#constituency

[plusvoice]

Dependency and Constituency

Some quick notes on dependency and constituency relationships

[divinemercymeditation]

Catholic MP Sir David Amess stabbed to death at constituency surgery

Catholic MP Sir David Amess stabbed to death at constituency surgery

Image caption: Sir David Amess on the Tributes are being paid to Sir David Amess, a Catholic MP stabbed to death at his constituency surgery in Essex. He was knifed repeatedly by a man who sprinted into Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea shortly after 12 noon and died in hospital three hours later. Police arrested a 25-year-old man at the scene on suspicion of murder and have said they…

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[thelingspace]

What can silence tell us about the syntax of a sentence? How do we know what meaning to fill in when words are missing? In this week's episode, we talk about ellipsis: what rules are at work to tell us how to use it, how sentence structure plays into what words we can leave out, and whether words are even missing at all, or just hiding.

We’re really glad to be back and sharing stuff with you all again! Looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

[lingthusiasm]

Gretchen: You know how in chemistry you can add drops of a known chemical to a mystery liquid and see if it turns green? Lauren: This is us getting our linguist lab coats on. Gretchen: Like, if it turns purple, it’ll tell you whether it’s an acid or a base. In the same way, there's stuff you can add to sentences that’s a known quantity that behaves in certain ways around constituents, which will tell you about the structure of your sentence. Lauren: We don’t have something like a Large Hadron Collider to show you around. Gretchen: More like a Large Hadron Constituencer! Lauren: Haha, unfortunately we haven’t built one of those to smash words and phrases into each other. But that’s why linguistics is really cool, because you don’t even need the imaginary lab coats that we’re wearing right now, you just need some linguistic intuitions and you can do the science. Gretchen: You can do the science right now with no fancy equipment!  Lauren: In the privacy of your own mouth! Gretchen: In the privacy of your own home, you too can do the science, you don’t need test tubes or safety goggles. Lauren: Try this at home! Gretchen: Do try this at home, it’s okay, it won’t break anything. Lauren: Other than some rules of constituency. Gretchen: No constituents were harmed in the making of this experiment. Lauren: There are a whole range of constituency tests that linguists use to figure out whether something as a constituent or not and these are often language dependent. Some of them you can use in a lot of languages, others are really specific to a particular language.  Gretchen: The core idea of a constituency test is you want to say ‘I’ve got a sentence and I’ve got a couple words in this sentence--’ Lauren: Any individual word is going to be a constituent because you could say it by itself if you want, so that’s not very interesting Gretchen: But if you’ve got two words or three words or five words, and you want to say ‘Are these words functioning together as a unit or is there some break between them?’ Within a sentence, you’re going to have some groups of words that are more influenced by each other and some that aren’t. What we’re doing is saying ‘okay here’s a group of words that we’re wondering about. Let’s put it through a bunch of other contexts where we know that things that are units do act together and if this one does that too then it is a constituent, and if it doesn’t do that too then it’s not. Lauren: We need a test subject. Gretchen: I think we should use ‘time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.’ Lauren: That is a very excellent set of guinea pigs to bring into the lab space. Gretchen: Because this will give us some contrast. Let's say we want to find out if ‘time flies’ is operating together as a single unit, and we will also want to see if ‘fruit flies’ is the same kind of unit.

Excerpt from Episode 9 of Lingthusiasm: The bridge between words and sentences - Constituency. Listen to the full episode here or on iTunes, read the transcript, or check out more links to learn about constituency in the shownotes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[thetynwald-blog]

Hello what are constituencies please

Hi there,

Constituencies are geographical areas in the UK which are each home to roughly 70,000 eligible voters. Together there are 650 constituencies which cover all of the land in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each constituency has one seat/MP representing them in Parliament. When an individual votes in a General Election they are voting for a candidate who is seeking to represent their constituency. 

[wat3rm370n]

Who is this big tent for exactly?

My letter to my Democratic party reps of all levels and the local Democratic Party orgs: 

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” - Justice Louis Brandeis. Do you want me in your so-called big tent or not? Because there’s not room for me in any tent littered with the corruption of tycoons and industry taking up the entire square footage. You can't have dirty money and my vote. You must choose. 

Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.

[oxford-dictionary-offical]

Word of the day:

Constituency

Noun

A body of voters in a specified area who elect a representative to a legislative body. 

"The politician who wishes to remain in the good graces of his constituency" 

[BRITISH] An area whose voters elect a representative to a legislative body. 

A body of customers or supporters. 

"A constituency of racing fans"

[nsemkekanews]

Ablekuma North: Valerie Sawyerr urges EC to rerun outstanding constituency polls - Nsemkeka

Ablekuma North: Valerie Sawyerr urges EC to rerun outstanding constituency polls – Nsemkeka Presidential Advisor for Governmental Affairs, Dr Valerie Esther Sawyerr, has called on the Electoral Commission (EC) to rerun elections at 62 polling stations in the Ablekuma North Constituency. She insists that the collation process in those areas was compromised and lacks legitimacy. In a strongly…

Ablekuma North: Valerie Sawyerr urges EC to rerun outstanding constituency polls - Nsemkeka