Discourse Particle Puns

So, discourse particles are a very common feature in Southeast/East Asian languages. I've encountered studies being done on Singlish discourse particled for example. However, there seems to be nothing on my own native language (Jakartan Indonesian). Neither, I suppose, on KL Malay, for example.

Each of these languages have different discourse particles carrying different meanings, and they are a very huge part of casual communication. Non-native speakers encounter huge difficulty in picking these up, and yes they are linguistically meaningful to denote intent and information regarding the speaker's perception of the listener. The latter usage especially, is a big, BIG part of highly context dependent languages. I believe they deserve more attention in linguistics perhaps as a category of its own.

Just to list a few particles...

Kan, sih(1) sih(2), deh, dong, nah, tuh, lah (1), lah(2), mah, noh, lho, kok, weh, woi, ya, etc.

For people who have no idea how these function, imagine "right" in English, except that the words in themselves mean nothing outside of being used in the context of the conversation. Failure to correctly apply the correct particle might drastically change the intent of the sentence. Japanese also has these (ne, sa, yo, deshou, etc). Singlish examples (ah, what, lah, meh, hor). I think a lot of non-native speakers just handwave these particles as simply a way of expressing emotion without much thought of the rules that govern their usage, and most non-linguist native speakers just understand them intuitively but are unable to describe their function to non-natives, thus perpetuating the idea that there isn't any structural meaning to these particles.

E.g. Kan, loosely translated as "right" implies your listener should have known beforehand what you are saying.

Dong implies suggestion that your opinion is correct and rather politely asks the listener to agree to your statement or request.

Deh implies a change in opinion from your previously expressed opinion, or a change in opinion to accomodate the demands of the listener.

Just wondering whether there's any extentive research done on this, whether in general or for Jakartan in particular, and whether the general linguistics community is aware of it and its importance in communication especially in high context societies.

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), otherwise known as Singlish, is known for having a variety of discourse particles conveying pragmatic meanings. For example, "what" (with low, flat intonation) is used clause-finally to convey that what one has just asserted is an obvious truth, and "meh" (high, flat intonation) is used to convey scepticism. Consider the following conversation:

A: Let's drive to the supermarket. B: Huh? It's very near what, we can just walk there. A: Really meh? We have to walk for at least 15 minutes!

In some sense, I like to think of these discourse/pragmatic particles as being markers of different kinds of speech acts - in this case, "what" marks that speaker B's utterance carries the illocutionary force of a challenge to speaker A's proposal, and "meh" marks that speaker A's 2nd utterance is similarly intended to challenge speaker B's counterproposal by casting doubt as to its feasibility.

Now my question... Would such particles be decomposable into semantic primitives/does it make sense to study them from an NSM framework at all?

I'm assuming that semantically "empty" but pragmatically rich items like this can possibly be broken down into primitives (at least based on their functions), but I'm not sure if it even makes sense to approach pragmatic meaning/these particles using NSM, since on their own without the context of a sentence they are meaningless ("what" is not a pronoun here), even if we can generally sort them by the different functions they carry.

Thank you for your time :)

It's got to the point in learning German where I'm fed up of seeing "doch" everywhere and not understanding it, but there seem to be a million definitions online. The same goes for words like "wohl" and "halt".

Can anyone explain how on Earth some of these modal particles (/discourse markers, what's the difference?) work, or link to any relevant information?

Thanks!

Everyone keeps joking about how they can crash the game with multishot and Mirage. I would like you all to remember the days of infestation survival with 4 Nezhas running Fire-Walker builds.

I did this with 3 buddies the other day, and we all cranked up GPU particles to ludicrous, and changed our energy colors to be different (one horrible green, one orokin blue, one a dark crimson, one a bright yellow). Needless to say, the framerate began to plummet fairly rapidly. Strangely enough, our buddy with the AMD Vega 64 had the best fps at 30 minutes in, while the rest of us had 1070s or 1080s and we're at about 35-40fps, he was sitting at a cozy 75, we went for almost 45 minutes before we finally crashed.

Anyone else miss doing idiotic stuff to try to break the game? Or am I all alone in this?

Mneumonese /noi̯məniz/ is a very particle-heavy language, with particles required to mark the case of each noun, to mark the relationships between clauses, and, in the case of the particles covered in this post, even to handle the movement of the speaking privilege among the participants in a discussion, passing it to and fro between participants, or to an imaginary place where it sits when the group is in comfortable silence.

Here are those eight particles for handling the movement the speaking privilege, shown in analogy table format with the corresponding and quite-related eight motions of chi and eight emotions (with the key/legend block in bold in the center):

For ease of discussion here, let us assume that the consonant these eight particles share is /l/. (Some of you may recall the heavily used particle [pass the speaking privilege] that had the sound /t͡sɛi̯/ in Mneumonese 2 and /ku/ in Mneumonese 3.)

To remove the speaking privilege from the sky when nobody is talking, one would say /la/.

To request the speaking privilege from someone else who currently has it, one would say /lɪ/.

To deny such a request, one would say /le/.

To accept such a request, one would say /ly/.

Or, to only lend the speaking privilege with the expectation of getting it back soon, one would instead say /lo/.

When one is done speaking and is ready to pass the speaking privilege on to someone who is waiting for it, one would say /li/. This is the typical particle one ends speaking with in a dialogue, the pervasive /t͡sɛi̯/ and /koo/ of Mneumonese 2 and 3.

To accept the speaking privilege that has been passed along via /lo/, /ly/, or /li/, one would say /lɒ/ before saying anything else.

And finally, to return the speaking privilege to the sky when one is done talking, one would say /lu/.

...

/lu/.

X-posted fro

Here's one that I just documented from my dialect:

The English discourse particle: "Well,"

Use pattern:

You say|said _(1)_. Well, _(2)_.

In this construction, (2) is a counter argument to (1).

Example: You say that I'm worthless. Well, I'll tell you what, I think you're downright pathetic!

In this construction, (2) is a counter argument to (1).

Note that this may be only a special case of a more general use pattern. More examples of its use will be needed to find the most general definition.

Note also that there may be other senses of the word "well" when used as a discourse particle.

What other discourse particles can you think of and define? Other languages are welcome too!

See original post here.

I find myself in desperate need to use one discourse marker or another – such as the adverb utcumque or the particle at – every second sentence when speaking or writing Latin. They're one of those things you typically pick up from listening to other speakers since it's often tricky to concisely describe their usage. This obviously poses a problem in Latin with its lack of listening material, especially when it comes to informal speech. Of course, this will also come after reading a few thousand pages worth of Roman classics, but I need to express myself somehow in the meanwhile.

For this reason I had to look for written descriptions, and that's where I'd appreciate your help. Googling "discourse markers" results in a large number of neatly organised tables and descriptions for English, and ideally I'd like to find something of the sort for Latin – a place to look for some new options, clarify my understanding of each item and see it used in context. So far I've found this list which only contains links to papers on some particular items or at best a small group of them. The biggest study I've found is this which includes nempe, quippe, scīlicet, vidēlicet and nīmīrum, but even that is very inefficient compared to simply using your own induction and linguistic intuition. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

I am an English language undergrad and currently trying to get my head around this. In particular I am reading this article by Alexandra D'Arcy: http://web.uvic.ca/~adarcy/web%20documents/DArcy-like-Anglistik%20proofs.pdf, on the rise of 'like' in discourse.

Here she states that this is an example of a discourse marker: Like if you’re doing your undergrad, no big deal. Like, it’s not that bad, but like I’m in a professional school.

And that this is a discourse particle: I remember there being like a solar eclipse.

She does go on to explain what the difference is but I'm still having trouble. Can someone explain it to me in really simple terms?

So, I know §3 of Grenoble (2007) "The importance and challenges of documenting pragmatics" (PDF) goes into some of the difficulties and importance of studying discourse particles in under-described languages. But I'm hoping for papers/books/dissertations that mention a methodology or suggestions on analyzing them.

I've come across a few corpus-based studies, and while that's a useful tool to have in your arsenal for languages like English or German or Japanese, it's a bit less useful when you don't have a corpus of spoken dialogue.

Thanks in advance for suggestions!

Hey /r/Unitican! In casual forms of Unitican, there are the discourse/emotive particles 'la' and 'ló', which in turn are directly borrowed from a creole of English, Singlish.

Unlike most other parts of Unitican, these discourse particles utilize tones. The tones are quite varied, and different tones applied on the particles contribute to different meanings. Their functions are similar to adverbs, and therefore are placed at the end of the sentence or phrase, as adverbs are. Let's explore.

La can express several moods, feelings and even formality. They depend on the tone. To make learning easier, I will use an English sentence, instead of a Unitican one.

1. Flat middle tone (3) --> Makes the sentence or rebuttal less harsh, seemingly more polite.
   No la, I did not do that / No, I did not do that la. This compared to the original one would seem less defensive, reassuring the listener that, indeed, I did not do it.

2. Defensive or corrective/justifiable anger--> High falling to Low (5 to 1). Signifies anger at a false accusation or frustration/shock at a ridiculous/unbelievable behavior.
   No, I did not do that la! - Angry that one could even have possibly doubted me for doing it.
   That is not the way you do that la! - Flabbergasted that one could have even possibly considered using that method of approach.
   Then, stop doing it la! - If one knows that continuing down this course of action will result in repeated failure, why are you still doing it?!
   Whatever la! - Do it your way then, since you feel that your way is always better despite my repeated warnings.

3. Middle to middle low (3 to 2, 4 to 2 for emphasis) --> Signifies correction or highlighting obvious course of action whilst being slightly authoritative, yet polite. Can also signify reassurance.
   Since it can be done this way, do it like that la.
   If you still don't understand, tell me la, I won't punish you.
   Let's go drink beer la! - Since we have so much free time and money, let's proceed to do it! The 4 to 2 instead of 3 to 2 tone signifies a "rally" for support, or emphasis on making a point.
   Don't worry, it can be done la. - La here acts to reassure the speaker of consequences.

4. Low flat tone (1) --> Mild frustration or resignation
   *I'm just going to

So while studying japanese recently, i became a bit stumped over the particles Wa and Ga. I understand that they mark topics and subjects but how in gods name do you differenciate between topic and subject?

There has been a recent influx of discourse about Kalam cosmological arguments in this subreddit. After reading through about a hundred comments, I am disappointed with how us atheists are responding to these arguments. In this post I will look at a couple common objections to Craig's Kalam argument found throughout the subreddit, and explain their shortcomings by introducing stronger reasons to think the argument is unsuccessful. This post is quite long and I expect it to be viewed as more of a resource than a traditional debate post. I do not endorse everything here.

Most users are familiar with Craig’s formulation (KCA) so that is where the majority of my focus will be. His syllogism is as follows:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. (Hence) The universe has a cause of its existence.

I would like to note that there are much better versions than KCA being offered. KCA just happens to be quite popular in apologetics, and therefore counter-apologetics, circles. Graham Oppy provides the most compelling and rigorous responses to KCA, so I will primarily be drawing from him. I might pin a comment below this post of further resources to look at for certain topics.

Does Everything That Begins to Exist Have a Cause?

The first premise of KCA is Craig's familiar causal principle: everything which begins to exist has a cause of its existence. A recurring objection to this principle that I found on the subreddit is that "we don’t actually observe things causing other things to begin existing, for supposed each occurrence of this is nothing but the rearrangement of pre-existing matter."

I fail to see the relationship between the first and second clause of this sentence. The advocate of KCA does not suppose that each instance of something “beginning to exist” is the spontaneous generation of matter or energy that did not exist prior to that thing’s beginning to exist. Suppose we say some table begins existing on December 24th. We are not saying that all of the constitutive matter of this table begins to exist on December 24th, we are instead saying something like that all of the constitutive matter of this table becomes arranged to form a table on December 24th.

There is even a streak of mereological nihilism as an attempt to respond to KCA seen when people argue that we haven’t actually observed macrophysical objects such as tables beginning to exist because tables are just some representatio

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Do your worst!

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

They’re on standbi

Pilot on me!!

Re-reading one of my early favourites for the first time and whilst I was not as overawed and overwhelmed by the beauty of Joyce's prose, I feel I've understood and comprehended substantially more of it. Whether this has made for a better quality of reading I do not know, however I do now know more fully the significance of the tundish/funnel confusion, and have been able to appreciate for example the form of the novel, which has Stephen coming to some kind of epiphany near the end of each chapter, which is then undone in the following one (feeling himself to be a a sort of Parnell-like figure fighting for justice after speaking to the rector as a child, to it being made into a joke by his father in Chapter 2 when his conversation with the rector is revealed; Stephen's religious epiphany brought on by the sermon on Hell in Chapter 3 crumbling away in the following one and once again being replaced by another, this time esthetic.) The sermon in Chapter 3 btw is about as terrifying a depiction of Hell as you're ever likely to read.

The free indirect discourse that for the most part the novel is written in leaves all judgement of Stephen to the reader as he is constantly flung between different extremities of thought; he cannot simply turn to religion and try to become a good Christian, instead he becomes an ascetic (an asceticism which brings him no real greater connection to God, and his attempts at mortifying the senses in humility and humbleness towards God eventually become but a physical routine while his mind turns colder and more easily agitated), he can't just be a writer or poet, but must be an artist who forces himself into exile away from Ireland so that he can have unfettered freedom in thought and speech and in being able  to create in the image of his esthetic philosophy. Not only that, but the free indirect discourse serves its purpose for one of the main principles of modernism, that is, to describe things as perceived by the narrator or character, capturing emotions and thoughts, not necessarily the cold-hard facts. Things being described as perceived and not as their objective reality, in a way make them more honest, at least to the fiction they're contained in.

I won't lie, Stephen explaining his esthetic philosophy did have my eyes glazing over a bit, but that's only because I'm personally not that interested in trying to assess, rationalise and explain all that experiencing art or esthetic beauty is, and I did have a couple other smal

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

When I got home, they were still there.

So, I'm from India, and had been an atheist for a long time, primarily because I was not convinced that there is any proof for the existence of God. I was not seriously seeking answers or anything, I just wasn't really bothered then. But during my engineering days, I came across a group that practiced Gaudiya Vaishnavism, which is a subset of Vaishnavism (primarily, the belief that Vishnu or his incarnations are the Supreme Lord). Gaudiya Vaishnavism holds that Krishna is the Supreme Lord, and that Vishnu is one of his expansions. I initially attended their discourses, and through a mixture of somewhat convincing answers, my own newly ignited curiosity, and in general the good quality of the devotees, I took to the practice whole-heartedly. I was then a strict theist for four years, after which I wanted to leave the group, because I found it too restrictive. Restriction in terms of what music one can listen to, in terms of what books that one can read and so on. I found the principles difficult to follow. I was also curious to explore other philosophies such as Western, Buddhism, Shaivism and that too from their own sources, rather than what devotees had to say, because there'll naturally be bias. After I left, I'm still in touch with some of them, and they're more like usual friends, and are not fanatic enough to push their thoughts on me. My position now is that of an agnostic, because I'm not sure whether God exists (including non-scriptural) or not. I'm currently reading Russell's History of Western Philosophy (read till Spinoza) and am going to read Anthony Kenny's next.

So, one of the friends that I'm still in touch with (two years senior to me from my college), is a practicing monk and is open to any sort of questions. He is also learning Sanskrit and in general, I regard him to be more reasonably versed in Vedas than me. I recently had a lot of discussion with him regarding God, Vedas etc. and wanted to hear your take/perspective on this. The questions are by me and answers by him (mostly from memory); I told him to forget that I had been a practicing devotee and answer my questions anew.

Q1. How do you know that there is a God? Where's the evidence for such an entity?

A. Evidence of God can be realized only through personal experience, which is based on faith on God and his word (scriptures). Since God is by definition non-material, we cannot perceive him (let's refer to him for brevity) through our senses or instruments (i.e. through the in

I won't be doing that today!

What's this? GraphiteSwordsman is back with another overthought, overwritten analysis of Avenger's game design? I thought he was done with this game? Yeah, so did I. But I love Spider-Man to my core, and I just had to pop back in and check on the web slinger. And to be honest, I thought he was pretty well designed. Obviously within the parameters of jank that define the game as a whole. But still, pretty decent. I was having a good time with him.

But, the more I played, the more I started to remember all of my issues with the game, and becoming completely disillusioned with how badly it fails to capture the Avengers fantasy it promises all over again. It's like I keep forgetting, and convincing myself it can't have been that bad. Anyway, I was kind of excited for a few days, but I'm already pretty bored again.

As I was playing, I started to realize how much Spider-Man actually provides a great case study for some of the game's issues. So, without any further preamble, here are my thoughts.

Spider-Man's new Webbed status effect is the perfect example of the  problems with the game's status effect system, and highlights exactly how it negatively impacts the game. It does this by doing status effects right, and thereby highlighting how the entire rest of the system is wrong.

Now, I think the reliance on status in this game was weird to begin with. If you asked me to imagine 10 different Avengers games, I'm not sure any of them would feature such a heavy reliance on status effects as a core mechanic.

However, I think there was still a way to do it right. Spider-Man shows us how.

One of my (and many other's) main complaints about the status effects, as implemented in the game, is that they strip away what makes the heroes unique. The appeal of the Avengers is that they are all unique characters with bespoke skills and abilities, who all bring something different to the table. Together, they overcome challenges any single hero couldn't handle, and they do this by having strengths that compensate for each other's weaknesses.

Now obviously this game is limited in scope; we don't have stealth missions for Black Widow, or mass destruction missions for Hulk, for example. Every character is being presented through the lens of a brawler; the thing on display is their combat prowess.

This is fine, as each character still has room to express unique identity through combat. This is shown in the great character kits that CD created. In the sticks, controller in h

[Removed]

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

There hasn't been a post all year!

You take away their little brooms

Why

I find myself in desperate need to use one discourse marker or another – such as the adverb utcumque or the particle at – every second sentence when speaking or writing Latin. They're one of those things you typically pick up from listening to other speakers since it's often tricky to concisely describe their usage. This obviously poses a problem in Latin with its lack of listening material, especially when it comes to informal speech. Of course, this will also come after reading a few thousand pages worth of Roman classics, but I need to express myself somehow in the meanwhile.

For this reason I had to look for written descriptions, and that's where I'd appreciate your help. Googling "discourse markers" results in a large number of neatly organised tables and descriptions for English, and ideally I'd like to find something of the sort for Latin – a place to look for some new options, clarify my understanding of each item and see it used in context. So far I've found this list which only contains links to papers on some particular items or at best a small group of them. The biggest study I've found is this which includes nempe, quippe, scīlicet, vidēlicet and nīmīrum, but even that is very inefficient compared to simply using your own induction and linguistic intuition. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

There has been a recent influx of discourse about Kalam cosmological arguments in this subreddit. After reading through about a hundred comments, I am disappointed with how us atheists are responding to these arguments. In this post I will look at a couple common objections to the arguments found throughout the subreddit, and explain their shortcomings by introducing stronger reasons to think the Kalam arguments fail. This post is quite long and I expect it to be viewed as more of a resource than a traditional debate post. I will add that I do not endorse everything here.

Most users are familiar with Craig’s formulation (KCA) so that is where the majority of my focus will be. His syllogism is as follows:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. (Hence) The universe has a cause of its existence.

I would like to note that there are much better versions than KCA being offered. KCA just happens to be quite popular in apologetics, and therefore counter-apologetics, circles. Graham Oppy provides the most compelling and rigorous responses to KCA, so I will primarily be drawing from him. I might pin a comment below this post of further resources to look at for certain topics.

Does Everything That Begins to Exist Have a Cause?

The first premise of KCA is Craig's familiar causal principle: everything which begins to exist has a cause of its existence. A recurring objection to this principle that I found on the subreddit is that "we don’t actually observe things causing other things to begin existing, for supposed each occurrence of this is nothing but the rearrangement of pre-existing matter."

I fail to see the relationship between the first and second clause of this sentence. The advocate of KCA does not suppose that each instance of something “beginning to exist” is the spontaneous generation of matter or energy that did not exist prior to that thing’s beginning to exist. Suppose we say some table begins existing on December 24th. We are not saying that all of the constitutive matter of this table began to exist on December 24th, we are instead saying something like that all of the constitutive matter of this table becomes arranged to form a table on December 24th.

There is even a streak of mereological nihilism as an attempt to respond to KCA seen when people argue that we haven’t actually observed macrophysical objects such as tables beginning to exist because tables are just some representat

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "