Questions tagged [conjunctions]
The conjunctions tag has no usage guidance.
39 questions
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Do conjunctions like "and" ever become grammaticalized into plural morphemes?
If so, what are some examples of this having occurred?
For instance, take a scenario where "X-and-X" is a common expression of plurality, as in English emphatic quantitative expressions like ...
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What grammatical number is assigned to noun phrases formed by the conjunction "and"?
In a language with number agreement on determiners, would the phrase "the good boy and girl" have an adjective and article that is marked as plural since "the" and "good" ...
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Can a complementizer (C) take two complements (COMPS)?
The 1997 paper "English Relative Clause Constructions" by Ivan A. Sag has these diagrams:
(53) shows a diagram of to go to the UK, and (54) of for them to go to the UK. In (54), ...
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The analysis of 'for NP to VP' in HPSG
This is from a paper titled "What for?" by Bas Aarts:
(35) [NP It [S′ [COMP for] [S Mary see his relatives]]] [M may] [VP distress John]
Bresnan’s account was very influential in proposing ...
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Is "because" always a subordinating conjunction introducing a subordinate clause?
My grammar book says that a word like "because" is a subordinating conjunction, meaning that it is a word that can introduce a dependent clause. I know that a dependent clause contains its ...
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Do any languages treat conjunctions as nouns or verbs or such things?
Similar to What other languages can get by in some cases without prepositions or particles like Somali?, I am wondering how we can boil everything down to just nouns and verbs (maybe adjectives, or at ...
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x-bar theory - the conjunction "and" connecting different elements
Normally, We use the conjunction "and" to connect two words, phrases, or clauses with the same grammatical functions and grammatical forms. But I wonder how to draw a tree if the conjunction ...
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Distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions
I am struggling with finding any remotely formal criteria for distinguishing these two types of clauses. There are typologies which already define certain groups of conjunctions, but there are tons of ...
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Why are prepositions and subordinate conjunctions grouped as the same tag in the Penn Treebank tag set?
I was reading a book by Jurafsky et. al. It states following:
English adpositions occur before nouns, hence are called prepositions. They can
indicate spatial or temporal relations, whether literal (...
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Is "Since + clause" a noun clause or adverbial clause in this phrase?
I wanted to know if "since + clause" was an adverbial clause or noun clause in the phrase or after the phrase "it's been a while since I've seen you.".
I was thinking “it's been … ...
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Do all languages have the subordinate clause next to the conjunction?
There are example languages for almost all the possible orderings of subject, verb and object in a simple sentence, with the order of frequency being:
SOV > SVO > VSO > VOS > OVS > OSV.
...
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Why are constructions such as ‘AN historian’ commonly pronounced with a non-silent H?
It is well-known that the determiner a is substituted with an when the following word begins with a vowel (letter or sound). In some cases, however, an has been used preceding words beginning with (as ...
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Can levels of nesting in conjunctions be unambiguously systematically parsed?
This question on NLP asks for the how of parsing, and the given answer shows how the state-of-the-art isn't at that level. But whether this is a hard problem or not is not my question: what I ask is, ...
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What is wrong with this way of looking at conjunctions?
What is wrong with the way of looking at conjunctions that I have tried to illustrate in the diagram below, in which a girl is simultaneously the object of saw and greeted, and the function of and is ...
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Whence אֶת between partners' names?
The word אֶת /et/ is used with the following meanings:
In Biblical Hebrew, it means "with". In modern Hebrew it survives, but only with a complement-of-the-preposition pronoun suffix: "with me", "...
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What languages reinforce imperatives with conjunctions?
In Italian, the conjunctions "ma" ('but') and "e" ('and') can preface imperatives to reinforce them as in: "ma/e vieni!" ('do come!').
Does anyone know of any languages that display this phenomenon ...
user27758
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Unusual sentence grouping with conjunctions
A sentence might be split into subject+verb+object order. But there are two ways of doing this.
(1) S = subject+(verb+object)
(2) S = (subject+verb)+object
I would say the first one is more ...
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Characterising adverbial constructions
I know adverbs are multifarious, but I’d like to find out just how farious they are. I’m trying to work out what properties they can have by looking at variations in the way different ones can be used....
user23078
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Parallel coordination failures
Consider this sentence:
You can manipulate lightning, mist, and wind; traffic with air creatures; and are resistant to electricity damage.
This looks at first glance like a perfectly normal ...
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Conjunctions between complex clauses - which items do they coordinate?
In a sentence like:
He had joined up for no other reason than to escape, [blank] hated army life.
I would use the conjunction and. In the equivalent Thai sentence, though, it seems that native ...
user23078
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How does one deal with sentences starting with a connective?
While drawing syntax trees for spoken language and not ideal languages, how does one handle conjunctions and other particles appearing initially in sentences like:
And that is that. (After a long ...
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What do you call the process of resolving the subject of a conjunct?
I have the sentence
We kick ass and take names.
Running this sentence through Google's dependency parser gives:
As you can see, "we" is tagged as the subject of "kick". However "we" is not tagged ...
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How can you test whether a word is being used as a conjunction?
It's been a couple years since I've taken a syntax class, and I've forgotten - what tests can you use to check whether a speaker uses a word as a conjunction? I seem to remember something about ...
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Incoordination (sentence-initial equivalents of "and")
In Italian, the conjunction corresponding to "and" can be used in imperative constructions for emphatic purposes, as in:
E smettila! ('And stop!', i.e: 'Do stop!').
This is probably the outcome of ...
user21986
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Is it possible that whole relative clause refers/describes one word/phrase in the main clause (without anaphora)?
My running example is the sentence (from the VAT law of one country):
The building land is the plot in relation to which the building permit has been issued.
There are possible at least two views on ...
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What is the term for the formation of word groups with single meaning/function (e.g. "in relation to which") in lingustics
Clearly - pharases "in relation to which" (subordinating conjunction) function as one word. How such process is named in linguistics. It would also be interesting to know how such formation is ...
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What part of speech is the word "that" in "That you be happy!"
In the exclamation That you be happy! what part of speech is the word that? Is it a conjunction via ellipsis, i.e. "(I wish) that you be happy!" If yes, then does this poke a hole in the idea that ...
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What is the difference between AND and WITH in general?
I, myself, a russian native, but still can't tell what is the real difference between and and with even in my own language. Is there definite demarcation line between those grammatical concepts? I'm ...
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What is the difference between a conjunction and a preposition?
What exactly is the difference between them?
I've seen people say that prepositions connect words and conjunctions connect syntagms and clauses. Is this definition accurate?
Is there any linguist who ...
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Syntactic status of 'than'
I'm not terribly familiar with the syntax of PPs, but I've noticed that a handful of them do not seem to satisfy any constituency tests, particularly 'than'. 'Than' is listed in dictionaries as both '...
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Grammatical term for inflectable conjunctions as used in the Arabic language(s)
Conjunctions in the Arabic language can be inflected be adding an affix that indicates the pronoun.
E.g. the conjunction 'because' is لِأَن (li'ann), and 'because you' yields لِأَنك (li'annak).
...
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Which branch of linguistics educates on affirmation, causality, similarity, time, etc…?
Which branch of linguistics educates on and plunges into the contents of this helpful answer? I must read more about these concepts because Function Words especially in English cause many problems ...
user10165
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Are there languages without subordination/only with parataxis?
My Latin teacher was talking about parataxis and hypotaxis using coordinating vs subordination conjunctions. He said that may have been the way people spoke in the past. I don't believe there ever was ...
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Are there languages in which AND + OR (conjunction and disjunction) are expressed the same?
I'm looking at coordination strategies in the languages of the world and I wonder if all languages have a distinction between conjunction and disjunction.
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Is the use of abbreviation and ellipsis as codified as the basic syntax of a language?
I had a style discussion on another SE site. Part of the discussion
boiled down to whether the following sentence is appropriate:
It was a bird. It had a black head and wings with a golden ...
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Drawing tree diagrams of ambiguous sentences generated by a CFG
Suppose I have the following CFG rules:
S -> NP VP
NP -> (D) NOM
VP -> V (NP) (NP)
NOM -> N
NOM -> NOM PP
VP -> VP PP
PP -> P NP
X -> X+ CONJ X
How should I draw the tree ...
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Preposition vs. Subordinating Conjunction in English
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum), which was published in 2002, expanded the scope of the part of speech "preposition" to such a great extent that a significant ...
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grammatical role of the word "e" in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages
What is grammatical role of e word in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages? Notice the following excerpt:
>
La léngua emiliâna-rumagnōla l’é parlêda int l’Emélia-Rumâgna, int la pêrt ed sōvra dal ...
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Are there languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive "or"?
I would be especially interested in Indo-European languages or other common language families, but failing that, I would be very interested if it exists at all, because it is an important distinction ...
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