All Questions
Tagged with grammar theoretical-linguistics
17 questions
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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
5
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1
answer
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
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2
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100
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Are there approaches to/theories of grammar that do not deal with the acceptability problem?
As I understand, grammars boil down to the acceptability problem: Is an utterance acceptable to the users of some language X? How to differentiate acceptable from non-acceptable utterances? Those who ...
- 347
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1
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139
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How can we explain "head feature" of a phrase? [closed]
For example, how can we explain the head feature of an adjective phrase?
user27687
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2
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2k
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What is non-headed phrase?
I know most of the phrases in English are headed phrases, like noun is the head of NP. But what is non-headed phrase?
user27687
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1
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83
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What is case for pronouns in different positions? [closed]
Can we say "the case of subject in a sentence is nominative, the direct object of a verb is accusative, the second object of a ditransitive verb is accusative, the objective of a preposition is ...
user27687
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1
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185
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What's the difference between coindexing and coreferential? [closed]
Here is a sentence. I(i) enjoy yourself(i). Can we say "I" and "yourself" are coindexed but not coreferential?
user27687
2
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2
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178
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Can we predict language death just by looking at grammar?
Is it possible to predict that a language is about to die out just by looking at its structure? So without taking into account the number of native speakers it has and other external factors? If so, ...
- 939
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Introductory linguistic theory books [duplicate]
I'm wondering where a good place (or good places) to start learning about linguistic (grammar, syntactic and semantic) theories would be. I'm essentially a complete novice in this domain. Any sort ...
3
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4
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226
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How does the description of the grammar of a language differ between a traditional and scientific approach?
Let me clarify the question,
There are traditional grammars to describe the working and structure of languages, mostly with the purpose of teaching someone to speak the languages. So, it is approach ...
- 1,047
2
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2
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573
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Chomsky's Syntactic Structures: Why is {a^n b^n : n ∈ ℕ} not a finite state language?
In (10) (i) of Chomsky's Syntactic Strucures (1957), the set of sentences of a specific language is defined as
ab, aabb, aaabbb, ..., and in general, all sentences consisting of
n occurrences of ...
- 29
2
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1
answer
164
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Which linguists from the 1940s–1970s believed that language comprised two distinct parts, “lexis” and “grammar”?
I’m looking for information about the linguists and/or researchers from before the 1970s who at the time believed that vocabulary and grammar should be taught as two completely separate entities, that ...
Patter English
6
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1
answer
3k
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How is category theory applied in linguistics?
I am learning monoidal category applied in quantum information and quantum field theory, and several references say that monoidal category is somehow related to linguistics via Hopf algebra of quantum ...
- 303
13
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2
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2k
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Besides logics, what mathematical tools are used in the study of linguistics?
I learned of connections between linguistics and category theory when I'm learning the application of category theory in quantum field theory. Being aware that axiomatic set theory (logics) is ...
- 303
1
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1
answer
123
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Do affixes and clitics belong to an own part of speech, part of sentence or another category ?
Birds, flowers, children belong to the part of speech of nouns,
to fish, to pick, to play to verbs,
swift, smelly, nice to adjectives
those are the easy ones, what about clitics and affixes and such ...
- 745
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216
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Phrases and clauses used as an adverb, and hence don't take a preposition
He had been in precarious situations his entire life.
I know here in this sentence his entire life is used as an adverbial phrase and, hence there was no need of placing a preposition before that ...
- 335
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2
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483
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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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