From the Archives!—The SpecGram Straw Men—The SpecGram Archive Elves™ SpecGram Vol CLXV, No 4 Contents Rethinking Social Sciences Under the Influence of N-Bar Theory—Nikita Barbarosa, Nigel Barclay, Norberto Barrowman, & Vino Heineken

Regenerated Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
(because they aren’t actually true)


gathered at great personal risk of
psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers
by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

This 25th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Test question

Propose an analysis for the English pronunciations illustrated in datasets A. and B.:

word  A. American English  B. British English
news[nuːz] [njuːz]
tuna[ˈtuːnә][ˈtjuːnә]
cute[kjuːt] [kjuːt]
few [fjuː] [fjuː]
presume[prɪˈzuːm][prɪˈzjuːm]
stupid[ˈstuːpɪd][ˈstjuːpɪd]
duke[duːk] [djuːk]
puny[ˈpjuːnɪ][ˈpjuːnɪ]

Answers

More to come...

From the Archives!The SpecGram Straw MenThe SpecGram Archive Elves™
Rethinking Social Sciences Under the Influence of N-Bar TheoryNikita Barbarosa, Nigel Barclay, Norberto Barrowman, & Vino Heineken
SpecGram Vol CLXV, No 4 Contents