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YukiKanda Posted 8 years ago
Essay & Composition Writing

Proofread a 300-word essay?

Hi everyone, I'm planning to apply for a scholarship, and I need some help with my essay that must be submitted for the application.

Maybe it's a little technical, but I've avoided using jargon as much as I can.

I'll appreciate it if you point out grammatical problems.

Thank you in advance.


I am planning to pursue a linguistic concept called evidentiality, a significant aspect of Arawakan languages, and propose that English is also relevant to it. This notion is widely defined as the ways in which linguistic information is acquired (e.g. visual recognition, inference, and hearsay). However, it is not straightforward to justify the proposal because unlike Tariana, English does not have a single word that functions to mark evidentiality. If one wishes to manifest it, she has to rely on adverbial expressions such as I hear (for hearsay), and I infer (for an inference). This could also imply that English is irrelevant to the concept after all. However, there is empirical evidence that it does have a relevance to languages like English as well at the level of grammar, if we consider a construction called Copy Raising. To illustrate this, let us first consider the sentence Your house sounds like nobody enjoys cleaning *(it). As indicated by the asterisk, this sentence will be ungrammatical if there is no pronoun coreferential with the matrix subject (i.e. Your house). On the other hand, there are also cases in which similar constructions appear to be grammatical; for example, You sound like Tibetans are healthier than us. Concerning this asymmetry, I propose that evidentiality is the factor that influences the occurrence conditions of the coreferential pronoun. As a motivation for this proposal, in the first example, the information related to Your house must have been obtained through a non-firsthand method such as hearsay and inference, not through a firsthand method such as visual recognition or direct interaction. Contrary to this, the second example is required to be interpreted that the information concerning You has been acquired in a firsthand way, otherwise it is impossible to utter the sentence. These strongly suggest that the concept of evidentiality (i.e. source of information) works also in English.

  

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Sorry I forgot to tell you something, this is my research proposal.

  • Sorry I forgot to tell you something, this is my research proposal.
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2 Answers
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Sorry I forgot to tell you something, this is my research proposal.

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I am planning to pursue (research, examine, study) a linguistic concept called evidentiality, a significant aspect of Arawakan languages, and propose that English is also relevant to it. (it is also relevant to English grammar?) This notion

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