Alan Hogue

2,458 reputation

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	age	40
visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
	seen	Sep 16 '11 at 21:17
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	2,458 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
816 badges		location			seen	Sep 16 '11 at 21:17

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Aug 13	comment	Why am I always compelled to begin a response with “Well, ”? This isn't true. When it comes to extremely subtle shades of meaning people have a tendency to wildly overstate (if not simply make up) meanings. People should consult the literature on discourse markers if they are curious about words like "well".
Aug 13	answered	Why am I always compelled to begin a response with “Well, ”?
Aug 13	comment	How can I practice differentiating between the “æ” and “ɛ” sounds in English phonology? Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's exceedingly rare for those learning a second language later in life to achieve native-like pronunciation. Yet people still get along just fine. Probably not worth the untold hours of practice it would require.
Aug 13	comment	What is the difference between “’ll” and “will”? Sure. If you want your prose to sound stilted and unnatural, by all means avoid contractions. :)
Aug 12	awarded	Beta
Aug 11	comment	Why do some people pedantically cling to dying word forms (e.g. die, oxen)? Are you saying that "feet" is just as uncommon as "die"?
Aug 11	answered	Pronunciation of “especially”
Aug 11	comment	What is the difference between “’ll” and “will”? That's not true. Contractions are used in all kinds of writing, no matter how formal.
Aug 10	answered	“Assume”, “presume”, “suppose”
Aug 10	comment	“did shoot” vs “shot” I have spent a little time trying to look this up today, and have had no luck. So I'll just say that it seems to me that "do" here is providing something like contrastive focus in information structure terms. So in that sense it certainly has a function other than as a landing site for tense. If its primary function was to host tense, then it would not be optional, I think.
Aug 10	comment	When is it acceptable to use Internet abbreviations such as “u” or “r”? Incidentally, an actual linguistics site was proposed, but I seriously doubt it will ever get enough support to get off the ground.
Aug 10	comment	When is it acceptable to use Internet abbreviations such as “u” or “r”? In that case a usage site should probably never have been set up, because there is almost never a factually correct answer to these things in the sense that there would be for, say, engineering questions.
Aug 10	comment	“did shoot” vs “shot” I'm not sure I would agree that this should be considered a case of do-support. Do-support, as far as I understand it, is when "do" is inserted purely so you have something to apply tense to (hence, "support", it doesn't do much on its own). Here "do" does have a function of its own. This is probably splitting hairs though.
Aug 9	revised	When is it acceptable to use Internet abbreviations such as “u” or “r”? added 98 characters in body; added 7 characters in body
Aug 9	answered	When is it acceptable to use Internet abbreviations such as “u” or “r”?
Aug 9	answered	Are there diagnostic tests to distinguish between proper and common nouns?
Aug 9	comment	What alternative would you suggest to “in/with regard(s?) to”? No, I think that's just wrong. You have to watch out, people love to make up "just so stories" about grammar. This arises in part from the very common misapprehension that all points of grammar make some kind of rational sense, when in fact a lot of the details are purely conventional. For instance, you can still say "In regard to the strawberries..." The plural there is just another (probably incoming) variant. If you don't want pedantic people to be irritated with you, then by all means don't use it.
Aug 9	answered	“did shoot” vs “shot”
Aug 9	answered	What alternative would you suggest to “in/with regard(s?) to”?
Aug 8	comment	Recommendations for non-native English speaking bloggers Your grammar is not exactly what people in the US, UK, Australia, etc., would consider correct, but it's understandable. Why not write as well as you can? There's nothing wrong with being a non-native speaker, and there's nothing wrong with writing in a non-standard dialect. If you are looking for something that will automatically make your writing standard, I don't believe there is anything that can do that.