[MENTION=5388]CrystalViolet[/MENTION], [MENTION=360]prplchknz[/MENTION] -
i was also in speech therapy for a month or two, but i was somewhere between five and seven. i didn't learn to talk until i was 3.5, almost four, because of a neurological disorder that was eventually diagnosed as cerebral palsy (it was not 100 percent certain and i made a complete recovery, owing to the efforts of my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother). when i did, i started to use full sentences almost at once and, as my mom put it, "erupted". she used to call me chatterbox or motormouth - i am told i could talk loudly and excitedly for hours, and i guess it must have been incredibly hard to shut me up.
but i still pronounced the "l" sound after broad/hard vowels as identical to the "y" in "young" and couldn't manage the rolling "r". it became guttural, more similar to the rhotic sound in german or yiddish.
my parents took me to a speech therapist, who made me lie on a couch and inserted a strange tool underneath my tongue - it looked like a long spoon with a wooden ball attached to the end. i was told to expel my breath in a specific way to make it vibrate against the lower side of my tongue. i didn't like this because i would get dizzy with hyperventilation and the sessions could last an hour or two each, so it was difficult to stand up afterward. but once the sessions were over, the speech defect was gone.
Telling me the trash is overflowing is not the same as telling me to take out the trash, it's only a hint at such so don't act like it was something I was actually told
this is the exact thing i can have trouble with. if someone says, "it is cold in here" - or, as in your example, "the trash is overflowing" - my first instinctive impulse is to understand it as a statement of fact. now, with more social experience and several comprehensive courses in pragmatics, i am aware that people may not say what they mean in situations like those, so i can arrive at the additional meaning rationally. "one usually wouldn't state the obvious without a reason. it's colder than usual in this room because the window is open. this should be connected to the window, then. does this person want me to close it?" but it's not natural for me, and feels forced.
during one of our pragmatics classes, the tutor illustrated this with the following example. she said: imagine a situation where you are sitting on a bench and eating a cucumber. someone sits down next to you and asks, it is not a chocolate egg that you are eating, is it? how would you interpret it?
i was perplexed and couldn't think of a response until she told us that the person would be (supposedly) asking for part of the cucumber. but that did not explain much. i still could not understand why one would want to go to such a length - the sentence sounded outlandish, and i couldn't imagine who on earth could say that or where. it seemed a little dishonest, too, an attempt to be selfish and rude (or what one would perceive as that) without appearing to be such. i thought, i would rather that person asked outright - not sure about others, but i would not have found anything objectionable about it. or, if one does believe one is acting in a rude or unacceptable manner, then why do so at all? just be silent.
in the end i would probably give them the cucumber. but only to make them stop asking bizarre irrelevant questions. or because, now that we had started to talk about the cucumber, it would sound like a good idea to snap it in half and share.
to be honest, i suspect that i was not the only person in the class who had this reaction.
To this day, I still cannot understand "quarter after" and "quarter till". I'm like "Just tell me the time!"
i couldn't understand it either as a child but i am not sure when this stopped - possibly when i was fifteen or sixteen. those two expressions made me stumble over them. i first had to remember that "a quarter past seven" meant i had to think about that actual hour, whereas "a quarter to seven" meant i had to think of the hour before that; then i had to visualize a clock face with the hour hand on seven and the minute hand on fifteen, or with the hour hand on six and the minute hand on forty-five, respectively. may have had to do something else too. the result was that when my mom (who taught me english) would ask me to translate the time using one of these expressions, i would experience a sort of mental emptiness and just stare.