The study of structural features, diversity and commonalities of the world's languages.
2
votes
0answers
46 views
Which prefixing language has the most speakers?
Most if not all national or widely spoken languages with an inflecting or agglutinating typology do all of their inflecting at the end of the word. These are called "suffixing languages".
This is ...
2
votes
1answer
68 views
Are there any specific traits in Italian which make it different from other Romance languages?
Although Wikipedia says 'the grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages', I suppose some ancient Italic (or perhaps even pre-italic) traits might prevail.
I am especially curious about ...
0
votes
0answers
29 views
Is there a correspondence between contextual semantics and the type of language?
Most of the isolating languages I am familiar with have context-bound semantics either in division into parts of speech (e.g. Chinese) or word meaning (Yoruba), or both (Chinese, again). E.g., in ...
0
votes
1answer
49 views
Constituents of language
Suppose we take the view that language is a tool for communication. What would be the basic, or essential, constituents of a language?
Some examples that come to mind:
a set of words
a set ...
0
votes
0answers
41 views
Are languages of different types described by different structures in language trees?
This thought occured to me after having a closed question read here. I drew five language trees for a same sentence rendered in five different languages, and the result was quite interesting.
...
2
votes
1answer
109 views
Are there any languages with verbs that require more than three arguments?
Are there any languages some of whose verbs require more than three arguments? I was thinking of causative constructions, such that "Mike had John give Sally the ring" could be expressed with one ...
0
votes
0answers
27 views
Are there any languages in which all or almost all verbs take only one argument?
Are there any languages in which all or almost all verbs take only one argument? For example, is there a language in which the patient is expressed with an adjunct whose omission results in, say, a ...
0
votes
0answers
42 views
Is there any universal semantic coding for noun cases similar to verb aspectology?
I am aware of the argument/actant theories, but perhaps there is something like universal semantical coding for the nouns as well.
For Argument concepts,you can see the relevant Wikipedia page for ...
0
votes
1answer
92 views
How do we know how many languages exist?
I've read that between 3000 and 6000 languages are spoken on Earth. My question is the following: how do people calculate that number?
2
votes
1answer
189 views
Are there any languages that are more analytic than English other than Afrikaans in the Indo-European family?
Are there any languages that are more analytic than (or as analytic as) English other than Afrikaans in the Indo-European family?
-1
votes
1answer
108 views
What are the job opportunities in linguistics? [closed]
I like learning new languages so I am curious in getting a degree in linguistics.
What kind of jobs are available as a linguist?
What are the opportunities available in this field?
From what I am ...
6
votes
0answers
90 views
Which indigenous languages have marked Ancestral/Mythological Past in grammars?
I have found a mention on such a system among some South American native languages in Adam Jacot de Boinod's book 'I Never New There's A Word For It'.
Non-academic reading, which doesn't make it ...
14
votes
6answers
368 views
In languages with grammatical gender, how do they determine the gender when a new word has been created?
In languages with grammatical gender that has (almost) no morphological relation between the words and the genders(e.g. French), how do they determine the gender of a new word that has been ...
2
votes
1answer
73 views
A syntactic approach to possessives
I am currently writing an essay in linguistic typology on possessives. I got stuck in the last part, in which I am supposed to present a syntactic approach to the structure of possessives. I should ...
4
votes
0answers
131 views
Word order typology in Germanic
I am not a native speaker of English, but I study English and Dutch. I have noticed that the two languages differ in their degree of flexibility. The following sentence, for example, is not acceptable ...
1
vote
0answers
91 views
What does the abreviation INFLNFL stand for and what is the difference between INFLNFL and INFL?
What does the abreviation INFLNFL stand for? What is the meaning of INFLNFL and where does it appear in the syntactic tree-construction?
3
votes
0answers
82 views
Dimensions of a verb
A single verb usually describes an action or state --the common dimension of verb among languages.
But in addition to that it may convey more information e.g. tense, person, gender of subjective, ...
5
votes
2answers
504 views
What language are the most similar to English?
I speak English and Bengali with similar proficiency, at least in the 'lower' registers of the languages. Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having ...
2
votes
1answer
243 views
What is the difference between syllable-timing and stress-timing?
From what I've heard, syllable-timed languages have syllables of equal length throughout each breath-group (i.e. bit of spoken discourse said in one breath), and stress-timed languages have ...
1
vote
0answers
108 views
What are some theoretical motivations for do-support?
I've been attempting to put together an overview of the various theoretical motivations that have been proposed for do-support in the literature, but the topic has been frustratingly difficult to ...
2
votes
1answer
89 views
Citations for morpheme/word counts?
(Edited to provide context and clarify what I'm interested in)
Context: I am reading a paper that involves comparing German, Dutch, and English. German is the outlier for the phenomena and measures ...
10
votes
2answers
130 views
About how much does language typology correlate with genetic relationships among languages?
About how much does language typology correlate with genetic relationships among languages? For example, should we expect most Sino-Tibetan languages to be isolating, or most Indo-European languages ...
7
votes
4answers
267 views
How usual is it for languages to have both prepositions and postpositions?
It has seemed to me (though I might be wrong) that languages usually take either prepositions (English, German, Spanish) or postpositions (Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish). (Yes I know sometimes a ...
4
votes
1answer
159 views
Where is Welsh on the analytic/synthetic spectrum?
I believe it's traditionally been held to be more on the synthetic side of the spectrum, but why? Are there any quantitative analyses to back this up?
8
votes
2answers
389 views
Gender of mixed groups defaulting to masculine – how common?
French has that rule that whenever a masculine entity is part of a group, the whole NP will default to masculine as far as agreement goes. My native language, German, also defaults gender to ...
3
votes
1answer
307 views
Distinction between definiteness and specificity
May I have an example of a language which separately marks definiteness and specificity (or indefiniteness and non-specificity), and also a principled way for deciding which of the two sets of terms ...
7
votes
1answer
204 views
Consonant length-differences by prominence
In a language I am studying I have just noticed a significant but subtle difference in the length of [f] segments in tonic versus atonic syllables (an ~50ms difference which is statistically ...
6
votes
2answers
255 views
Are there any “universal” aspects to “adjective sequence”
Whilst it's by no means a "fixed rule", it seems to me the normal sequence for multiple adjectives applied to a single noun/verb in English does indeed tend to correspond to the top answer given in ...
20
votes
8answers
558 views
What is word order used for in “free word order” languages?
Consider languages whose case-systems allow the order of arguments to be changed without changing the arguments’ grammatical relations. (Note the 189 languages noted as having “no dominant ...
6
votes
1answer
147 views
Is there a proposed parameter of 'copula-drop'?
There is a property of languages with respect to copula (a verb 'to be' to mark equivalent thing): the copula may be necessary, or prohibited (and more complex mixtures of necessary and prohibited.
...
7
votes
2answers
150 views
Uniformitarianism in diachronic typology
Croft 2003 argues that "the typological universals discovered in contemporary languages should also apply to ancient and reconstructed languages" (the so called uniformitarian hypothesis, p. 233). How ...
5
votes
5answers
192 views
Traits that are common in the Americas and rare elsewhere
I'm looking for examples of typological traits that are common in languages of the Americas and rare in languages elsewhere. Traits could be at any level of description — phonological, ...
2
votes
1answer
65 views
Do we have any idea how widespread NPIs are?
Most languages have words that function as negative polarity items. Is this believed to be true of all human languages? Are there specific languages that have been plausibly claimed not to have any ...
9
votes
1answer
122 views
What's a simple example of how Mongolian is radically dependent-marking?
In Johanna Nichols' book Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, I came across the passage on page 146, where she asserts that Japanese, Mongolian, Dyirbal, and Yawelmani are all radically ...
7
votes
3answers
411 views
What are the alternate morphological typologies to isolating, agglutinative, fusional, polysyntehtic, etc.?
The above typology seems to also be called "Humboldt-Schleicherian".
While reading this answer in the question "Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when ...
24
votes
4answers
440 views
Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?
What's the difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken? According to my understanding, agglutinative languages typically join prefixes and suffixes extensively.
For ...
2
votes
3answers
548 views
German is SOV: should it not have been “Ich ein Berliner bin”?
German is typically described as a Subject-Object-Verb language. For former American President Kennedy's mistake to be grammatical (i.e. without the indefinite article "ein"), why should it not have ...
7
votes
5answers
186 views
What are the different ways in which languages express the notion of passivity?
In English, the passive is expressed by the use of an auxiliary and past participle. The agent is demoted to an optional by-phrase, and the theme/patient is promoted to the subject position.
Rome ...
4
votes
1answer
289 views
How common is word order change?
During the course of their development, the word order of some languages change. Examples include Latin (SOV) that changed to SVO in the Romance languages, Proto-Austronesian (verb initial) that ...
7
votes
0answers
272 views
Which languages have zero markers of comparative degree that coexist with non-zero comparative markers?
The zero comparative marker and the non-zero one should be more or less interchangeable. (The etymology of the non-zero marker doesn't matter.)
(A message asking to list such languages was originally ...
4
votes
0answers
242 views
Comparative markers coming from low degree markers (“attenuatives”)? (List such languages.)
Which languages have a marker of the comparative degree of adjectives that coincides with a marker of a low degree? ...or which has evolved from such a low degree marker?
(A message asking for the ...
9
votes
2answers
2k views
What's the difference between accusative, unaccusative, ergative, and unergative?
What does it mean for a language or verb to be one or the other of these typologies (examples would help)? Can it be more than one at once?
PS I wasn't sure whether this would be better classified as ...
9
votes
1answer
147 views
Are there any databases of geographical language distribution?
I'm wondering whether anyone knows of any machine parsable database of the geographical distribution of natural languages (for example the geographical distribution of (native) speakers)?
I know WALS ...
10
votes
6answers
1k views
What's the global difference between nouns and verbs?
Is there a way to distinguish nouns and verbs that applies to all languages?
This problem has been occupying my mind for some time now. I'm not quite sure how to approach this question, so I'll just ...
12
votes
4answers
347 views
Why do tone and simple syllable structure appear to be correlated?
I happen to have been struggling to learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese lately, and it's been my first attempt to really deal with tones to any significant extent. I find distinguishing tones quite ...
7
votes
2answers
129 views
Are there some analyses or linguists with the view that Chinese does not have lexical word class?
I'm not a linguist but a language enthusiast and I read lots of stuff about all languages mostly on the internet in blogs but also in accessible books and sometimes attempt to read some things not ...
3
votes
1answer
69 views
Is there a database of interlinear glosses of subordination-examples?
I'm currently investigating the typology of subordination, or to be more precise adverbial subordination, and would like to see the data that the existing analyses, like for instance Cristofaro (2005) ...
6
votes
2answers
304 views
Are any of the isolating languages of East Asia showing signs of gaining inflections?
It's generally accepted that languages go through a cycle of changes to their morphological type.
English is losing its inflectional endings and becoming more isolating/analytic.
But what about the ...
7
votes
1answer
278 views
Relationship between SOV word order and osV prefixes
I've been reading about the Native American language isolate Washo, and looking at the Universals Archive. If an ergative language is SOV, the object and subject affixes will be prefixes and the main ...
7
votes
3answers
172 views
Is there a term for the theory that languages move from one morphological typology to the next in a fixed cycle?
There is a well known theory, widely accepted that as languages evolve their morphological typology changes through the same usual steps.
The major steps are I think isolating or analytic, inflected, ...
