linguistics and lexicography
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Posted by Elizabeth Manning on May 21, 2013
We all know the list of English personal pronouns – I/me, you, he/him, she/her, it, we/us, they/them – but there’s one word that interests me because it seems to have the function of a personal pronoun but has very specific connotations. That word is muggins, which is defined in the Macmillan Dictionary as “used for [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on May 13, 2013
You may be familiar with the not-very-funny jokes based on the old formula “someone/something walks into a bar…”. They usually involve a play on words, as in ‘A drunk walks into a bar. “Ouch!” he says.’ Exactly – they aren’t very funny. But some of them make useful points about grammar: A dangling modifier walks [...]
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Posted by Janet Byron Anderson on May 02, 2013
Today’s guest post comes from Janet Byron Anderson. Dr. Anderson is a medical editor and runs Medical Linguistics Consulting. Her book Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language is available at Amazon.com. _______________ If you’re of a certain cast of mind and want to know your prospects for life, death, and happiness you can open [...]
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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 Michael Rundell on April 23, 2013
Sixty years ago this week, the journal Nature published Francis Crick and James Watson’s groundbreaking paper on deoxyribonucleic acid, which described for the first time the double helix shape of the DNA molecule. As often happens with scientific and technical vocabulary, the term DNA soon broke out of the specialized field in which it originated, [...]
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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 Stan Carey on April 15, 2013
Breathing is such an intimate and vital activity that it’s no wonder it shows up in such a range of everyday expressions, including many metaphorical phrases. Witness a breath of fresh air, don’t hold/waste your breath, take your breath away, breathe down someone’s neck, and breathe new life into something. I especially like Don’t breathe [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 09, 2013
The annual IATEFL Conference is being held this week in Liverpool, a city forever associated with the Beatles. The conference opened with a lecture by David Crystal, entitled ‘The world in which we live in: Beatles, blends and blogs’ (the second ‘in’ is deliberate). So it seemed like a good idea to republish a post [...]
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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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