Questions tagged [grammar]
A body of rules, features, or generalizations which reliably differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical constructions.
560 questions
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New knowledge via HPSG
I've happened to read a little bit of HPSG literature (a certain part from Sag's textbook and a dissertation on prepositions) and it felt like this framework was more of a description model to capture ...
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Mysterious uncertainty about ablative case in Turkish
Yesterday I was watching a Turkish trivia game show on TV when a question came up about the ablative case in Turkish. The question, asked during a part of the show when questions are generally deemed ...
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Why do languages seem to lose the dual number in particular?
Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed as having a dual number; Ancient Greek and Sanskrit both had one, yet modern Greek and all Indo-Aryan languages have lost it; similar patterns can be observed in ...
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How many grammatical cases does Telugu have?
I can't figure out how many grammatical cases Telugu has:
Wikipedia says 8 (Telugu grammar)
Telugu itself says 8, but I'm not sure if they map 1-1 to linguistic cases (విభక్తులు/viḅaktulu)
I found a ...
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Unclear Polish case usage
I saw the following two constructions in Polish:
Za około dwadzieścia minut
Po około dwudziestu minutach
And I don't really understand their grammatical rules.
Za takes accusative, 20 and około take ...
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Correspondences between syntactic categories and human cognition: are telic classes missing (in English)?
A basic but rich question (to me) seems to be, we have these familiar lexical categories that come up again and again across languages, but why? Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional ...
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Are there any languages with no distinction between perfect, imperfect, and simple tense aspects?
I am currently trying my hand at making a conlang, and I just wish to know, are there any languages that don't distinguish between perfect, imperfect, and simple tense aspects? Thank you in advance.
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Where can I find books from the late 17th/early 18th century about English grammar, and books from the same period about English phonology?
I'm interested in finding books that explain English grammar (as much of it and in as much depth as possible), written by scholars from the late 17th/early 18th century. Which do you recommend? Could ...
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Acceptability and grammaticality
My understanding of acceptability and grammaticality is this: As someone who is able to communicate in a given language I find given sentences that I hear or read more or less acceptable (in terms of ...
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In general Western languages, how to terminate a phrase, which starts with a question but ends with a statement?
I just entered the following comment on a StackOverflow question:
Is this a purely theoretical question, because sleep 5 without any quotes is working fine?
I have no idea if this sentence is ...
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Which aspect is actually communicated by Supine verb form in Estonian
there is one bit of Estonian grammar that bugs me in particular for years already. Why to have 2 separate infinitive forms (so called, -ma and -da infinitives, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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How can I understand "remnant movement" in English heavy-NP shift construction
Kayne 2003 mentions that there exists remnant movement in English. As background, note:
I predicted that John would marry Susan, and marry Susan/her/*Ann he will.
The argument(s) in the preposed VP ...
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Is there a formal system in Linguistics like Boolean algebra to reduce the grammar rules of a language to minimum items ignoring semantics? [closed]
To get the grammar rules down to the minimum necessary for teaching. Semantics not included.
This is example what what I am thinking about.
Grammar with all the semantics cut out, means it is easy to ...
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How to make a reference grammar of colloquial forms of a language?
Recently, I became interested in trying to document the grammar and phonologies of colloquial or "street" forms of English. Is there an easy way to figure out how people in my neighborhood ...
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Question about a phrase with the Polish case genetive (dopełniacz)
in the following sentence:
"Teraz idę do żabki po sok"
What is the function of the genitive case applied on the noun "żabka"?
I'm aware that with the preposition "do", ...
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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 &...
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Relation Between Unreal & Past Tense Forms
Background
I am learning English grammar. Having been confused about modal usage, I decided to pick out a book on the subject, coming to "Modality and the English Modals" by F. R. Palmer. In ...
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About the location of 'đươc', can it be placed both before a verb and before a noun? [closed]
In my Vietnamese self-learning book, I saw this sentence:
Rất vui đươc gặp cô.
I'm very pleased to meet you. (To an elderly lady)
So I thought đươc is used like đươc + verb (đươc gặp = can meet).
...
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Alternate classification of Language objects?
In the normal Grammar that we learn in school, we have concepts such as nouns, verbs, adverbs and so on. In some languages, certain concepts of this framework have no resembling equivalent. For eg, in ...
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What are the practical differences between type-logical/categorial and context-free based approaches to semantic parsing?
I am currently reading Bob Carpenter's Type-Logical Semantics, which goes over the Type-Logical approach to natural language semantics. I understand that categorial grammar is technically different ...
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The difference between headwords and main words
Not while ago, I was provided with a handout adressing types of phrases and in the very beginning, my lecturer stated this :
Now, what I'm basically trying to know is, first: whether the info is valid ...
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Is there a standardized way to classify languages according to how much the order of the words is tied to the words themselves?
(I'm a language enthusiast, not a linguist, so the question is probably longer and contains more examples than it needs; maybe it could have been shorter if I had more techinical terminology at my ...
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What is the difference between if and if-then?
According to [33]. Davis, W. (1983). Weak and strong conditionals. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64(1), 57-71., there exist two versions of if conditional as shown below.
(1) a. If it is humid, ...
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We call the shots as we see them
I was invited to ask here.
I sometimes hear the sentence "we call the shots as we see them." I want to ask whether the as-clause modifies "shots" (just like "as we know it&...
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Human natural language metalanguage
I was thinking about how a controlled grammar of English can be used as a programming language because it’s fully parsible.
The idea of doing this for other languages, such as Sanskrit, brought me to ...
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Confusion with Afrihili Word Machine Problem from NACLO
The Pretext
The Problem
I am referring to the third subproblem
The Data
The Confusion
The solution states that it is possible to extrapolate from the data that -ma- is used to refer to occupations. ...
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presupposition and trigger in emphatic sentences
It was Jenny who stole the cake from the bakery.
I'm learning presuppositions & trigger words in my linguistics class. In an emphatic sentence like above am I correct in my understanding that...
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Dropping repeating pronoun phenomena
Consider this sentence:
"I took the garbage out and read a book "-x
this is short form for:
"I took the garbage out and I read a book"-y
This sentence could naturally appear in a ...
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Why are comparative -er and -est suffixes considered inflections not derivations?
In e.g. English, why do we say that better and best are inflections of "good" and not derivations of "good"?
Why is tastiest commonly understood as an inflection and not a ...
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Examples of languages that lost auxiliary verbs [duplicate]
I've been looking around and haven't found any examples of languages that at one point in the past had auxiliary verbs but then later lost them. I know that both the Germanic and Romance languages ...
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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 ...
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What type of verbs take a clause as the direct object?
We have detailed transitivity classification for the valence and the number of objects a verb can take.
Some transitive verbs can take a complete sentence (a clause) as the direct object. For example,
...
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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 ...
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Nominalization is the name for the conversion of a word or a phrase into a noun. Is there a name for the conversion of a word into a question?
In Mong language, a word can be converted into a question by a prefix and suffix. Puosmuaj is the prefix puos- with the infinitive to have muoj, meaning do you have it, is there anything appearing/...
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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 ...
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Reason for silent letters in languages
Why are there silent letters in languages?
I understand that there may be not any reply to this question. But if there is one, I am curious.
Like in French: Je ne parle pas français.
Why is it not ...
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In Arabic what is the difference in the usage of the perfect tense negative and imperfect tense jussive.(as their translation is same in English.) [closed]
For eg : لَمْ يَكْتُبْ and مَا کَتَبَ both means "he did not write."
So how would I know which one i should use?
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Languages that distinguish between objective vs. subjective genitives
Are there languages that grammatically distinguish between objective and subjective genitives?
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Possible Sanskrit word "pas" as declension case [closed]
I would like to ask if it is possible that the word pas, which I think could be a Sanskrit word, is a declined case of an existing word (e.g. the nominative or vocative case).
If not, could it be a ...
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If the definiteness of a noun is dependent on the article that introduces it, can the gender of that noun also depend on that article?
If a chair can become the chair, can a noun's gender change depend on the article that introduces it? My understanding is that the classifier concentrates on the similar characteristics of the noun ...
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Are there words for the reverse of some grammatical relations?
Henry saw the exhausted soldier.
In this sentence, the subject of saw is "Henry". The modifier of soldier is "exhausted".
Are there words for the reverse of these relations and ...
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Do any languages treat I/me/my/mine in a singular way as a third-person entity?
Are there any examples of languages which avoid the use of objective me, possessive my, possessive pronoun mine, reflexive myself, etc., and somehow combine some concept/word in addition to using some ...
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Do any languages do without the word for "this" (or "that"), or treat them somehow as nouns/verbs/adjectives?
A lot of words are defined in terms of "this", such as "here: this place". But "this" can be a pronoun ("is this your bag?") or determiner ("don't listen ...
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I'm confused by the term 'adjunct' as used in A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (2nd Edition 2022)
According to the authors of the book, adjuncts are divided into two kinds: modifiers, which are thoroughly integrated into the syntactic structure of clauses, and supplements, which are much more ...
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How to do Practice Problem for Basque
Link to Problem(both Problems and Answers[but no explanations])
https://sites.google.com/site/paninilinguisticsolympiad/Resources/sample-problems-and-solutions
My question is about the problem titled &...
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Declension of Sanskrit words "kil" and "kila"
I have been using this search engine for Sanskrit grammar: https://sanskrit.inria.fr/DICO/grammar.html, specifically declension, and I was wondering about some results returned by the search.
Indeed, ...
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Why do we use the names we do for grammatical genders?
Imagine if every French speaker suddenly agreed that nouns were one of 'animate' and 'inanimate', or 'chocolate' and 'strawberry', or 'A' and 'B' instead of 'masculine' and 'feminine'. The language ...
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Languages with strict or less strict grammar
I speak German and Dutch and it seems to me that the German grammar more "enforcing" or "strong" is. I explain my impression :
German grammar rules are non ambiguous. I think for ...
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Constituency Tests
I had a test and the question was to test the underlined part for constituency; however, I got confused because I used the test of deletion, but I found the sentence ungrammatical, so my answer was ...
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How can you 'test' for grammatical properties in A Student's Introduction to English Grammar?
According to the book A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (2005), grammatical terms, e.g., subject, object, noun, verb, adjective, etc. should not be defined by meaning, but by grammatical ...
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