Questions tagged [speech]
Questions about spoken English.
518 questions
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Declarative question vs midsentence auxiliary ellipsis
'Declarative questions' are often used when the speaker thinks he/she
knows or has understood something, but wants to make sure or express
surprise (not normally possible after a question word: Where'...
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Is using the phrase "life expectancy " in the phrase below right?
I saw this text in a chat : "Mostly old and frail people are among those who die because of the heat, people who have a low life expectancy anyway. How many Europeans die each summer? 2.3 million ...
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Does an adverbial form of "opposite" (usable syntactically similarly to "not") exist?
Context
When others utilise adjectives without a direct, antonymous counterpart (referred to as "unpaired words" by Wikipedia), [1] I frequently see "not" erroneously prepended, in ...
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Whispered voiced sibilant fricatives / z ʒ / (e.g., cee vs zee)
Are whispered voiced sibilant fricatives devoiced to the point of being indistinguishable from their (whispered) voiceless counterparts, /s ʃ/ ?
For example, Asher = azure, mesher = measure, buses = ...
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Is the word "suddenly" really less used in casual conversation than the phrase “all of a sudden”?
According to Google's historic word count of written English, the word "suddenly" is being at the moment used about 200 times more than the phrase "all of a sudden".
How come then ...
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Translation or equivalent feature to using an pronoun to highlight interest like with the French « arrête-moi ça » in colloquial speech?
– [Annoying behavior]
– Arrête ça ! [Stop that!]
– [Annoying behavior, again]
– Arrête-moi ça !
In French a pronoun can be used in colloquial speech to highlight the interest or importance of the ...
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How was the year spoken in late 1800s England?
Would it have been as we do today, for example, 1889 as Eighteen-Eighty-Nine, or something else, such as Eighteen Hundred Eighty Nine, or Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-Nine?
Also curious about years in ...
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How to pronounce "en caul" correctly
I previously posted in Linguistics, but was directed here as a better place for this question. Here is the original content from my linguistics post.
My wife works in childbirth, and she learned to ...
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Term for pronouncing every letter, like t in water
Native USA English speakers frequently skip (or elide?) certain letters, like the t in water, and modify others.
What is a term for someone who (self-consciously?) pronounces every voiceable letter?
P....
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What part of speech is 'really' when it is spoken in a sentence on its own?
The word 'really' can be spoken in two ways, in a sentence on its own.
Either in enthusiastic, and appreciative belief :
You can run a hundred meters in 13 seconds. Really ?
Or in cynical, one ...
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Are there any other out-loud-slashers here?
Native speaker (American English): I say "slash" out loud sometimes in place of "and" or "or," and an example sentence that is natural in my idiolect is "When slash ...
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How do I read aloud a range of years with a slash?
How do I read "During the 2002/2003 season" out loud? Should I say the word "slash" or replace it with “and” or "to"?
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Does this direct speech need a question mark? [duplicate]
I have this direct speech:
"What's in the bag?"
"Let me go!", said John.
"What's in the bag, I said!"
Does the last line need a question mark and if so, should it be ...
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What will be the passive voice sentences for these sentences? [closed]
How many men are there?
How much milk he buys?
There are books.
It is a toy.
Books are there.
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Is English really a non-tonal language?
The British Council Teaching English site says:
English is not a tonal language – i.e. pitch changes in words do not change meanings. Patterns of pitch changes (intonation patterns) are [instead] ...
