User:Nil Einne/Sandbox
Recently featured: Virus – Murray Chotiner – Chinese classifier
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the sixth feature film in the Star Trek science fiction franchise. It was released in 1991 by Paramount Pictures, and is the last of the Star Trek films to include the entire core cast of the 1960s Star Trek television series. After an ecological disaster leads to two longstanding enemies—the Federation and the Klingon Empire—brokering a tenuous truce, the crew of the USS Enterprise-A must prevent war from breaking out on the eve of universal peace. Faced with producing a new film in time for Star Trek's 25th anniversary, Denny Martin Flinn and Nicholas Meyer, the director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, wrote a script based on a suggestion from Leonard Nimoy about what would happen if "the wall came down in space", touching on the contemporary topic of the Cold War. Principal photography took place between April 1991 and September 1991. The production budget was smaller than anticipated due to the critical and commercial failure of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Due to a lack of sound stage space on the Paramount Pictures lots, many scenes were filmed around Hollywood. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry died shortly before the movie's premiere. The Undiscovered Country garnered positive reviews, with publications praising the lighthearted acting and tongue-in-cheek references. The film performed strongly at the box office, and earned two Academy Award nominations, for Best Makeup and Best Sound Effects. (more...)
Recently featured: Virus – Murray Chotiner – Chinese classifier
In Chinese, classifiers are words that must be used whenever a noun is modified by a number or a demonstrative such as "this" and "that". There are as many as 150 different classifiers, and many nouns are associated with certain ones—for example, flat objects such as tables use the classifier zhāng, whereas long objects such as lines use tiáo. How exactly these classifier–noun associations are formed has been a subject of debate, with some linguists proposing that they are based on innate semantic features (e.g., all nouns with "long" features use a certain classifier), and others suggesting that they are motivated by analogy to prototypical pairings (e.g., dictionaries and textbooks use whatever the more general noun "book" uses). There is also, however, a "general classifier", gè, which can be used in place of the specific classifiers; in informal speech, this one is used far more than any other. Furthermore, speakers often choose to use only a bare noun, dropping both the classifier and the number or demonstrative preceding it; therefore, some linguists believe that classifiers are used more for pragmatic reasons, such as foregrounding new information, rather than for strict grammatical reasons. (more...)
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