought a touch of glamour to a rather gloomy U.K., then (as now) in the grip of economic recession. The fast cars, cowboy hats, gushers, [...]
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Posted by Kerry Maxwell on February 19, 2013
In 2003, my son was 8 years old, tablets were still the things the doctor prescribed to make you better, and no-one had much of a clue about tweets, smartphones and apps. Yes, a lot can happen in 10 years – my son is now on the cusp of ‘adulthood’, I own a tablet, tweeting [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 18, 2013
Consider this line, which appears in William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light: “One of the Sharman Group’s research initiatives centred around the possibility of isolating mutant strains of HIV.” Gibson is a skilled and careful writer, and it’s clear what he means by the words centre around, yet some readers automatically reject the phrase as an [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on February 11, 2013
I’d like first to draw together some threads from recent and not-so-recent posts on the flexibility of word class in English – i.e on verbing, nouning, and the general tendency of words to hop from one word class to another. I wrote about nouning in November, and last month Stan Carey focused on the bad [...]
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