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Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Archive for June, 2013

Intonation

Saturday, June 29th, 2013

A former student of mine now living in and working in Russia, Troy McGrath, recently wrote to me and passed on this anecdote:

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day and said, “In English, a double negative forms a positive. But in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However,” he pointed out, “in no language in the world can a double positive form a negative.” But then a voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

I responded that intonation was a crucial factor in his example and gave him a second example I actually heard.

Another linguistics professor, the late Kenneth Pike, once proved the importance of intonation in speech by demonstrating that intonation may contradict the content of a sentence.

If we simply say, “I love you”, the sentence has a positive meaning. But if we add question intonation, “I? Love you?”, the meaning of the sentence is exactly the opposite of the content of the sentence.

Maneuvering Manure

Thursday, June 27th, 2013

Gail Rallen just sent in a funny anecdote related to our recent Good Word maneuver:

“When my brother was very young he had a stock of really quite funny malapropisms, with today’s GW among them. He was concerned about people who allowed pets to run loose in their yards, because the dogs maneuver in their grass.”

Considering the fact that French manœvre was the origin of both maneuver and manure, he wasn’t far from being correct.