Introducing English Linguistics Quotes

“That the present tense marker in English can mark time frames other than the immediate present has led many grammarians, including Quirk et al. (1985), to argue that semantically English does not have a present tense per se but rather a past tense and a non-past tense.”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“The reason that content words rather than function words contain the tonic syllable results from the fact that the goal of intonation in spoken discourse is to highlight new information. And since content words are more meaningful than function words, it is only natural that content words would receive the greatest stress in a tone unit. In fact, function words are often so lightly stressed in rapid speech that the vowels they contain become subject to vowel reduction, and the consonants ending function words are sometimes deleted.”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“As a result, during the Middle English period, two very different systems of stress placement co-existed. One consequence, as Dresher and Lahiri (2005: 78) note, were “doublets,” words with two different patterns of stress: one Germanic, the other Latinate or French. Commenting on the list of words below, Dresher and Lahiri (2005) remark that while Chaucer would have employed the French system of stress, the Germanic system would have existed in English as well: French Stress Germanic Stress Modern English Gloss ci.'tee 'ci.tee ‘city’ com.'fort 'com.fort ‘comfort’ di.'vers 'di.vers ‘diverse’ ge.'aunt 'ge.aunt ‘giant’ Pla.'to 'Pla.to ‘Plato’ pre.'sent 'pre.sent ‘present”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“In addition to having meaning, words also have a “pointing” function. This function is known as deixis, a word of Greek origin that means ‘to point’ or ‘to show.”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“If notional definitions are so problematic, it is worth asking why they persist. One reason is that they have a long tradition in English grammar, largely because grammars of English are based on the terminology found in classical Greek and Roman grammars. For instance, the notional definition of a sentence as a “complete thought” can be traced back to Dionysius Thrax’s Greek grammar written ca. 100 BC. Linguists of the modern era have modified this terminology as a result of advances in linguistic science and the need to have terminology that describes languages that are very different from Greek, Latin, English, and other Indo-European languages – the languages upon which traditional grammar is based.”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“Hake and Williams (1981: 445–6) describe psycholinguistic research and an experiment they gave that suggests that the nominal style is much more difficult to process than the verbal style. However, Hake and Williams (1981) also report that in certain contexts, readers will judge essays written in the nominal style as “better” writing than equivalent essays written in the verbal style. Consequently, clarity of expression is often valued less than the high level of abstraction associated with the nominal style, which many associate with intellectual maturity”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“The influx of French vocabulary into English as well as the simplification of its inflectional system have led some to claim that English underwent creolization during this period as a result of contact with French. However, as Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 308) argue, this is a rather extreme position: “There were never many speakers of French in England” during the Middle English period, the borrowing of words and affixes into English was “no more extreme than the kinds found in many other normal cases in history,” and ancestral Normans became bilingual in English “within no more than 250 years of the Conquest.” Thus, the linguistic changes to English during this period followed the natural course of linguistic change.”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“the Latin word for Modern English girl, which contains the base form puell-, is marked for the feminine gender and would, accordingly, receive specific endings depending on its case –nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative –and its number (i.e. whether girl is singular or plural). Markings of this nature are what Comrie (1990: 337–8) terms as “fusional”; that is, there are not separate inflections for case and for number. Instead, case and number work together, producing a single combined inflection.”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics

“PIE had eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, ablative, dative, locative, and instrumental (Baldi 1990: 54).”
― Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics