A total pinhead, I'm still wondering why...
Is it just an "American vs British English" thing?
If that's what it actually is, I'll quit wondering and just take note of it:)
Модератор: zymbronia
A total pinhead, I'm still wondering why...
Don't see how it provides the evidence supporting this hypothesis, or even correlates with the raw data from googlebooks...
I think it's a matter of the focus - those who choose the singular form of the verb obviously tend to stress the 'research', so 'decades of reasearch shows' is perceived by them as a whole, something like "decades-long research".
This approach works for those who don't find the formal disagreement in number ungrammatical, of course.It depends on whether you're talking about the research or the decades. If you mean "Research which took decades", use the singular verb (research is a mass noun so it doesn't take plural verbs); if you mean "Decades, which were spent doing research", use the plural.
For example, "The decades of research were the happiest time of my life" but "Decades of research was needed to solve the problem." (Similarly, "tons of concrete was needed to fill the hole.")
Easy-Breezy English, those are the words that indicate portion, aren't they?Easy-Breezy English пишет: ↑13 мар 2022, 22:32 decades is probably interpreted similarly to loads of/lots of in this case:
(same source)Rule 8a. With words that indicate portions—e.g., a lot, a majority, some, all—Rule 1 given earlier in this section is reversed, and we are guided by the noun after of. If the noun after of is singular, use a singular verb. If it is plural, use a plural verb.
Examples:
A lot of the pie has disappeared.
Aot of the pies have disappeared.
Fifty percent of the pie has disappeared.
Fifty percent of the pies have disappeared.
A third of the city is unemployed.
A third of the people are unemployed.
All of the pie is gone.
All of the pies are gone.
Some of the pie is missing.
Some of the pies are missing.
...
As I relearned ASL, I also discovered Deaf authors. I thrilled in finding people like me who were adding nuance and cultural specificity as they wrote about Deaf people. In those stories, Deaf people had power and agency in a narrative. As I adopted a “big-D” Deaf identity (the uppercase D signifies a cultural identity, rather than a medical condition) and grew into a Deaf adult, I turned to literature written by Deaf writers to validate my existence.
...
More change across our keyboards is inevitable. Younger generations will usher in new forms of digital language, and we’ll all try to keep up. “We don’t want to get too hung up thinking we’ve discovered the right way to do things because we’re just going to get proven wrong again,” says McCulloch. So just wait. Before you know it, Generation Alpha (aka the iPad kids) will be eager to make fun of your “main character aesthetic” and that cat sweater you’re wearing ironically.
Think hyperbole rhymes with Super Bowl? Don't worry, it could be the start of something beautiful
Someone I know tells a story about a very senior academic giving a speech. Students shouldn't worry too much, she says, if their plans "go oar-y" after graduation. Confused glances are exchanged across the hall. Slowly the penny drops: the professor has been pronouncing "awry" wrong all through her long, glittering career.
We've all been there. I still lapse into mis-CHEE-vous if I'm not concentrating. This week some PR whizzes working for a railway station with an unusual name unveiled the results of a survey into frequently garbled words. The station itself is routinely confused with an endocrine gland about the size of a carrot (you can see why they hired PRs). Researchers also found that 340 of the 1000 surveyed said ex-cetera instead of etcetera, while 260 ordered ex-pressos instead of espressos. Prescription came out as perscription or proscription 20% of the time.
Free from Russian dictates over language usage and education, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan prepare to embrace Latin lettering. It’s the latest chapter in the region’s fraught history of alphabet reform.
From ‘lepak’ to ‘deurmekaar’, terms borrowed from its 1.75 billion global speakers are enriching the language we share
...
...the World Englishes.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has documented many of the words that these new communities of English speakers have added to the vocabulary. Many of these words are borrowings from other languages with which English is in constant contact, such as lepak (to loiter aimlessly) from Malay, deurmekaar (confused, muddled) from Afrikaans, kaveera (a plastic bag) from Luganda, and whāngai (an adopted child and the adoption itself) from Māori, which may be unfamiliar to British English speakers but are words characteristic of Malaysian English, South African English, Ugandan English and New Zealand English respectively.
More than a decade ago, I moved down from Liverpool to London to study and work, like many thousands of other young people before and after me. Countless times during this period people have said to me, “You’ve not lost your accent.”
It’s always struck me as an odd phrase, as if the pronunciation of words is something external, at risk of being accidentally dropped down the back of a sofa. Can you really lose an accent, and more importantly, why would you want to?
A grammatical problem which has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC has finally been solved by an Indian PhD student at the University of Cambridge.In his PhD thesis published on December 15, Cambridge scholar Dr Rishi Rajpopat claims to have solved Sanskrit’s biggest puzzle—a grammar problem found in the ‘Ashtadhyayi’, an ancient text written by the scholar Panini towards the end of the 4th century BC. Experts are calling the discovery revolutionary, as it may allow Panini’s grammar to be taught to computers for the first time.
When did humans first begin to speak, which speech sounds were uttered first, and when did language evolve from those humble beginnings? These questions have long fascinated people, especially in tracing the evolution of modern humans and what makes us different from other animals. George Poulos has spent most of his academic career researching the phonetic and linguistic structures of African languages. In his latest book, "On the Origins of Human Speech and Language," he proposes new timelines for the origins of language. We asked him about his findings.
Infants start learning words at an incredible pace in their second year of life. One of the strategies they use to learn words so efficiently is to take advantage of clues hidden in grammar: ‘syntactic bootstrapping’. How infants with fledgling lexicons learn complex relationships between words and grammar is unknown. Using eye tracking, we demonstrate that 1 to 2-y-old infants can quickly learn a novel relationship between words and grammar from short videos and use it to learn new words. These results show that young language learners exploit links between language elements on the fly, suggesting that infants self-supervise learning through a network of efficient language-learning shortcuts.