f13.net

This term I take a class on linguistic research methods, research on second language acquisition to be specific. During this class I am expected to conduct a small scale research project of my own. For that I need a whole bunch of people who speak English or German as a second/third etc... language and native speakers of English.

I have no idea about what kind of methods will be used or even what the methods are, but I need volunteers nonetheless.

Anyone  ?

At this moment I only want to know if you are interested at all. I'll start working on this after Pentecost/whitsun.


PS: I do not think this will take much of your time, it should be fun, you might even learn a bit about linguistics (I know I'll do)

PPS: To get you in the mood. I found those cartoons hilarious. (http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/L/Linguistics.asp)

German native speaker with English as Second language.

If it helps you, I think I can spare the time.

I'm a Hungarian native speaker with English as a second language, and German as a third.

I should probably have the time for it, will be a good distraction from my masters-thesis-project-of-doom at least.  :P


-- Z.

Native english. I've dabbled in the linguistic studies and various languages.

ESL teacher, native English speaker with passable Spanish and a smattering of Czech and Korean, and I'll be starting Russian in the fall  :-)

This sounds interesting... I'm thinking about getting a Masters in Linguistics down the road, but am not really sure what I'd do with it.

Make a living of taking the opposing viewpoint of Chomsky. Just troll that arrogant fuck until you're famous.

Jesus Christ, Schild.  Not having a job thrown off your sleep schedule this much, or are you up early for the new one?

heh.

I'm native English w/ schooling in French and Arabic.  My wife has been slowly learning German over the past year.  Let me know.

Native English speaker and pseudo-native Spanish speaker.

I'd be up for some guinea pig action if I'm at all germane to your research.

Native Icelandic speaker - English a second language, Danish third.

Native English speaker, trained ESL teacher and I've done some studying philosophy of language that our new professor basically made into the philosophical importance of Chomsky. I'd say build a career on trolling the fuck out of Chomsky but generally if you prove him wrong on something, he accepts it and takes up the new theory you've put forward into his own and continues being the big name in linguistics near as I can tell.

Native English speaker. I should know Canadian French, but I fucking hated it in high school.

Native English and very limited Canadian French as well.

I have a smattering of deutsch from high school  :awesome_for_real:

It used to be great for making german girls laugh.

Go to heavy metal music sites.  It brings English and German together.  I haven't decided what my native language is.  I speak everything equally bad.

Native English and some very rusty high school Latin.

Native English with German in high school and college.  I've forgotten most of it, but at the time was able to get by in Europe.

Native English. I also speak Java, Visual Basic and C++.

What? They're languages too!

Native English with German as a second language (high school, exchange student to Bavaria, then failed university). Prost!

Thanks a lot so far. I will have more information after the weekend. Maybe then I will know what I will be doing.

Oh, btw, if you come up with a sound theory to oppose Chomsky let me know.  :awesome_for_real:

Native English.  Terrible at Japanese, Welsh, French, and Russian.  Even worse at Arabic and Zulu.  Even worse at Mandarin.



The great thing about Chomsky is if it turns out a theory isn't that great (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory), he changes his mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_Program).  I'd agree that he's arrogant and kind of a dick (getting petty and sarcastic when contradicted), but unless you can read this (http://www.amazon.com/Language-Mind-Noam-Chomsky/dp/052167493X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b) and understand at least 3/4 of it, you're in no condition to troll him.

My girlfriend studied linguistics for a while, as in a MS from Dartmouth and worked on a PhD in linguistics at Georgetown until she decided that linguistics research wasn't interesting to her.  She gave me this (http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-Creates-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060958332).  It's worth reading for pretty much anyone and does a good job of explaining that even though Chomsky may be a nut, he's a genius at linguistics.

Pinker's great.  I'd recommend How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate highly.

I'm actually very impressed by how rigorous Chomskian linguistics is compared to most of the 'soft' sciences.  It actually has a lot of applications in Computer Science.  It may not be as rigorous as say, physics, but it's theories are solid enough to do real work with which says a lot.

Language Instinct is actually quite a readable book, that Professor of mine actually seems to keep a copy on him most of the time. In terms of how language works Chomsky's certainly the authority, what always impresses me is his level of scholarship on a huge variety of different fields. The only other person I can think of who's in the same area was Foucault simply for their ability to have an article flooded with references from about 20 different academic disciplines, that's the kind of shit that either involves months of research per article or a phenomenal memory combined with reading and understanding articles and books about pretty much anything that vaguely interests you.

Well, class was cancelled last week and will be this week, so there will be some delay while I wait for my book to be delivered and try to wrap my head around the concepts myself.

Till then a few semi-related questions.

Do you really use "United States of America" in the singular ? If yes, does it feel as strange for you as it does feel for me ?

What about Data ?

And "people" ? Is there a plural usage of "people" ?

Yes, because it's the name of a (one) country.  Kind of silly to give a country a name that looks like a plural noun, but that's how it is.  If I'm actually referring to a collection of individual states then it's plural.


Yes, if I'm speaking in American English, or referring to the Star Trek character by that name.  If I'm speaking in Latin, or feeling pretentious, or both, it's plural.


Yes -- "those people" (plural) if talking about an arbitrary collection of persons, "a people" (singular) if talking about an entire culture or race, "peoples" (plural) if talking about multiple cultures.

Strictly speaking the singular of 'data' is 'datum', but I don't think its used outside of some pretty specific scientific circles. Data is used both as singular and plural.

Not exactly - English nouns can be countable, uncountable, or always plural (or some combination thereof, like the word chocolate).  In common usage data is an uncountable noun, meaning you can't have "a data", which would be the strict singular.  For uncountables we tend to use 'a piece of x', or 'a slice', or a few other phrases. 

Naturally there are exceptions to everything I just said.  :awesome_for_real:

I asked this because I have to (almost physically) force myself to use "USA" with the first person singular. I believe he reason for this is some connection I draw between the plural markers "s" and the word formation process of the following verb.

Also I can't think of an example in German, but our morphology is different as well.

Do exceptions like this come naturally to you native speakers or do you have to think about it ?

Also, "a people" ? Really ? The people of China sounds OK to me, how would you use "a people" in a sentence ?

Yes, and I had a WTF moment with it about a fortnight ago when I was rewriting someone's headline (I'm a journalist). I have three people working for me and two of them are fresh out of university, following my lead, and I was rewriting a plural country name in the singular. It did make me stop and think. But I was the senior employee, so I was right.


I almost never use the word. It's overused in the Internet age. If a researcher has revealed new data, I will call it new research, not new data. I am writing for a mass market audience and if I don't dumb it down enough, I lose their attention. But yes, while I'm aware it's originally plural I would write "the data suggests", not "the data suggest". I would never use datum. My readers wouldn't know what it means.


People is the plural of person, in everyday English. Saying "persons" sounds too formal, like a police spokesman giving a media statement. Using "a people" also sounds very educated and formal, but the "a" makes it very clear that you are talking about persons of a particular culture/nationality. In journalism, I would write "two people have died", not two persons. But as soon as possible, I would change it to add specifics, e.g. "a man and a woman have died".

Fascinating.
(really)

When you've been doing it your whole life it comes naturally.  Like spelling "knife" with a "k" at the beginning.


Google "a people" and you'll find a few... "a people at war", "a people without a land", et cetera.  It's something you don't see in normal conversation but it can make a nice rhetorical flourish if you want to convey the concept of a culture as a monolithic entity.

"A people" makes me think of a Nation Geographic voiceover. "Here we see the Zimzambalese, a people at war with a changing society..." So yeah, definitely a rhetorical flourish.

"A people without a land" is actually a really good example now that I think about it.  Compare "people without land" to "a people without a land".  The literal meanings are close but they have radically different connotations.

Does not compute. At all.

It just feels wrong. I understand the reason for using it that way, but again I'd have to force myself to use it.

Weird.

Eh, English can be a malleable language, hell verbing and nounage are fairly common though they usually sound weirder than "a people". Also try reading some of the translations of German philosophers in English, transliterating German neologisms produces some... interesting results.

If you had to think about it, you wouldn't do it, unless you're taking pains to be correct.  In casual speech, people use whatever idiom comes naturally and unconsciously, even if it's 'irrational'.

My current favorite is the fact that 'news' is a the plural ('s') of an adjective ('new'), and normally it's illegal to pluralize an adjective.  (Note that it's probably not correct to say that you're pluralizing a noun that was created out of an adjective, like 'the reds', because it's not correct to use 'new' as a noun in the singular. e.g. *'That's a nice new'.).  And that this is also true in Welsh ('new' = 'new' [noun], pluralize 'news' = 'newydd').  Weird.

I'm not sure you can say you're pluralizing the word 'new' when you compare it to 'news', as the meanings don't really overlap.

And something that occured me to when walking home today: 'a people' is often used to describe/stereotype races or nationalities.  "The Czechs are a crafty people", or "The Germans are an industrious people".  A native speaker wouldn't think twice about those statements.   

My random grammatical complaint of the day: People using 'an' incorrectly.  No, it does not go before words like useless or university, only before words that sound like they begin with a vowel.  You fail, headline writers at reddit and digg.  Not that that's anything new.

I'm even more irritated by the excessive use of 'an' where there aren't any initial vowels at all, most often when people are interjecting an adjective between the indefinite article and a vowel-initial noun, like 'an singular honor'.  That just sounds pretentious.  Knock it off.

I never liked how, say, music bands (or any group for that matter) aren't described as a singular entity. Ex. Rage Against the Machine are a kickass band.

To me, it sounds better if you said "Rage Against the Machine is a kickass band".

The only time "are" would sound right if the name of the band is plural (The Rolling Stones are a kickass band).


Sorry if someone has mentioned something similar.

I agree, Stray, and I believe I use it as you describe.  Whether or not that's considered correct.  I think treating band names as plural is just a holdover from when most band names were plural, and common usage hasn't entirely caught up yet.

Pluralization of collectives like that is pretty arbitrary.  For ex, in UK English it's typical to refer to a corporation or business in the plural (e.g. 'Microsoft are attempting to buy Yahoo'), whereas in US English it's singular (Microsoft is), even when the company name is plural (e.g. 'Feathered Friends has cheaper prices than REI')

What I like about this is the the way in which phonology influences morphology. If you talk very slowly, you begin  to understand how some rules came to be.

I found something strangely satisfying in discovering when much younger that in French you don't pronounce 'h', suddenly reading an hospital or an hotel started to make a lot more sense. At least I presume a large part is a holdover from the French influence when the vowel sound would have been coming first.

Also I quite like overusing an, only when I'm trying to obnoxious though.

I don't think that's a UK-US divide. At least, it's more correct in Australian English (mostly UK influenced) to say Microsoft is attempting to buy Yahoo. "Are attempting" is colloquial English. It seems to vary between wire services in journalism, but I write is, not are.

I have a tougher time with sport stories. Every sports journalist writes "Liverpool are playing Manchester United", when Liverpool is a team in the singular and they should be writing "is". But I've given up fixing sport stories because they're so full of shitty writing that they live in their own style world.

A big difference between German and English today is that Germans are conscious of protecting their language and keeping it German. Lots of English words enter German, especially in new technology. English speakers, using the dominant international language, are blissfully unaware of outside influences on vocabulary and grammar, so they are less conscious of correctness.

And pretty much everyone in the last several posts on this page has missed the point.  The point is, you are all wrong and the people speaking the language are right.

e.g. Liverpool are.  Well, yeah.  The guys of Liverpool are playing the guys of Manchester United.  Just because you interpreted it differently doesn't mean you are correct.

There is no protecting the language.  The language that you are 'protecting' (read: whining about) is just a transition between what the people before you were 'protecting' and what the people after you will be 'protecting'.  Meanwhile the language will live on and everyone else will be able to convey meaning exactly as meant, regardless of what you made up in the interim.

edit: also, I'm drunk.  Yay.

Unless they're from the South, amirite?

OK boys and girls, I got the information I needed, it's time to start.

I need to groups of people, the more in each group, the better.

First group: Native speakers of English with knowledge of German (ALL (can't stress that enough) levels of proficiency are needed)

Second Group: Native speakers of English

If you want to participate, please do this:

Write me a message on this board.

Please give me:

A working email-address

1. Your age.
2. Place of birth
3. Place of living
4. Profession
5. Known languages and competence in those languages..

For point 5 I want you to list all the languages you have or had contact with and your proficiency in it.

For example, I would rate myself  (Native German speaker, Second language English, also "contact" with  Latin and Spanish) like this.

Language proficiency (1-5)

1st language: German  5
2nd language: English 4
3rd language: Latin 2
4th language: Spanish 1


I need as much replies as I can get. The experiment itself will ask you to answer a rather small set of not more than 25 questions and should not take much of your time.
All personal information will be used for statistical purposes, group allocation and communication during the experiment, it won't be connected to your person at any time after I have received your message and allocated you to a group.

If people are interested, I will publish the results here in this thread, but I won't be able to tell you about the purpose beforehand.


Thanks a lot in advance.

So far I got three volunteers.  :awesome_for_real:

But I need more. A lot more. I am counting on all you guys who mentioned that they learned some German at school.


HAELP!1!

I could pretend I am a native english speaker, but my email suffix would give me away :)

The email is only used by me. It won't show up in the paper.

I say this just in case some people are afraid to have the emai-adresses published.

Also, I think you could argue that German is your second language. Depending what dialect (if any) you grew up with of course.

Incoming

sent

Thanks to all who replied so far. We are getting somewhere. :awesome_for_real:

What I still need are more native speakers of English who had contact to German.

Don't make me PN you. :drill:

Having grown up in Upper Austria and Vienna, one could argue that when I TALK German, but my written German works like everybody elses because
contrary to your belief we don't learn writing in Mundart!  :grin:

 :heart:

One would have to test you to verify if the way you speak influences the way you write. While the experiment I will conduct (most hopefully, I STILL need more people) is concerned with the written language, that is just because of the medium I will use for communication.

Please do not think that I (or any "real" linguist) rates dialects of a certain language in terms of good/bad or right/wrong. They are just different manners of articulationg "inner soundless speech". :heart:

PS: Your "Mundart" might be unintelligeble to me, but I doubt you'd understand my "Kölsch" better (which, non-linguistic speaking IS the better dialect  :awesome_for_real: )

sent

Hey, don't make me break out the Bayerisch.

OK, so far I have 10 volunteers, I will create the questionnaires this weekend and send them to you next Monday.

But I still could use more people.

Ooops. Internet is hard. I don't think anyone got an email. :ye_gods:

I am at work now, will send them later in the day.

I still didn't get my email, fwiw.

Apparently I am unable to send 10 emails at once.

I am working on it.

Task I was send out yesterday, Task II will follow in a few hours. That is all  :awesome_for_real:

Second (and final) task sent.

Get to work  :heart:

 :awesome_for_real:

I didn't get my email.

True. You are not on my mailing list.

edit: Your PM did not contain an email. I can send you the tasks via PN or email, what would you prefer ?

I got the first task, but not the second.  Was that one just for the German speakers?

I don't have my notes with me at the moment. If you were in the control group, there was only one task.

I only noticed this thread now but if you still need some more people and it's not too late let me know. I did 4 years of German at school.

 :awesome_for_real:
PN me your Email. I will send you the tasks.