Questions tagged [grammar]
A body of rules, features, or generalizations which reliably differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical constructions.
560 questions
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Does a possessive nominalize an adjective in Indonesian?
Fletch’s song “Laraku, Pilumu”
“Sedih,” “lara,” “pilu”….
Those are all adjectives, yet they’re being modified by possessives (“-ku,” “-mu,” “kita manusia,” et cetera.).
Does it mean that possessives ...
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Can someone share with me an article that studies the decline of by-phrases in the passive?
Can someone share with me an article that studies the decline of by-phrases in the passive? Preferably a corpus-based study, but this is not that relevant
user36925
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What are some rules that native speakers instinctively know about English that non-native speakers usually don't? [closed]
For example, the famous tweet quoting Forsyth,
[A]djectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little ...
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What is the subcategorizarion of the verb "thought"?
I'm writing a grammar and I see that VP->thought SBAR.
The sentence "the president thought that a sandwich sighed ."
In the stanford parser.
But what is this type of verbs?
Transitive/...
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Verb subcategoriztion - intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, Verb with a complement clause
I'm trying to avoid building grammatically incorrect sentences in some small toy grammar I'm building.
I find subcategorization of verbs bit confusing.
Can there be more then one classification per ...
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How does the process of finding descriptive rules of language differ from prescriptive ones?
How exactly does the research of writing a prescriptive grammar book differ from that of a descriptive one? I imagine that both would involve reading modern day literature, so how could they be ...
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Are there any languages where you can put the demonstrative at the end of the sentence? [closed]
Basically, are there any languages where it's grammatically acceptable to say "blue this is" rather than "this is blue?"
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OVS in English dialogue
English is an SVO language. When writing dialogue, especially in literature, writing a sentence with the speech first is considered grammatically correct. Take for example this extract from Ursula K ...
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Does English have animate/inanimate distinction?
I know we have the "'S" genitive and the "X of Y" but I don't exactly understand the rules of using these even as a native English speaker and I'm unsure if English makes other ...
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Do English words have a sort of de-facto inherrent gender (or gender stereotype) to them?
I apologize in advance if this question goes all over the place, I was just randomly thinking today about gender in the English language.
One thing in English that I find is overlooked is gender in ...
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Which language is more complex, English or French? Is it even possible to objectively measure a language's complexity?
OK, so I'm a native English speaker who learned French as a teenager and I have a friend who is French and learned English as a teenager (so the opposite).
The other day he was telling me how easy ...
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Is Hebrew more efficient and more grammatically logical than English? [closed]
Grammatically logical - this is possible, vs zeh yachol lhiyot. Let's break down the English way for a moment -- the words don't actually connect with each other in a logical sequence. 'This is' has ...
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How to draw HPSG illustrations?
everyone!I want to draw HPSG pictures like this,what tools can I use? Are there any HPSG illustration generators like http://mshang.ca/syntree/ ?(that link is a syntax tree generator)
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Why did auxiliary verbs in Kazakh got completely merged into one word in Turkish?
Kazakh and Turkish belong to same language group.
But Kazakh is more archaic, Turkish is more modern.
In Kazakh, there are auxiliary verbs otur, jur , and jatir that become part of the word in Turkish:...
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On a question in regards to Ergativity
I am working on a conlang, and I am making sure of how this one sentence would be parsed when translated.
"We have no friends, but the mountains"
Would mountains be the ones put into the ...
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Question on Avestan Adjectives
Looking at various examples of Avestan, I am confused on how the adjectives work. For instance,
Ahura Mazda, Vohu Manah, Angra Mainyu, Spenta Armaiti, Aka Manah, etc are all adjective first.
But Asha ...
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Why couldn't one combine rules from languages for sentences with the same intended meaning?
Why couldn't one combine rules from languages for sentences with the same intended meaning?
So that I could, for example, write Finnish with the same comma rules as in English?
Rather, one must ...
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Why can't you treat prepositions as simply noun/verb modifiers (i.e. as adjectives or adverbs)?
I am working on a conlang and have (for many months/years?) been perplexed by the prepositions. They standout because they are extremely hard to pinpoint what they actually mean, unlike a noun or verb,...
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Flesch-Kincaid reading ease formula coefficients [duplicate]
About the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease formula:
F = 206.835 − (84.6 ∗ S) − (1.015 ∗ P)
I don't understand the meaning of the coefficient choices. Why those specific numbers? Are the studies behind the ...
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How do you draw a x-bar tree with negative inversion? [closed]
For example: 'Never was I so offended'
There is already a T to C inversion with 'was', where do we put the word 'Never'?
And how should we label it? AdvP or Neg?
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In syntax trees, why aren't single-word phrases reduced to that word?
Why do phrases like "the car in Texas" break down into
(NP (Det the) (N car)
(PP (P in) (NP (N Texas))))
Why is the prepositional phrase "in Texas" constituted of the ...
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Can adjuncts modify nouns?
The Wikipedia page on adjuncts gives the example
Yesterday, Lorna saw the dog in the garden.
Notice that this example is ambiguous between whether the adjunct in the garden modifies the
verb saw (in ...
user31190
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What causes people to make mistakes in language usage? Is it bad concentration or mislearned rules or ...?
What causes people to make mistakes in language usage? Is it bad concentration or mislearned rules or ...?
This confuses me.
If the rules are to be reasonable, shouldn't people "know" ...
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Why are there grammars in languages in the first place?
I recently took an interest in linguistics and is currently working through the various interesting phenomenon like x bar theory, wh-movement, binding theory, etc. It all sounds very fascinating to me....
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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
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What's the significance of correct grammar (as long as the information gets across)?
What's the significance of correct grammar (as long as the information gets across)?
This confuses me, because I intuitively think that:
Yes, if there are grammar rules, then one should attempt to ...
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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 ...
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Why "a liter of water" but not "a 100ºC of water"?
Imagine a volume of water, 100 ml in size, with a temperature of 100ºC. Interestingly, you can refer to the water as "100ml of water" but you cannot call it "100ºC of water". That ...
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Why does the pronoun and verb order vary in Polish language?
My go nie lubimy - we do not like him
On nie kocha mnie - he does not love me
Why in the first example go is followed by nie lubimy, but in the second sentence we have the opposite: nie kocha followed ...
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why in Polish we change ją to jej when negating the phrase?
ja lubię ją - I like her
ja nie lubię jej - I do not like her
Do I understand correctly what these sentences mean?
If yes, why do we change ją to jej when negating the phrase? In both cases the ...
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What is the maximum number of accusatives you can have in an English sentence? [closed]
I know things like the double-accusative exist in English, like "I call sodas cokes." Then things can get more complex with words like "bet," where you can have "I bet you 5 ...
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When/how did "articles" like "the" first appear in language?
I am wondering this sort of cross-linguistically. I know many (most?) languages don't have a word for "the", but the English language does. First part of the question is, did Middle English ...
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(how) do natural languages distinguish classes and instances of things?
In data modeling and other areas of knowledge organization there is often a strict separation between abstract classes of things and individual objects. For instance I am an instance of the class ...
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The grammatical analysis - "most of them civilians"
I came across this sentence today:
They were most of them civilians.
Now how will we analyse"most of them" here? Is it just a modifier in Noun Phrase - "most of them civilians"? ...
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Is there a root final stop in English?
Is there a root final stop in English? I can't seem to find any
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When can FOR be used as a preposition and a complementiser?
This question is based on several suppositions:
For as a preposition is able to be transformed into a wh- question with the wh- phrase preposed with for, as below with senators John acting as the ...
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The verb "to hit" does not change the form between active voice and passive voice - implications [closed]
As adults we confidently grasp the concept of searching for context when information in a few words spoken to us is not enough. Moreover, we apply logic and cause-effect dependencies, filtering out ...
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Meaning of Old Babylonian word pāqidūtum [closed]
I am learning the Old Babylonian language and just stumbled over the word/form pāqidūtum. It seems to be a third person male stativ singular + u + the female ending tum of the verb paqadum (to care ...
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Could the at symbol '@' be considered a vocative marker?
Specifically, the at-symbol as used e.g. on Twitter or Github (or many other sites besides), e.g. '@somename, what do you think about this?' or '@foobar, I'm waiting!' Comparing it with English/German ...
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Does grammar allow two questions in one sentence? [closed]
This is not an English-specific question. In Japanese, you might also ask "何時から何時までですか。" Or "nan ji kare nan ji made desu ka", "From what time to what time?" (from Google)...
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Is there a name for the idea of having grammatical rules for the purpose of easy pronunciation?
For instance, in German you'll have Der Mann singular, Die Männer plural, instead of, say, Die Männen. It seems this is because you don't want to over-expose the speaker to the "n" sound.
...
user34029
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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 ...
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Combinatory categorial grammar for English
I am working on theoretical NLP things, in particular to do with combinatory categorial grammar (CCG). I don't have much knowledge of CCG, or of grammar in general.
I was wondering how much of English ...
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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?
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I have my hair cut - "my hair" a Direct Object?
I am confused about the following sentence:
I have my hair cut.
Now here I am not sure whether "my hair" is the Direct Object (DO) of the verb "have", or if it is just the ...
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What are some reasons why grammar is often more complex than needed for communication purposes?
It shouldn't be controversial to say that the grammar of certain languages is more complex than what communication calls for. For instance, some languages have gendered nouns, and it is often unclear ...
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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 ...
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Grammatical function vs. Semantic role
What is the difference between grammatical functions and semantic roles? Are they the same?
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Can one sentence have two or multiple possible phrase structure grammars? And what is this called?
After reading about syntactic structure and phrase structure grammar in Wikipedia and on the internet, I was wondering if there are any sentences with more than one possible phrase structure grammar? ...
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How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake?
How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake? For example:
Your the best.
This iz the end.
I likes music.
She preatend to be asleep.
One method is to read the erroneous sentence aloud (...
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