All Questions
Tagged with grammar terminology
36 questions
1
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25
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Marking TAM without an explicit TAM marker
There's this concept related to how Semitic verbs conjugation - not the vocalic templates, more a logical consequence of them - that I think is really interesting. How they manage to communicate TAM ...
- 600
5
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1
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138
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What is the name for the phenomenon where an English verb that takes a clausal complement either does or does not mark the infinitive with "to"?
Let them go home.
*Let them to go home.
*Allow them go home.
Allow them to go home.
Make them go home.
*Make them to go home.
*Force them go home.
Force them to go home.
What is the reason that &...
- 59
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5
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Is there a term for when you use grammar from one language in another?
I am reviewing a report as part of a university course, and the author of said report, a native Swedish speaker, has chosen to write the report in English rather than Swedish. Frequently, he uses ...
- 303
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40
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How are inflection variance and invariance classified in linguistics?
I was trying to understand how variance and invariance in inflection is classified in linguistics. (Curiously I found this redirect page on wikipedia but no dedicated article.)
What I mean is you can ...
- 121
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1
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84
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Is there a name for a situation where a word can be described by prepositive and postpositive modifier at the same time?
With the current culture of quiet quitting in English, lying flat, or letting it rot in Chinese, I was curious if there is such a phrase in my own Mong language. The adverbs laam and dlogdlig will ...
- 41
1
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1
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718
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Does Morpho-syntax = Grammar?
According to Fukuyama University Asst. Prof. Warren M Tang1 What is morphosyntax? – in other words
Morphosyntax is another word for grammar.
Grammar can be divided into morphology and syntax. ...
user5306
2
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1
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70
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What is it called when a verb takes its "logical" or "usual" object as its grammatical subject?
This usually occurs for objects that are used by a person, and in English often feels to me like an Americanism. Examples:
The sofa sits five.
The wine drinks very smoothly.
The car drives very ...
- 23
5
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1
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1k
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What's a grammatical feature?
This is not a naif question asked by a layman just out of curiosity. I am presently editing a book by a colleague which is devoted to the notion of grammatical feature (with a special focus on ...
- 2,679
5
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2
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174
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Is there a universal (general) definition of gerund, infinitive and participle?
Is there a universal (general) definition of gerund, infinitive and participle applicable to all languages despite the differences between them?
- 203
2
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2
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93
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What is terminology for the difference between, for instance, "see" and "sees"?
To clarify, I'm referring to the terminology for the difference between just a the word "see" as a verb, and the word in a statement like "Alice sees Bob". What is the correct ...
- 21
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1
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Arabic grammar: The difference between the terms raf` and marfu'
I have begun to learn Arabic, and the difference between following terms confuse me.
There is this topic of ʾirāb—the science which deals with how the Arabic noun inflects with respect to its ...
- 473
5
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2
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1k
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Are words classified (PoS) according to their use in a sentence, or does classification precede usage?
This is a rather broad question, so I'd like to limit this to verbs, at least in this explication of the question.
Verbs take many forms and roles in sentences. Present participles can take the role ...
- 206
2
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2
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208
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Context-Free grammars and Language
As someone trained in neither, how could you explain the analogies between context free grammars / languages and certain programming languages in computer science? Have I misunderstood whether there ...
- 31
1
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1
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857
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Grammatical case vs semantic case
I'm not sure what these terms mean. In my lecture notes I wrote that grammatical case is used to show the syntactic functions of a nominal syntagm, depending on its relation to the verb. Semantic case,...
- 939
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2
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102
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How to break down sentences into known grammatical categories
I'm trying to break down and analyse different sentence structures in English. Each group contains one present, past, and future sentence, but otherwise should be the same within a group.
1
He ...
- 1,242
-4
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2
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128
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Why was 'grammar' chosen to signify the model of linguistic competence, when 'grammar' was already strikingly polysemous?
Page 5 of (R.L. Trask, Robert McColl Millar's) Why Do Languages Change? (2010 Rev. ed), expounds that 'grammar' originally didn't mean its linguistical meaning (quoted at the bottom): no surprise, as ...
user5306
1
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1
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221
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How can I identify Grammatical Categories in a sentence?
Please excuse the fact that I'm not an academically trained Linguist.
I am working on a computer program with example sentences and their equivalents in different languages.
The idea I am trying to ...
- 11
0
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1
answer
209
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direct object and indirect object [closed]
Which is the direct object and which is the indirect object in the following sentence?
The school has given David's proposal serious consideration.
I think that "David's proposal" is the indirect ...
- 194
1
vote
1
answer
890
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What is the difference between syntax and grammar? [duplicate]
I think syntax is concerning with the theories of syntax like structuralism, behaviorism, traditional, and informational since each school has it's own rules and theories while Grammar is in regard to ...
- 39
2
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1
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70
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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 ...
- 499
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1
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60
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Is there a technical term for the kind of adjective A which appears in sentences of the form 'The object O is A.'?
Question.
Is there an attested technical term for the construction
'Object O is A.'
where O is a noun and A is an adjective?
Remarks.
The phenomenon that I am hoping to read about, and find a ...
- 139
6
votes
1
answer
461
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The argument/complement marker prepositions
What is the name used to refer to the subset of particles (or prepositions) which mark sentence's arguments/complements in a language?
For example, suppose that the prepositions sub, dir, and ind ...
- 231
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2
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4k
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Can anyone explain the difference between nominal and pronominal cases?
Like the title says, can anyone give an explanation on the difference between nominal and pronominal cases?
- 131
11
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2
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279
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What is a half-transitivizer?
I've been learning Greenlandic and I came across this term, and I can't find anything about it online. Can anyone explain it in Layman's terms?
- 131
2
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2
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141
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What do you call a specific combination of grammatical categories?
What do you call a specific tuple formed by selecting grammatical categories? I mean for instance the combination of "present tense, imperfect, indicative, plural, 3rd person, subjunctive passive ...
- 161
4
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1
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322
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What do you call a verb that requires another verb?
I know that verbs are sometimes called "transitive" and I think that means the can take a direct object.
I'm learning Mandarin and there seems to be some verbs that can only take other verbs. For ...
- 221
7
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3
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163
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Treatment of or collective term for constructions with no*, some*, any*, every*
Many languages have a little subsystem that uses a combination of particles of no*, some*, any*, every* or similar to create related question and negation words.
This is what the system roughly ...
- 10.6k
9
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3
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605
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Is "sentence" a useful and/or clearly-defined term in linguistics
Further to comments against Do complex sentences always need a conjunction? as recently asked on ELU (and Complex sentence without a subordinating conjunction? here on Linguistics), I'd like to know ...
- 998
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3
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125
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Why do some scientific possessives have trailing "s" and others don't?
I debated names of scientific terms with my friend, and we both discovered that some of them have the trailing letter "s" while others don't.
Here are some examples:
Mobius strip, Fourier series, ...
- 119
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2
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556
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Сoncept of an attribute usesd by Russian grammarians
Note: This is cross-posted on ELL.se at Сoncept of an attribute used by Russian grammarians.
I need to know all the attributes in theese sentences and how they are expressed.The problem is that ...
0
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1
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94
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Term for when sentences (or parts) are combined with "this means", "meaning", "that shows", etc.?
Often sentences or parts of sentences are combined with verbs or pronoun + verb. However, they don't describe something of the content of the text, they just help to bring the parts or sentences in ...
- 11
3
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3
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293
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Book suggestions for linguistics for Computer Science people [closed]
I am asked to do some NLP tasks on a language which is agglutinative. I am finding these terms difficult to understand since my background is different. I am looking for some nice books that give a ...
- 159
3
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0
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78
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Which grammar framework the terms "predicate/ complement/ adjunct" belong to?
From wiki, there're a number of grammar frameworks. Which framework the terms "predicate/ complement/ adjunct" belong to?
- 141
1
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1
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150
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What's the technical term for illocative parenthesis?
I want to know whether there is a technical term, preferably an accepted one, for the following type of parenthesis (bold):
(1) You are, I believe, not healthy.
The (bold) parenthesis always ...
- 1,424
1
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1
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3k
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Grammatical constraint of language
I have a question for a machine translation exam which reads;
"Provide examples where unigram, brigram, trigram and 4-gram models would fail to capture a grammatical constraint of the English ...
- 171
52
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6
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218k
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What's the difference between syntax and grammar?
From what I've read, both terms have to do with the rules of formation of sentences. I've seen grammar used in mathematical contexts, in computability theory, where it has a precise definition. But ...
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