Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 April 9

= April 9 =

"Spoon" as a verb
I was listening to the 1908 song Shine on Harvest Moon, and it has the lines: "I ain't had no lovin' Since April, January, June or July. Snow time ain't no time to stay Outdoors and spoon"

I initially read "spoon" here as a possible reference to the type of cuddling known as Spooning, although I thought that use of the word would have had a more recent origin. Then, I looked up the word on Wiktionary and "spoon" as a verb apparently has an archaic meaning of "court". So, my question is: Is the archaic meaning what was likely meant in the song, and approximately when did the word begin to refer to cuddling? Kansan (talk) 02:38, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm obviously not the OP but their question has me wondering, where does the use of "spoon" to mean "court" come from? I can understand the modern use, meaning to cuddle, since the people who are spooning would be fit together like a couple of spoons but this "court" meaning eludes me.  Dismas |(talk) 02:53, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says: "Love spoons. The giving of elaborately carved love spoons by a lover to his lady as a token during courtship was common in 18th-century Wales and later." There is a whiff of just-so story if you ask me. —Tamfang (talk) 03:20, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * (another ec) According to Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (and the OED implies this as well, without actually stating it), it's related to a colloquial sense of the noun spoon, "a sweetheart", that developed from spoony ("sentimentally in love"), which is in turn a specialization of an earlier sense of "foolish" ("ex its [i.e., a spoon's] openness and shallowness", says Partridge). Deor (talk) 03:24, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Actually, both senses have nineteenth-century origins. In the OED the first citations for the "lie together spoon-fashion" sense are from 1887, whereas the "court" sense (which the OED defines as "to make love, esp. in a sentimental or silly fashion"—note how the meaning of "make love" has changed somewhat) is recorded from 1831. There can be little doubt, I think, that in the song the meaning is the latter; the former isn't something that's normally done "outdoors". Deor (talk) 03:08, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * All of this is fascinating. Thank you for looking into this. While I did detect a hint of salaciousness in the song, I wouldn't have expected them to "get away with" a whole lot in a popular song of that time, so this explanation does make sense (and I had no idea about the earlier "spoony" word.) Kansan (talk) 04:39, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * "Sparking" was another contemporary term for "making out" (which is what "making love" meant in those days, as you note). Songs in those days would sometimes have a hint of salaciousness, but not too much. Consider verse 2 of "My Merry Oldsmobile": "They love to spark in the dark old park / As they go flying along / She says she knows why the motor goes / His sparker's awfully strong..." where "sparker" theoretically referred to the mechanism that made the sparkplugs fire. And of course the possibly double-entendre final line of the chorus: "You can go as far as you like with me, in my merry Oldsmobile." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:56, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Our parents and grandparents would sing all those suggestive old songs around the piano till the cows came home. Songs mentioned "romance" almost as if it was something so innocent and wholesome that nuns could engage in without fear of recrimination from their Mothers Superior.  But how shocked, outraged and disgusted they were when the sexual revolution arrived, and free love and pre-marital sex were openly advocated and practised for the first time.  The message from the oldies was that it's OK to do it, as long as you cover it with the mask of respectability, and call it something it's not. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  10:00, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * That's one of the things I love about swing music. A song like I Didn't Like It the First Time (ostensibly about spinach) seems so charming and innocent, even though you'd have to be pretty stupid not to get the point.  Of course by the time you get to Wynonie Harris's classic Keep On Churnin' Till the Butter Comes, we might be a little past "charming and innocent".  Still like the song, though. --Trovatore (talk) 10:18, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Are letters and other grapheme linguistic signs?
Are alphabetic letters and other graphemes linguistic sign? According to Saussurian definition, a linguistic sign is the union of a signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept). It means linguistic sign is not possible without the existence of signified. So if I say "dog", the psychological imprint of the sound in the hearer's mind is the signifier. And the animal dog is the signified. But if I say "A", "B", or write a punctuation mark where is the signified here? --Goqer (talk) 04:12, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * "A" is still a linguistic sign, because to speak it "aye" would be the signifier, and the shape itself is the signified; there is a real shape that when you express the sound "aye" that the listener will think of, and THAT shape is signified. Even orthographically, something like the "," shape has linguisitic function; it represents a real concept, but that concept isn't a shape or an object, or anything like that.  Its a more nebulous idea, but the comma still has meaning, in a linguistic sense.  Consider the classic sentances:
 * The panda eats shoots and leaves.
 * The panda eats, shoots, and leaves.
 * In those cases, the commas distinctly change the meaning of the sentance, so they themselves must have a linguistic sign. -- Jayron  32  04:48, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I disagree that commas represent meanings or ideas. My opinion is that they signify differences in intonation, — real sounds — rather than nebulous concepts. --Kjoonlee 05:20, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Jayron32, thanks for explaining the issue with letters. But I think Kjoonlee is right on the punctuation issue. The use of comma, for example, serves different purposes in different situations. And if it is used to signify differences in intonation, where is the signified when I use a comma? This is something still unclear to me. --Goqer (talk) 06:20, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I'd say the comma signifies the intonation, and the intonation signifies the shape and structure of the syntactic parse tree. --Kjoonlee 09:22, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks! --Goqer (talk) 09:44, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * As always, we have an article: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. (I've read the book, and I was always a little disappointed that Truss didn't use the Australian version: Eats, Roots, Shoots & Leaves.) Mitch Ames (talk) 07:02, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * @Goqer: As far as I know, the traditional view in linguistics is that the morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has meaning, and thus that individual letters and phones are not linguistic signs.
 * @Jayron: As Kjoonlee says, even in the sentences you bring up, the comma does not have any meaning. Rather, the sentence itself includes words with multiple meanings, and the comma provides some disambiguation between them. The comma itself has no semantic content, any more than does a pause or a change in intonation during speech. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 08:03, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Hmm, that's interesting. Does the traditional view take suprasegmentals into account? What if suprasegmentals only showed up on top of half of a morpheme? Thanks. --Kjoonlee 09:28, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I would think no; Anonmoos' comment (11:18, 9 April 2011 (UTC)) below about distinctive units sums it up well, and applies to suprasegmentals just as well as segmentals: while a phoneme or a suprasegmental (such as stress or a tone) might serve to contrast between two words, the phoneme or the suprasegmental doesn't have meaning in of itself. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 21:13, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * According to my old English teacher, the commas stand for "and" in that context, which is why the second sentence would normally be rendered as "eats, shoots and leaves" rather than "eats, shoots, and leaves", i.e. "eats and shoots and and leaves." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:39, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * See serial comma. The difference between "eats, shoots and leaves" and "eats, shoots, and leaves" is mainly a stylistic one. To generalize to the point of near uselessness, scholarly style guides tend to support it (it's also called the Harvard comma or the Oxford comma), while newspaper style guides don't. Even when style guides advise against it in the general case, they will allow the comma before the "and" in cases where not using it would cause ambiguity (e.g. "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.") In any case, the comma is there to separate out the various sub-items of the conjugation, and doesn't actually have the meaning of "and" (although that does seem like a reasonable "quick and dirty" way of presenting the concept to elementary school children). -- 174.21.244.142 (talk) 17:43, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The teacher I'm referring to was at the university level. In any case, commas are sometimes omitted altogether, as in "What's Up Doc?" and "That's All Folks!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:04, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

@Rjanag,

You said " traditional view in linguistics is that the morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has meaning, and thus that individual letters and phones are not linguistic signs".

But according to this paper [Christian Lehmann, "On the system of semasiological grammar" (Working paper), 1993],

"A grammatical unit is a kind of linguistic sign defined by a certain degree of grammatical autonomy. The grammatical units are, in order of increasing autonomy: submorpheme, morpheme, stem, word, phrase, clause, sentence."

Note "a kind of", this means there are linguistic signs that do not have grammatical autonomy. Right? So there are linguistic signs other than grammatical units. What are those signs? And how do they fall under the definition of linguistic sign as per Saussurian tradition (i.e. presence of signified)? --Goqer (talk) 09:27, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Goqer -- The morpheme is by definition the smallest linguistic unit which can be associated with a specific meaning. So in the word "cats", the morpheme "cat" is associated with felinity and the morpheme "s" is associated with plurality.  There are smaller distinctive units (which contribute to distinguishing between different morphemes/words), but sub-morphemic distinctive units are not individually meaningful units.  So the presence of the "t" consonant distinguishes "cats" from "caps" etc., but the "t" of "cats" does not have any separate meaning of its own (apart from the meaning of the "cat" morpheme as a whole). AnonMoos (talk) 11:18, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Within the context of a specific word, right? In words like T-square or T-intersection, the "T" definitely has a specific meaning, namely a mental picture of the object. But not so, the T in "cat". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:41, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Baseball Bugs -- in those words it's pronounced [tiː], not [t], so those are rather poor examples. But yes, "t" in "meant", "spilt", "kicked"(pronunciation!) etc. is a morpheme... AnonMoos (talk) 13:28, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Which is why I asked, don'cha know. In effect, the "T" becomes a syllable rather than just a letter. Right? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:06, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I was talking about the consonant sound (phoneme) /t/, so the name of the letter T has absolutely no linguistic relevance (any more than the word "H-bomb" [eɪtʃ bɒm] would have to a discussion of Cockney h-dropping). AnonMoos (talk) 20:58, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * But then, those s and s represent phones, which aren't linguistic signs according to Rjanag's understanding above. --Kjoonlee 12:46, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * @Goquer: in the article you quote, Lehmann's "submorpheme" may be referring to phonesthemes, the status of which is somewhat fuzzy, but I'm not really sure. But in any case, the standard view is that the morpheme is the smallest linguistic sign, and that single phonemes that have meaning are (as AnonMoos points out) just single-phoneme morphemes. For example, in the context of first language acquisition, Ingram (1989, p. 41) defines the Principle of Linguistic Sign as "the realization that phonetic events can be paired in a conventional way with concepts". That is a definition that, of course, gets revised a lot by philosophers of language, but the important thing is that it does not include single phonemes or letters, since those do not have semantic content in the real world (they are not "paired with concepts"). This is, as far as I can tell, pretty much the standard view. If your view is different, then it's because you think "linguistic sign" means something different, in which case we'll just be talking in circles around one another; but if you think that this is what "linguistic sign" means, then I don't think there is any way it can include single letters or phonemes. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 14:57, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Regarding Jayron's first point about "A": I believe the use-mention distinction is useful here. If you say "the letter A", then A is a linguistic sign because it is actually pointing out a thing or concept in the world, it has meaning. But if you say "his name is spelled S-H-A-W-N", then A is not a linguistic sign, I think. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 15:04, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Sure it is. How is the second usage different from the first.  The "A" is still referring to the symbol with two diagonal lines and a crossbar... -- Jayron  32  20:33, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * To change the example up a bit: if I say aloud "English has a [ʃ] sound in lots of words," I am actually referring to something in the real world (the sound), whereas if I say "Shucks!" I am still making that sound, but not using it to refer to anything&mdash;rather, it's just a meaningless part of a larger linguistic sign. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 21:11, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Ambiguity of the word "more"
I can distinguish between degree and quantity when using low values by saying "less interesting people" and "fewer interesting people", but how can I do that with high numbers? The phrase "more interesting people" means both higher degree and higher number. Do I distinguish degree by saying "interestinger people" or "higher interestingness people" and number by saying "more numerous interesting people" or "a higher number of interesting people"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.159.230.243 (talk) 04:26, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * You could, although "interestinger" and "interestingness" are nonce words that probably would only be accepted in informal or joking situations. A more standard way to avoid this ambiguity is to use a relative clause: "people who are more interesting" and "more people who are interesting". Lesgles (talk) 05:27, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Since "few" is the opposite of "many", shouldn't "fewer" be the opposite of "manier" ? StuRat (talk) 06:21, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * You probably know this already :) but "fewer" is typically rendered as "fewer than", so the opposite would be "more than"... or if the contrast is large, "many more than". I have to tell you this funny: I was on a college campus recently and they had a co-op grocery store. The typical express lane in grocery store chains will have a sign saying "10 items or less". This one, being in the heart of a campus and presumably trying to set an example, said "10 items or fewer". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:24, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Waitrose has been using that for a few years, because their clientele complained about the use of 'less'. It sparked all sorts of interesting discussions about whether this specific case ("10 items or less") is actually prescriptively wrong in dialects that make the less/fewer distinction, or whether "less" is actually the 'correct' choice. I'm sure you can find some in the usual places. 86.162.71.235 (talk) 21:31, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Isn't there a distinction in every dialect ? For example, what dialect would permit "I have fewer coffee in my cup than you" ? StuRat (talk) 21:41, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * A different kind of distinction. In the "grumpy old 7th grade English teacher" dialect, there are some situations requiring "fewer" and some requiring "less" and there's no overlap. For regular people, there are some requiring "less" and some that can go either way, but none where "fewer" is required. Same type of thing as who/whom. You can change every "whom" to "who" and only offend the grumps. If you change every "who" to "whom", you'll sound weird to everybody. 67.162.90.113 (talk) 09:03, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I think you mean, "offend only the grumps". Hmph, bah, sputter. --Trovatore (talk) 21:12, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * In writing you could try "more-interesting people" for higher degree interesting people, and you might even be able to get away with "more interesting-people" for the other. 93.95.251.162 (talk) 13:35, 9 April 2011 (UTC) Martin.

''The following passage was strangely posted by User:AK63 in the preceding section. I've moved it. —Tamfang (talk) 21:53, 13 February 2012 (UTC)''

This is in RESPONSE to the posted BELOW :

the "ambiguity" discussed below can be understood but can be avoided-even if in more "inventive"/ingenious ways. First, it is important to point out that part of the reason why your example poses difficulty is that, it is in a phrase (PARTIAL SENTENCE) form & NOT in the form of a FULL sentence! Hence, if you provided the following examples (albeit, more awkwardly or, in MORE NUMEROUS sentences): "There are 5 people in this group". There are 6 people in that group". Obviously, the sentence: "there are more people in that group" is redundant-as, plain Arithmetic reveals which group (NUMERICALLY!) has MORE people. Hence, even though the combination of the adverb 'more' with an adjective & a noun (as in: "more interesting people") to denote a NUMERICAL superiority† is FAR LESS DESIRABLE than when saying: 'There are MANY MORE people in this room than..." OR: "There are MORE people in this room than...", people still misuse this quantifying adverb when conveying SPECIFIC meaning. Same applies to UNCOUNTABLE/NON-COUNT Nouns, as in: ††"There is much MORE cold water in the pitcher/There is MORE cold water in the pitcher). Subsequently, when denoting any OTHER (NON-NUMERICAL) descriptive quality, the combination of adjective & noun should immediately FOLLOW the quantifying adverb (aka: quantifier) 'more' (or: 'less')-as in: "There are more INTERESTING people in this room than in that room" (actually, BETTER still: "The people in this room are more INTERESTING than in that room"! This sentence CLEARLY denotes a NON-NUMERICAL quality reflected by the adjective 'interesting' & ANY ambiguity between it & the NUMERICAL adverb is thus completely AVOIDED!). --- †the SAME rule of logic applies to the NUMERICAL inferiority adverb: 'less' ††many people tend to colloquially misuse words to convey SPECIFIC meaning ACCURATELY. Compare the DIFFERENT quality/meaning expressed in the following 2 sentences: "There is much MORE (cold) water here" & "There is much COLDER water here". The former conveys quantitative SUPERIORITY (DESPITE the REDUNDANT adjective 'cold') & the latter-focuses on the NON-QUANTITATIVE quality expressed in the adjective 'cold'!

李白的「送友人」
Hello. I am studying Chinese, and am having trouble translating this poem:

青山橫北郭 白水遶東城 此地一為別 孤蓬萬里征 浮雲游子意 落日故人情 揮手自茲去 蕭蕭班馬鳴 Can someone translate this into English? It has to be eloquent though! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 一起 (talk • contribs) 08:38, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi, if you search for "青山橫北郭 horse cloud" on Google you will probably find many results. --Kjoonlee 09:58, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth, my old attempt is at http://www.chinese-poems.com/lb15t.html . The 'tumbleweed' line is excruciatingly bad though, and I'd probably change the last two lines from 2nd person singular to first person plural. HenryFlower 10:07, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Looks good; I'll try to adapt that. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 一起 (talk • contribs) 08:18, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Cletus Spuckler
Which american accent does Cletus Spuckler have? Can it be geographically located...? 90.229.145.36 (talk) 09:38, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * As he's a hillbilly, it's probably someone's idea of a "hillbilly accent", which would typically be connected with Appalachia or possibly the Ozarks. Can you find a youtube that has a good representative sample of the way he talks? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:18, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Cletus doesn't have any specific accent. Indeed, although he is always voiced by Hank Azaria, he has very different voices over the course of the series. In every case, his accent is a haphazard blend of various southern and Appalachian features which sound distinctively "yokelish" to a General American ear. It's not an attempt to imitate an actually existing dialect. One illustrative example: Cletus tends to substitute /ɪu/ for every GA /u/ ("Never yew mind, Brandine!"), which is a caricature of certain southern accents in which yod-dropping does not occur, and in which "yew" and "you" would have distinctive pronunciations. Moreover, yod-retention is entirely absent from Appalachian/Ozark (that is, "hillbilly") varieties. It's only present in the deep south and in the Carolinas. So Cletus's accent is not only geographically non-specific, it's geographically paradoxical. You would never come across any real person with his combination of linguistic peculiarities. L ANTZY T ALK 00:18, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * So his accent is as generic as Springfield itself, then? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:33, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

IPA spelling help
I profess no knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet - that being said, how would one write "ash-tuh-BYU-la" using the IPA? It's a commonly mispronounced name, and would be handy on related articles, e.g., Ashtabula, Ohio. Any help is appreciated! Avic ennasis  @ 09:58, 5 Nisan 5771 / 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * It's æʃtəˈbjuːlə, assuming you mean ash like the word "ash"; tuh like in "today"; BYU like in "beauty"; and la like in "Paula". Lfh (talk) 10:33, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed I do! :) Thanks for the help! Avic ennasis  @ 10:48, 5 Nisan 5771 / 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The last two syllables are also a homophone of the out-of-fashion female name Beulah. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:01, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

''The following passage was strangely posted by User:AK63 in the preceding section. I've moved it. —Tamfang (talk) 21:53, 13 February 2012 (UTC)''

Response to below request:

One would TRANSCRIBE the sounds of the name: Ash-Tu-Byu-La into IPA sound system this way: ʌʃ-tu-bju-lʌ. However, assuming that the name is a Pakistani/Afghani in sound/origin, if it ends with an 'h' (aspirated) sound, the IPA transcription would end with an 'h': ʌʃ-tu-bju-lʌh.


 * And why might one assume that the name of a place in Ohio is of Pakistani/Afghani sound/origin? —Tamfang (talk) 00:56, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Could some translate this Spanish song?
Could some translate this Spanish song?

No me vuelvas a llamar Tratando de explicar Que lo que vi no era cierto Verguenza debes tener Si me quieres convenser Que eres fiel y eres sincero Oh! Te vi con ella y no puedes negar Que eran tus labios los que la besaban Canalla! No te sirvio de nada El disimular Que solo charlaban No mientas mas!

Si me vuelves a llamar Yo te vuelvo a colgar Ya me canse de escuchar Escusas y mas mentiras

No me vuelvas a llamar No te voy a perdonar Otra oportunidad No te la doy Si no vales la pena


 * Google Translate gives:
 * Do not ever call me trying to explain that what I saw was not true Shame you have Convens If you want me That you're faithful and sincere Oh! I saw her and you can not deny What were your lips that kissed Canalla! Do not avail Cloaking That only talked but not lie!


 * If you call me again I'll come back to hang I'm tired of hearing excuses and more lies


 * Do not call me again I will not forgive another chance Do not give it if you're not worth it
 * Rojomoke (talk) 15:37, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Consulting my Spanish/English dictionary:
 * The Spanish for "to convince" is convencer, which seems to fit with the phrase Si me quieres convenser, i.e. "if you want to convince me".
 * The Que right after negar (to deny) would better translate as That, so Que eran tus labios los que la besaban would be more like "That they were your lips which kissed her."
 * Canalla is an explitive that is translated as "swine" or "dog".
 * ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:48, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

There's no need to use Google Translate; we have no dearth of Spanish speakers here. I'm not a native speaker but I would hope that I can do better than GTranslate (at least until a native speaker comes along to fix my errors; my comments in square brackets):

72.128.95.0 (talk) 03:15, 10 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I humbly disagree on one point: I read No te sirvio de nada el disimular que solo charlaban as "It does you no good, to make up the story pretend that you[?] were only talking." (Is ustedes the subject of charlaban?) —Tamfang (talk) 05:59, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I couldn't think of the word pretend last night. —Tamfang (talk) 18:42, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I think your translation of that line is closer. 72 has done a pretty good job with it overall. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:12, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Indicative Pronouns
What are the "indicative pronouns"? From the context I could figure out that "this" and "that" are definitely "indicative pronouns". How about "here", "there", "it" etc? Any pointers would help. Thanks. 117.211.88.149 (talk) 12:52, 9 April 2011 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya
 * I'm not familiar with that terminology; since indicative is usually used in English grammars to denote a verb mood, it's rather awkward to apply it, in a different sense, to pronouns as well. That said, the article Demonstrative should be of help. Deor (talk) 13:09, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * There are "Indexical" (i.e. pointing) pronouns (see Indexicality), but I'm not sure that the phrase indicative pronoun is commonly used by linguists... AnonMoos (talk) 13:21, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * It would help (as always) if you provided the context in which you saw this term being used. r ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 15:59, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * The term seems to be used for many foreign languages, including Latin where "ille, illa, illud" are given as examples, but not commonly for English. I have seen it defined as "pronouns that point to something". Looie496 (talk) 00:35, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * That's what linguists normally call indexical pronouns, "indicative pronouns" may be common usage among latin philologists I don't know.·Maunus· ƛ · 00:46, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Latin philologists might possibly object to the fact that the word "indexical" is not really correctly formed according to Latin rules of word derivation... [[Image:SFriendly.gif|20px]] -- AnonMoos (talk) 16:51, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses so far. I came across the term in a book tittled "English Algorithmic Grammar" by Hristo Georgiev. It uses the term without defining it. 117.211.88.149 (talk) 05:48, 10 April 2011 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya
 * I'm not familiar with either "indicative" or "indexical" in this sense. I would call them "demonstrative", or more specifically "deictic". --ColinFine (talk) 17:36, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Intransitive Verbs in the Passive Voice?
Hello, again!

The other day, I was listening to a friend's radio, and I heard the following sentence apropos the current U.S. government dispute: "President Obama has now said that the problem will be delved into in great detail."

Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought that the passive voice only worked with transitive verbs. Increasingly, though (at least in informal speech) constructions such as "the issues will be dealt with over the next few weeks." have become much commoner than in the past.

Is this simply an extension of everybody's now accepting prepositions at the end of clauses—or just lazy speech? Pine (talk) 19:16, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't see anything wrong with these. In fact, some more idiomatic 'passive intransitives', such as "I won't be put upon", don't have any active equivalent. <b class="IPA">r ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 19:31, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Twinpinesmall -- The alleged no-prepositions-at-end-of-sentence "rule" was always highly artificial, and was based more on a few people's abstract theoretical ideas about how Latin should supposedly be the model for all other languages than on observations of what just about all English-speakers were actually saying. For the general linguistic phenomenon, see Preposition stranding. AnonMoos (talk) 20:52, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * P.S. In older Indo-European languages (and most current non-Germanic continental European languages) it was not really possible to promote the object of a preposition to subject of a passive verb, but in many non-European languages (including a large number of Bantu languages), you can add an "applicative" suffix to a verb to make the verb take an indirect object, and if you then add a passive inflection onto an applicative verb, the indirect object now becomes the subject.  Unfortunately, Wikipedia has two redundant articles on the applicative, Verb applicative and Applicative voice, neither of which is all that great... AnonMoos (talk) 22:33, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * You're right that intransitive verbs can't be made passive, but the examples you give are not examples of intransitive verbs. 'To delve into' and 'to deal with' are transitive verbs, which can exist in both active and passive forms (We are dealing with this issue. This issue is being dealt with).
 * Intransitive verbs have no direct object: The sun is shining, the fish are swimming, the birds are flying, and all is right with the world. None of those 4 intransitive expressions can be converted into passive, because the passive requires the previous object to be the new subject, but there was no object with any of them.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  21:12, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

———The sun is shining, the fish are swimming, the birds are flying, and all is right with the world———

Not to argue, but those strike me as phrases/clauses acting as predicative adjectives, and not really as intransitive verbs.Pine (talk) 21:18, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Not to respond, but I disagree. :) Try The Sun is shining on the Earth.  No way 'shining' is any kind of adjective.  It's clearly a verb, but an intransitive one.  I doubt we can get away with The Earth is being shone on by the Sun.  Or, if that's possible, how about I am going to the movies.  That cannot be converted to The movies are being gone to.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  21:40, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Also, try other tenses ("the sun shone brightly", "the sun will shine", "the sun shines"). I think the is may have been confusing you, but in these examples in other tenses it is clear that it's not an adjective. <b class="IPA">r ʨ anaɢ</b> (talk) 22:12, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not a grammarian, but it seems to me that "shine on" in the sentence "The sun is shining on the earth" is playing the role of a transitive phrasal verb rather than an intransitive verb and a free-standing preposition. "Shine" is something an object does alone, but "shine on" is something it does to something else (unless you're John Lennon in "Instant Karma.") The same can be said about "deal with" or "delve into." -- Mwalcoff (talk) 00:57, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * You're right. Rjanag's examples of intransitivity were much better than mine.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  01:02, 10 April 2011 (UTC)