Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 February 26

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February 26

lie/lay

Can someone help me with this Lay/lie question? "Alongside the road there is a big pile of sand, just laying/lying(?) there." Thank you. RJFJR (talk) 00:44, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Is the sand putting something down? That's the difference between laying and lying. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:55, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

So lying is the one that goes with lie and, even though the sand is inanimate so it can't do much of anything, it's lying there. Thank you. It's a little clearer now, but they both seem a little odd. RJFJR (talk) 01:04, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Old story: Someone asks a farmer a grammar question, for some reason I can't recall. Question goes: Is the hen sitting or setting? The farmer answers, I don't know about that. What I want to know is, when she cackles, is she laying or lying? --Trovatore (talk) 05:35, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Maybe this will help make it clearer? Matt Deres (talk) 13:17, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm always confused about when to say lying down, or laying down. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 13:21, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

It's confusing enough to native English speakers. One of those oddities, like "affect" vs. "effect". And it doesn't help that they both come from the same original root.[1][2] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:36, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

• ”Lie” is intransitive, as in “to lie down”. “Lay” in the present tense is transitive, as in “lay it on the floor”. But note that “lay” in another usage is the past tense of “lie”, as in “Yesterday I lay down on the bed”. Loraof (talk) 15:19, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

The parts are:

• Lie (go down): present: lie; preterite: lay; past participle: lain
• Lay (put down): present: lay; preterite: laid; past participle: laid
• Lie (dissemble): present: lie; preterite: lied; past participle: lied

The first is a strong verb. The other two are weak. 86.168.124.76 (talk) 18:19, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

However, "lay" as an intransitive verb ("He was laying on the road", "The criminal has been laying low") is now so widespread that I fear it's becoming the norm, and the prescriptivists are going to have to suck it up, sooner or later. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:15, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

It's nothing to fear, that's just how language works. We have a word for languages whose usage is fixed and does not evolve over time, they're called dead languages. --Jayron32 03:03, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

But I'm a metathesiophobe. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:46, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Fear of big words? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:06, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

The OED says that prescriptivists of the 17th and 18th centuries had nothing against lay as an intransitive verb, and they also cite usages by educated writers (Lord Byron, James Raine) of the early 19th century. That sense of the word has a continuous history of over 700 years (back to The Harrowing of Hell, c. 1300) so, yes, maybe it's time to accept it now. --Antiquary (talk) 10:40, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

The actual quote from the OED is "In the earliest examples the verb appears to be intransitive for reflexive or passive. Now (exc. in Nautical lang., see 43b) it is only dialectal or an illiterate substitute for lie, its identity of form with the past tense of the latter no doubt accounting largely for the confusion. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was not apparently regarded as a solecism.". Dbfirs 20:11, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Topic-comment structure in otherwise SVO languages

I just want to confirm my understanding. So, there are different kinds of word orders. The two most common ones are SVO and SOV. Among those languages, some are topic-prominent and form topic-comment structure. Basically, the topic gains prominence by being placed at the beginning of the sentence, followed by a comment. The whole thing is recognized as topic-comment, not SVO or SOV or whatever word order. Or is it okay to analyze the topic and comment separately as distinct clauses? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 18:57, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

For example, Standard American, British, Canadian, and Australian are not topic-prominent languages. So, a sentence like “Basketball plays very well,” with topic-prominence and subject-dropping makes no sense in the said languages. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 19:05, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

"Basketball plays very well" sounds a little odd, but there are some similar sentences in English, such as "The book is selling very well", which are perfectly fine. However, "the book" is actually the subject in this case. I really don't know what English construction you're thinking about in which "the book" would be the object -- at a minimum, a pronoun seems to be missing. AnonMoos (talk) 19:21, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Let me find a better example. “He play basketball play very well.” 140.254.70.33 (talk) 19:39, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Does that have a meaning? Dbfirs 20:54, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

No, but it may be how a non-native speaker may think and write. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 21:54, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Oh, I see, you mean “He play basketball: play very well.” Dbfirs 09:10, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

By "Standard American, British, Canadian, and Australian" I guess you mean standard English, in any of four flavours. As far as topic-prominence (not!) or the SVO order is concerned, they don't differ among themselves.

In English, "He plays basketball very well" is the standard order. You can prepose the object for a marked but still grammatical result: "Basketball, he plays very well." For me, "Basketball, he plays it very well" sounds distinctly odd, but still acceptable. Arguably, "basketball" in that last sentence has the syntactic (and not just semantic) status of "topic". Now let's fiddle with the first sentence: "He plays major basketball games for which he's trained enough very well". This is grammatical but ungainly. Let's prepose the object: "Major basketball games for which he's trained enough(,) he plays well." Sounds good to me. Now topicalize (?): "Major basketball games for which he's trained enough, he plays them well." Sounds OK to me.

Now let's turn to Japanese. This has nominative and accusative (and other) case marking. The suffixes ga and (w)o are nominative and accusative respectively. The order is SOV. However, sentences of the form "[subject]-ga [object]-(w)o [verb]" aren't so very common. (They're not rare, and they're fully grammatical.) The language also has two topic-related cases. For simplicity's sake, let's ignore mo, and just think of (the much commoner) wa. Sentences of the form "[topic (subject)]-wa [object]-(w)o [verb]" and "[topic (object)]-wa [subject]-ga [verb]". So there's a grammatical means to identify the topic, and a tendency to do this. It's a topic-prominent language.

I see no reason why there shouldn't be a topic-prominent SVO language; but sorry, I can't think of one offhand. -- Hoary (talk) 02:20, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

140.254.70.33 -- you can consult our topicalization article. See also the first two bullet points at Quebec French syntax... AnonMoos (talk) 05:16, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

• Topicalization is common in Yiddish and Irish English and Yoda speak. Native speakers find it perfectly comprehensible when it is complimented with a change in intonation: "PORK, I won't touch," rather than the unmarked, "I won't TOUCH pork." A continuing discussion of non-existent languages with vague and poorly constructed examples I don't understand. μηδείς (talk) 06:18, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

I was actually thinking of Singlish, which is influenced by Chinese and other Singaporean languages. The grammar can be written word for word in Chinese. I’m not a Singlish speaker, and I’m not Singaporean. I merely found out about Singlish on Wikipedia and notice that the grammar is very similar to Chinese. Chinese is predominantly a SVO language, but topic-prominence is used frequently and naturally, so how a native Chinese speaker thinks can definitely influence how he chooses and structures words in English. In Singlish topic-prominence statements, I just want to know whether they are still recognized as having a specific word order, or whether you’ll describe them as “topic prominence”. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 15:14, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

You seem to be making a dichotomy where none exists. While the OSV order does in English, it does so in order to signify topicalization. (There may be other examples in declarative sentences, but this is the main use, and I can't think of another use off the top of my head.) They are not two separate phenomena, unless you take Yoda as a native speaker of a standard ME dialect, which he obviously is not, being an alien from long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. There are also verb-second and verb-final languages and constructions in OE, German and Latin which indicate that SVO was almost certainly not the normal word order of PIE, but that goes beyond the scope of your original question. μηδείς (talk) 16:34, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Finally, someone answered my question. So, SVO word order and topic prominence can apply to the same sentence at the same time.

• 他(he)什么(anything, something, what)都不知道。(don’t know)

So, this sentence would be described as topic-prominence and SVO, but the object is placed before the verb for emphasis, if that makes sense. Right? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 17:17, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

• You are asking for an absolute definition. Such things are very rare. Definitions are contextual, and any good writer says, the first time he uses an ambiguous term or one in an unusal context, either, "By SVO I shall mean any sentence with that underlying form in an unmarked state, even when the actual elicited form is OSV." Or he will say, "By SVO, I will only mean sentences which strictly exhibit that order, regardless of how they would normally be formed in a less unusual circumstance.

Ayn Rand discusses the fact that there are no perfect sentences or arguments or essays in her The Art of Nonfiction (The companion, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers has an article) because they all exist in a context the writer and reader may not share, and perfect exact unambiguity would require a text of infinite length. One has to do the reader the courtesy of defining one's terms and sticking to those definitions and has to expect the reader to read the text with curiosity and generosity, not looking for misunderstandings or ambiguities for the sheer sport of it.

For example, I know the sort of audience that reads here. I am a volunteer. I notice mispelings or possible nitpicks all the time. But I am not going to write a two-hundred page proof to show that one plus one equals two, or go back and re-edit a long post for teh. μηδείς (talk) 03:45, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

I’m not sure how to interpret this. The latter two paragraphs don’t seem to be connected with the first paragraph. And the latter part of the first paragraph is not really connected with topic prominence. As for the first paragraph’s first line, my take-home message is that it’s all subjective, and do whatever you want. So, in the above example, 他什么都不知道, would be classified as SVO, because Chinese is described as an SVO language, while the statement often occurs in that order. If I switch the word order, 他都不知道什么, it sounds highly unnatural and weird. The former pattern is actually more natural and commonly used. This discussion is hurting my brain, so I’m just going to conclude that the natural form is topic-prominent unrelated to word order. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 14:25, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

You are repeatedly asking for the one true way to interpret ("absolute definition") topicalization and whether it affects "real" SVO/SOV systems or just their surface forms and my second two paragraphs are a bit of a rant, but they address a terribly common fallacy that comes up in these debates, whether our concepts are intrinsic ("Platonic realism") or subjective ("nominalism").

As long as you accept that dichotomy, you are not going to find an answer since the fact that topicalization by vioalation of unmarked word order exists means there are two absolute things, topicalization and word order, and they contradict. But topicalization and word order are concepts we use to classify certain phenomena, and how we choose to classify that has wiggle room based on out context which allows us to formulate the idea differently.

Your hidden premise is that most languages inherently belong to one of six possible word-order types, and that topicalization by changing word order breaks this absolute classification, so you see a huge problem. The problem is that language is a tool, an invention, not a divine creation and not a Chomskyan "organ" and that just as screwdrivers are classified as different from pencils and corkscrews for very good reason, we have minds and we can violate their "essence" and use any of those objects in an unusual manner, like stabbing someone or scraping wax from your ear canal.

As long as you insist on false premises: "Every animal that can fly is either a bird, a bat, or an insect" then questions like "So what are et pilots?" are going to remain inscrutable. μηδείς (talk) 19:32, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

So... how do you describe the specific example then? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 20:05, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

But I don't describe the specific example. You don't express yourself very clearly, other than to mention the general topics, which we can point you toward. But your "Basketball plays very well" is ambiguous, as it could mean "Basketball (subject) draws a large audience" which is perfectly grammatical, and also SP. Or it might be a garbled foreign broken English rendering of "Basketball, he plays very well" which is OSV and topicalized, but not grammatical as you wrote it.

So you have to go back and consider your starting point. If I said "All animals that fly are either birds, bats, or insects" and you said "but humans also have powered flight", I would have to accept that, and modify my claim to either "all animals that are evolved to execute powered flight by the flapping of their limbs are either..." or I could say, "Humans, which are themselves animals also have machines that are capable of powered flight, and humans have even created machines that can do this using trained leg muscles, although their legs are not wings. But only animals can fly without external mechanical devices."

There is simply no way to avoid this when dealing with complex topics where there are different exceptions and subtypes. In Latin, "Basketball plays very well" would have explicit markings of the subject/object, an implied subject and voice on the verb. You just have to deal with the fact that this can't be reduced to E=mc^2; it needs a paragraph or three to discuss. Speaking of which, I am signing off of this topic, I don't have the time to go into any more depth. You can read my proof in the margin. μηδείς (talk) 21:03, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

That sentence was not supposed to be grammatically correct. I was just trying to illustrate that English is usually not a topic-prominent language like Japanese or Chinese is. If someone were to translate literally word-for-word from Chinese to English, then it’ll make no sense. There are some sentence structures that just don’t work in English, and topic-prominence is one of them. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 21:16, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

But topicalization most certainly does work, if you give the sentence a different marked intonation that I have already noted is found commonly in Irish and Yiddish-influenced English. We just don't have a case particle to mark it. There's als "as for", as in As for this discussion, I find I have no more time to add to it.

(I am literally off to class). μηδείς (talk) 21:31, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Well, at least I learned a new word from this discussion topicalization. I just searched the keyword on Google, and the results showed a list of questions and answers compiled from various websites in bite-sized pieces. One source used topicalization and OSV word order in the same line, mentioning that OSV is the familiar term. Though, I’ve yet to understand the relationship between topicalization and topic-prominent language. I’ve noticed that some people describe American Sign Language as topicalization and topic-comment at the same time, hinting that the two terms are in fact synonyms. But topicalization mostly talks about English, while topic-prominent language mentions Chinese and Japanese. With that said, in the Chinese example, I think I’d use “topic-comment” to describe it and also describe it as an unique case of SOV word order within a predominantly SVO language. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 15:03, 1 March 2018 (UTC)