Please explain me sentence

Question

Hello.I have the following sentence.Openings can be, and are, foreshortened in a number of calls.Could someone explain me this please ?Thanks in advance.

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

dhomachevsky
Hello.
I have the following sentence.
Openings can be, and are, foreshortened in a number of calls.
Could someone explain me this please ?
Thanks in advance.

There is no context through which this mysterious sentence can be interpreted.

— maybe if you gave us an idea of where you got it and what, in general, it's about?

CJ

Please do not post the same question more than once. I have deleted your duplicate post.

AlpheccaStars · Answer

dhomachevskyI have the following sentence.

Yes, you copied it from an example in the Cambridge English Dictionary.

dhomachevskyCould someone explain me this please ?

Could someone explain it to me please? (Some learners often use "explain me" which is not what native speakers say.)

It is a sentence taken from the Cambridge Corpus. The Cambridge English Corpus is a multi-billion word collection of written and spoken English. One of the entries is a highly technical article on the linguistic analyses of opening statements (by caller/answerer) from a large corpus of Korean telephone calls.

Second Summonings in Korean Telephone Conversation Openings by Seung-Hee Lee, Language in Society Vol. 35, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 261-283.

I could not get any more context without paying for the article, but here is an extract.

Openings can be, and are, foreshortened in a number of calls. Often callers move to foreshorten the opening by using a particle, ntey, in constructing self-identification.

Why did they pick such an inscrutable sentence? I'll bet there wasn't much choice. The word "foreshorten" is far rarer than heterodoxy, obfuscate, sacristan, feckless and fulminate, and these are pretty rare words.

Please explain me sentence

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