Refers either to tentative or speculative theories, or abstract, usually mathematical, theories focused more on explanation and generalization than application
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What is a language? [duplicate]
How can we simply define a language ?
Can we say that a language is an association of a lexicon and a grammar ?
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1answer
52 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 ...
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1answer
95 views
Linguistic analysis
Is linguistic analysis scientific, or is it a pseudo-science? Would evidence based on it be allowed in a courtroom, for example?
I wrote something that was completely honest and open, but the person ...
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0answers
48 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 ...
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0answers
63 views
A list of postgraduate programs for Mathematical/Computational Linguistics [closed]
Following what I posted here, I would like to ask for your opinion on postgraduate programs in Mathematical or Computational Linguistics. I want to stress that I am open to postgraduate programs both ...
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3answers
173 views
Mathematical preparation for postgraduate studies in Linguistics
I posted this question in http://math.stackexchange.com/ and it was suggested to me that it would be a good idea to submit the question here, too, as there might be more specialists on the matter.
I ...
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1answer
119 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
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1answer
140 views
Why does there seem to be so much disagreement among linguists?
To put it another way, how much is there that all linguists would be willing defend as correct knowledge about linguistics?
I have just finished taking an introductory course in linguistics. One ...
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2answers
60 views
Link betwen Austronesian and Salishan families
In the Wikipedia article "Dené–Yeniseian languages", it mentions about
His [Vajda's] conclusion was that, contrary to prevailing belief,
such structures are often preserved intact with little ...
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1answer
61 views
Short Theory of mind paper [closed]
I have to write a short paper on theory of mind, and I'm really stock. We have been told that we should, since it's a short paper of max. 3 pages, concentrate on an aspect of the subject. Our ...
5
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1answer
138 views
Why hasn't functional grammar been more popular?
It’s nearly 30 years since Michael Halliday first published ‘An Introduction to Functional Grammar’ and yet, at least in Britain and in the United States, functional grammar seems not to have entered ...
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0answers
62 views
Formal approaches to Russian word order
What are the known formal approaches to Russian (or similar languages) word order? I'd expect something expressed in terms of exteded DRT or similar formalism.
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1answer
257 views
Why exactly is *“I Am America (And So Can You!)” ungrammatical?
Stephen Colbert wrote a book entitled “I Am America (And So Can You!)”. As discussed in a question on English Language and Usage, the title is an intentionally strange way of saying "I am America, and ...
6
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1answer
134 views
(Proto-)Uralic case and number morphology
I've read that Proto-Uralic and some modern Uralic languages don't mark number on nouns marked for case.
So that, singular and plural is only distinguished in nominative (and maybe accusative?) case, ...
4
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1answer
175 views
Why did generative linguists abandon the notion of kernel sentences?
I've had a hard time finding answers to this question on Ixquick.
When I was young, transformational grammarians believed that sentences were derived from "kernel sentences," which were ...
3
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1answer
55 views
What does a dictionary need so that a computer can use it to determine the grammaticality of a given string?
I would imagine that it would need a full list of all the forms of all the words, but how much information would need to be told to the computer about each word in order for it to know enough to judge ...
8
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1answer
259 views
What defines a unique writing style?
I'm an amateur writer that happens to be a professional programmer.
I say this because I've recently jumped back into a personal research project in which the goal is to automate the de-anonymization ...
5
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1answer
136 views
Computational models of language acquisition
What are currently used computational models/frameworks of language acquisition?
Desired features:
models that are biologically plausible (such as neural networks).
Personally, I have used ...
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3answers
282 views
Are 'cot' and 'cat' morphologically similar?
Can we say that words like 'cot' and 'cat' morphologically similar? I understand morphology as different forms of a particular word, eg. swim, swam, swimming, so my definition of morphology does not ...
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2answers
224 views
What are the motivations for which direction syntactic trees are built in (top down or bottom up)?
When I learned x-bar theory, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that trees were built top-down, from IP or CP to the VP and its complement, etc. However, as I am learning more about Minimalism ...
10
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1answer
145 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 ...
8
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3answers
621 views
Positive uses of vagueness and ambiguity in language
Background
The two common explanations for vagueness/ambiguity in language come from Zipf and Chomsky, and both seem to inherently assume that vagueness/ambiguity do not serve a positive purpose.
...
3
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3answers
171 views
Is there a term for “the number of words that must follow a given word to complete a phrase”?
I've been struggling, for a couple of months now to find the term for a concept from computational linguistics. It means something like: the minimum number of words that need to be placed after a ...
9
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3answers
206 views
General mathematical frameworks of language acquisition since Gold
Gold's theorem on the unlearnability of certain sets of languages (among them context-free ones) made several assumptions in its modeling of learning a language:
At each time step the learner ...
6
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1answer
220 views
Is there serious scientific evidence/vindication for the “linguistic fingerprint” concept?
I was reading a BBC article about "linguistic fingerprints". In my opinion a quite interesting idea, but there seems to exist a dispute in linguistic scientific community according to Wikipedia, how ...
7
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1answer
176 views
In languages with quotative markers, is extraction allowed out of quotative-marked clauses?
That is, is there a language that allows the following type of movement
WH1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1
DP-TOP1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1
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1answer
79 views
What is the technical way to talk about patterns that work sometimes vs. those that work always?
To say that John ate something, you say John ate (something), and it's always grammatical. To talk about the state or time of filling some role, you append -hood or -ship, as in womanhood, but for ...
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1answer
239 views
Is our mental lexicon structured like a tag-cloud system or hierarchical?
Thinking about this discussion on meta i was reasoning about simple self-experiments you can do in psycholinguistics, where you dont need great background knowledge in Cognitive Psychology or ...
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2answers
251 views
How do computational linguists abstractly represent a language?
When building models of the evolution of languages or similar phenomena where many different languages are involved and change over time, how do computational linguists abstractly model a language?
...
3
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2answers
207 views
Examples of physical signs adding content to conversation?
I love constructed languages, especially in fiction where I get a taste of constructed culture to go with it. One interesting idea that has popped up a few times in what I've been reading is the idea ...
9
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3answers
371 views
What are the criteria that distinguish clitics/particles from affixes?
This question inspired me to finally ask a question that has been bothering me for years: how does one distinguish clitics and/or particles from affixes, especially when those clitics are ...
7
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1answer
118 views
Are there creoles of three languages?
Are there examples of creole languages that have had three or more other languages as parents without intermediate two-language creoles? If they exist, then how high is the 'or more', i.e. what is the ...
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5answers
251 views
What evolution framework best describes the change between languages over time?
Language change and the evolution of languages can be seen as an evolutionary process. Human brains form the environment that constrains language. Language acquisition provides the replication, ...
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7answers
681 views
Is the very concept of the phoneme disputed?
I believe there was some important research published in recent decades which brought a fundamental change to the way linguists think about phonemes.
Or is it that the concept of the phoneme has ...
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5answers
295 views
What has NLP/CL brought to the table of pencil-and-paper linguistics?
What role do NLP (natural language processing) and/or CL (Computational linguistics) play in today's theoretical linguistics?
Does, for instance, computability and formal specification play a big ...
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6answers
745 views
What are some alternatives to Chomskian generative grammar?
What are the other common approaches to study syntax?
Note: the source is an example question from the on-topic question list in Area51.
