Seeing Double

Chuck Lloyd & Julius Earle

Part of our mission here at SpecGram is to educate as well as mock those who inform. The linguistics community is notorious for using words in ways that may be unfamiliar to people outside the field. This puzzle provides two sets of definitions for some of these words: one as intended by linguists, and one for what their non-linguist friends may hear when they blather on about work at the pub.

All of the answer words share a common property that can be used to find a bonus word. The puzzle creators may provide a clue, even if not asked to do so.

• Morpheme indicating a grammatical function
  

  Felt-tipped pen (6)

• Tense/aspect for a completed action
  

  Faultless (7)

• Voice that is between active and passive
  

  Where to find Malcolm? (6)

• No longer producing new words

  Like a lazy worker (12)

• The act of replacing a form with one from an unrelated word, such as “went” for “go”

  An instance of providing something lacking [uncommon] (10)

• Metaphrase as a type of translation
  

  A fixed value in computer code (7)

• Adjective describing a verb form inflected for number and person
  

  Bounded (6)

• Type of phonetics studying physical properties of speech sounds
  

  Unamplified, as a musical instrument (8)

• Relating to the use of language in a social context, rather than to its grammar or phonetics
  

  Practical (9)

• Semantic role undergoing or affected by an action
  

  Able to wait calmly (7)

• Relating to a pronoun referring to both the speaker and the addressee
  

  Counting the extremal elements of a range (9)

• Verbal feature often lumped in with tense and aspect
  

  Emotional state (4)

• Type of word expressing a grammatical relationship without lexical content
  

  Mathematical relation uniquely associating each element of a domain with an element of a range (8)

Send your solution to the editors of SpecGram by September 15, 2021, and you could win some SpecGram merch. The correct solutions and winners will be announced in the upcoming October issue of Speculative Grammarian.

The solution to last issue’s fairly difficult^* domino-themed puzzle, Scriptominoes II, is presented here. The script categories, color-coded for your amusement and edification, are Hangul, Hanzi, Hiragana, Katakana, Khmer, Lao, and Thai.

Each of the puzzlemeisters below will receive some moderately desirable SpecGram merch of their choosing:

Cindy Almond • Vincent Fish • Jang Seo-Joon • Kerstin Werner

Congrats to all!

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