not-a-fresher-anymore's flu // Cambridge Vlog 29

Well second year is off to a flying start! This week things are in full swing, with broken phones, library lockdowns and nothing more than good ole fresher’s flu to welcome me back to Cambridge. It’s looking like it’s gonna be a great year this time!
sexy reading about syntax (especially the final section of the paper on verb decomposition): Phrase structure as a representation of grammatical relations.
Baker, M. 2001.
In William D. Dvaies & Stanley Dubinsky (eds) Objects and Other Subjects; Grammatical Functions, Functional Categories and Configurationality. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 1-21
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[@meganc380]

HAD MY HAND IN A PUMPKIN BUT THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT

[@olivercooney]

i am so proud of ur commitment

[@jg90049]

Question for you, when did pronoun conjugations cease to be a thing in English usage?

[@olivercooney]

great question. i will say i am not a huge fan of historical linguistics, so i can't give a great answer, but if i remember rightly from my History of English module, Old English was rife for pronouns changing based on case, but did have some syncretism- that's when two different items have the same form, like the accusative and dative both being unc for dual first person. but by Middle English (around 1150), demonstrative pronouns no longer changed for case or gender, accusative and dative became a singular form, and we lost the dual, but case continued to be part of the paradigm. from then on, there has been some breaking down of the paradigm to get where we are now, but case remains marked on the pronoun contrasting I with Me with My, so we haven't truly lost modifications of pronouns, they've just reduced significantly from what they used to be. but this was a really long process that happened throughout the development of english

[@jg90049]

@@olivercooney pronoun cases were drilled into me in high school, but I notice that younger people don't seem to understand when to use "me" and when to use "I".

[@jg90049]

@@olivercooney If I had even a shred of ability in fiction-writing, I'd write a sci-fi book or screenplay about space travel 300 years into the future that tried to predict how spoken English is going to change over the next 300 years.

[@olivercooney]

@@jg90049 it's not really a lack of understanding but its syncretism happening in real time. language doesn't exist outside of the speakers, so language change also happens within speakers. where certain generations appear to not be keeping the same me/I distinction anymore, that's because their internal language systems are structured differently, and might be losing that distinction in certain places, usually in less common constructions that aren't used often enough for the distinction to persist as well as it does elsewhere

[@olivercooney]

@@jg90049 i love that idea! there is probably a good set of linguists out there who do exactly that, using what we have already about language change and historical cases and just applying that to the current language using current trends, although i have to say i don't have any concrete examples of people doing that, but would love to see some!