Rules which determine relationships between various features of all languages.
1
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0answers
44 views
Do all tonal languages have tone sandhi?
Tone sandhi is the process by which the nominal tones of syllables or words change based on the surrounding context.
I know that Mandarin Chinese and Thai have tone sandhi - but is this process ...
8
votes
3answers
204 views
Do all languages have sentences?
This is a pretty basic question I guess, but anyway.
Do all (human) languages have sentences?
Most linguistic articles I read assume so, but can we take this as an assumption?
4
votes
2answers
174 views
Why do marked terms exist at all?
According to the definition of markedness, unmarked terms can be consider the "norm". So if there is something more "normal" about using unmarked terms, why would a language have marked terms at all?
...
2
votes
2answers
157 views
Are there agglutinative languages without a propensity for long compound nouns?
I've noticed a propensity for agglutinating languages to also permit quite long compound nouns. Finnish, Turkish and Hungarian certainly have them and I've been finding a few now that I'm trying to ...
6
votes
2answers
263 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 ...
-1
votes
4answers
472 views
Did case systems dissappear to make embedding easier?
I edited this question in response to Karlsson's paper, "Constraints on Multiple Center-Embedding of Clauses" (Journal of Linguistics 43 (2), 2007, 365-392), linked here: ...
10
votes
1answer
143 views
Why do onsets not count for syllable weight in phonological processes?
Whether a syllable has a heavy or light rime is often important in whether it will participate in phonological processes, and whether it will receive stress. For example, in Latin, stress is on the ...
10
votes
3answers
333 views
Languages with a 12th Basic Color Term
Is the 12th Basic Color Term (BCT) always light blue as in Russian “голубой” (goluboy) and Italian “azzurro” or are there languages in which the 12th BCT is different? Which languages have a 12th BCT?
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5
votes
1answer
78 views
Recommendations on the current state of parameters as explanation in acquisition?
In the original P&P model, we had a nice story in which there was supposed to be some finite list of principles and some finite list of parameters, the former constraining hypotheses and the ...
16
votes
2answers
1k views
Why do most words for “mother”, across languages, start with an [m], and for “father” with [p]/[b], but not vice versa?
It has been observed that in general, a word for "mother" tends to be based on a bilabial nasal [m] or similar consonant, and for father it tends to be [b] or [p]. This is found in many language ...
8
votes
1answer
239 views
Are there languages which use the negation of 'odd' to denote 'even'?
This question is influenced by another one I found on the German SE, "Warum nennt man in Deutsch die Zahlen 0, 2, 4 … “gerade” Zahlen?". It asks "Why call Germans the numbers 0, 2, 2 "even".
The ...
4
votes
2answers
216 views
Are there languages with indefinite articles but for which the word for “one” is not related etymologically to any of the indefinite articles?
This is part of a set of three related questions but note they are each specific and distinct, they are not duplicates.
In all the languages I'm familiar with that have an indefinite article, the ...
4
votes
2answers
211 views
Are there languages which lack a full number system but which have an indefinite article?
Most languages have a fully developed concept of numbers but many do not, for instance most Australian Aboriginal languages lack numbers and counting beyond a few such as 1, 2, and 3.
Many languages ...
16
votes
8answers
443 views
Are there grammatical analyses of languages that are extremely different from IE grammar?
It's a fact that the grammar core of most European languages (not only IE ones) can be analysed in a relatively precise common framework. Of course I do not know much of these languages, but the basic ...
5
votes
4answers
214 views
Vocabulary Comparisons Across Languages
Based on my understanding, there is no universal vocabulary across languages, which is fine.
That said, there must be words that have a both highly correlated meanings and levels of usage.
Which ...
9
votes
4answers
263 views
Hierarchy of morphology, auxiliaries, and suppletion of verbal accidents?
I would like to make a hierarchy of verbal accidents that would have the
following features.
For any two accidents in the hierarchy, if a language marks only one
of them by lexical suppletion, it ...
4
votes
0answers
220 views
What is the origin of the “hierarchy of projections”, the language system or (some) conceptual system?
All languages display some form of the hierarchy of projections, to the extent we understand what this is: in a given clause, roughly, complementizers are higher than inflectional heads are higher ...
6
votes
1answer
205 views
What is known about the universal aspects of the relation between intonation and emotion?
Are there language-independent aspects of the expression of emotion by intonation? More specifically, are there established relations between the expression of emotion by linguistic intonation and by ...
5
votes
2answers
250 views
Can the /m/ sound in a 1st person pronoun be considered a linguistic universal?
For example,
english: me, mine, my
Russian: мне, меня, мой
Estonian: mina, mind, mulle
How prevalent is this in world's languages and what should it be attributed to?
19
votes
4answers
333 views
Is the seeming relation between the sound /n/ and negativity purely coincidental?
I have noticed that in many languages, words for "no", negative verb forms, etc. often begin with the sound /n/. Although I understand it is by no means universal, is there any relationship between ...
15
votes
2answers
247 views
Paucal number without singular
I have usually seen the paucal number presented as intermediate between singular and plural in the languages that have it:
singular - just one
paucal - a few
plural - many
However, is there any ...
9
votes
4answers
297 views
Are word classes universal?
I'm working on an application that takes a special database of words and its word class and determines the such from a given sentence. I'm now working to see if word classes that are found in English ...
