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Men are increasingly rising in pitch at the end of their sentences
More men speaking in girls’ ‘dialect’, study shows By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News 6 December 2013 Last updated at 01:37
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CFP Eurosla 2014: Corpus Pragmatics and Second Language Research
EUROSLA 2014 3-6 September 2014 (University of York) CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE THEMATIC COLLOQUIUM “CORPUS PRAGMATICS AND SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH”
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Johnson: We are all friends now
MANY languages use different words for “you”, depending on the relationship between the speaker and the addressee. “You” tends to have two versions throughout Europe (tu and vous in French; du and Sie in German; tu and lei in Italian, etc), and knowing how to use them is a big part of linguistic savvy. Typically […]
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Phrases Gone Astray
Modifying phrases should usually be adjacent to what they are describing. When such a phrase pops up in an unlikely part of the sentence, the effect ranges from clunkiness to confusion to unintended comedy. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/misplaced-phrases/
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Tricky Little Things
Tiny as they are, misplaced commas form an outsize blot on a sentence. In the spectrum of grammatical lapses, they seem particularly amateurish. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/too-many-commas/
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SHOUTY ALL CAPS and pass-agg full stops: how instant messaging has created a new English
There’s a lovely Ben Crair piece in the New Republic this morning, about how instant messaging and texts are changing our use of punctuation: it seems that a full stop at the end of a chat message can be seen as aggressive or final. So see you at home later is happy and friendly, while […]