Questions tagged [morphosyntax]
Structure and meaning of morphemes and how they interact with the grammatical structure of utterances.
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How do you gloss "personal a" in Spanish?
The Spanish preposition "a" is used in transitive sentences when the object is definite and animate, for example in
Veo a mi hermana
see.1sg ? my sister
"I see my sister"
...
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What are linguistic concepts that are not widely applicable outside European languages?
Most linguists are familiar with European languages, and then may have also studied some Eurasian languages that are familiar to Europeans such as Japanese and varieties of Chinese. So it may be that ...
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Do I need to lemmatize my corpus when performing collocation analysis on inflective languages?
Do I need to lemmatize my corpus when I am going to perform a collocational analysis? Several language, including English, are to a certain extent inflective. These inflections sometimes carries ...
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What is Double Zero Grade?
The double zero grade *ǵʰi-m- is preserved in the compounds with numerals.
(de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin 2013: hiems)
E.g. *dwi-ǵʰim-os “two years old”, literally “of two winters” (en....
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Are there any languages where the dependent agrees with the head's intrinsic property?
In head-marking languages, the head usually takes the marking based on the dependent's intrinsic properties. For example, every English noun/pronoun has an intrinsic property of person: "bear&...
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Are there specified names for categories of morphemes (or words that can combine with morphemes) in morphotactics?
Morphotactics is the study of the rules in a language by which morphemes are allowed to combine.
So at least in how I think of if, morphotactics is like grammar, but at the level of morphemes instead ...
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Why do some languages lack family name markers?
This is an extension of the questions that I have asked in the German and French communities: some languages have a subset of family names that are indistinguishable from given names, occasionally ...
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What is "operator dependence" in clause-chaining, a grammatical construction that Papuan New Guinea languages are famous for?
The Glossary of Linguistics Terms at the SIL website characterizes clause-chaining by "the possibility of long sequences of foreground clauses with operator dependence."
In typical clause-...
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Why did the Rebracketing from "Napron" to "Apron" Figuratively Stick?
I read that the cloth that painters and chefs wear, the one now called "apron", used to be called "napron". But then because of rebracketing, "a napron" became "an ...
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Are there languages which restrict adverb usage to only one of either preceding or following a verb?
We have adverb sentences like this:
I basically initially ran quickly.
That means the same thing pretty much as:
I basically initially quickly ran.
First part of the question is, why do some ...
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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. ...
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Was there a tendency of Indo-European languages to avoid syntactical ambiguity by introducing more complex morphology?
In (Peškovskij, 1914, p. 246) I stumbled upon the following (Russian) assertion:
Opisannoe vytesnenie predikativnogo imenitel'nogo tvoritel'nym možno
rassmatrivat' kak častnyj slučaj obščego ...
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What is the nominal attribute in Milewski's typology?
The wikipedia page on Milewski Typology gives 6 divisions:
Milewski proposed a division of languages into 6 groups, based upon
consideration of 4 main syntactic relationships; these were:
the ...
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Are there any academic papers on the "Adjective like (article) Noun" construction/ phrase?
I am currently working on a paper about the "Adj like (article) Noun" construction. Some would consider that which comes after the "like"-part to be a prepositional phrase if "...
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For English, is there a finite set of patterns for constructing sentences?
I am wondering about conlangs and thinking about English currently. I'm wondering does English have a finite set of patterns for constructing sentences? That is, could you build a computer program ...
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How does one write out possessive pronouns under DP
Would for example "their" be divided into they and 's under the DP theory when writing out a tree?
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Is syntactic understanding of a text actually the most elementary form of semantical understanding of the text?
I am not a Linguist, but I am curious about the question below:
Is there a linguistic theory that points out that syntactic understanding of a text constitutes the lowest level of semantical ...
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According to the Elsewhere Principle, can a syntactic rule block a morphological one, or a morphological rule a phonological one?
I read up on the Elsewhere Principle. In the linked article two examples are given:
The syntactic comparative "more + adjective" can be overruled by the morphological comparative "adjective+er" for (...
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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?
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Meaning of "access to Universal Grammar"
I'm reading a paper and the authors that seems to revolve around the concept of L2 learners' "access to Universal Grammar." They argue that the initial state of the learners' L2 grammar is the whole ...
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Case in German Nouns
German has an interesting situation in its noun phrases - articles and adjectives reflect case, but the noun itself does not.
Der große Mann sieht das Haus. ("The big man sees the house," ...
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Are all "Ergative Languages" split-ergative?
I've noticed that in a lot of examples of "ergative languages," there is some piece of the language that does not fit the pattern we call "ergativity." For example, Basque does not mark ergative case ...
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In English, is the use of the -ing participle verb form as adjectives or subjects or objects an example of conversion (a.k.a. zero-derivation)?
This is a pretty straight forward question. But here are some examples:
Baking is my hobby. (used as a subject thing, or as some would call it, a gerund or verbal noun)
I will be a contestant in the ...
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What's the difference between a light noun and a nominalizer?
I've been studying Japanese, and sometimes I see some words, like の and こと, get classified as "nominalizers," and other times as "light nouns." Plus, I've read somewhere that light nouns sometimes ...
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Where can I find a list of pronunciation rules for different languages?
I'm finding stuff like this in every language, but it's all written in sentence form scattered all over the place. Is there a central database of this sort of stuff for each language, or a book of ...
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Is there a database of literal linguistic glosses across languages or per language?
I would like to compare different sentence structures and would like to look up sentence glosses quickly. Are there any databases out there, either for all languages or for individual languages?
In ...
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Binding Principles
For each of the following sentences I have been asked to:
1) State which binding principle applies to all relevant elements
2) Identify the antecedent (If none then state so)
3) State if the ...
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Direct–inverse marking on the noun, or the possiblity of inverse alignment
A direct-inverse language, Wikipedia claims, is one which
involve[s] different grammar for transitive predications according to the relative positions of their "subject" and their "object" on a ...
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Terminology: types of inflection and features
Happy New Year, everyone!
I am reading an article by G.Corbett on canonical morphosyntactic features. He mentiones two kinds of inflection: inherent and contextual. These notions look to me somewhat ...
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Finiteness of embedded clause in "Susan seems to have gone"
My textbook flags the above mentioned phrase as non-finite but it clearly seems to indicate tense. After all, alterations like "have eaten", "have been eating", "have had been eating", "having been ...
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Evolution of perfective aspect from Sanskrit derivational suffix -ka in Modern Indo-Aryan languages
It is well attested that the Sanskrit derivational suffix -ka for adjectives together with the syntesized participle on nominals like krta-ka>done, evolved as the possessive case marker in modern Indo-...
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Are first-person and second-person pronouns always co-referential for a given speaker at a given context?
For the first-person singular pronouns, it seems obvious that these pronouns can only refer the speaker, since there is always only one speaker, so it must be always coreferential, as in
I(i) took my(...
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Are there any universals about how m-case can pattern for predicate NPs?
Predicate noun phrases (NPs) have different patterns of case in different languages.
Even closely related languages can show significant differences (Sigurðsson 2008). For example, among the Germanic ...
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How is declension class represented in Distributed Morphology?
Does somebody knows a good paper or textbook that would have a Distributed Morphology (DM) approach to declension class? Ora Matushansky writes that it is an "underlying nominal property influencing ...
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Edit Doron: Reflexivity in Syntax or the Lexicon
Perhaps I am missing something here, but does Edit Doron adopt:
1) a lexicalist view of morphology (as it seems from "A Unified Approach to Reflexivization in Semitic and Romance" by Edit Doron and ...
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Origin of Present Perfect in Romance Languages
Since in Latin no compound form of verb tense exists, AFAIK, I thought that origin of Present Perfect should be sought in Proto-Germanic also for Romance languages, but I found out that Present ...
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Constructions like the double accusative outside of the Ancient Greek word "διδασκειν"
I'm looking for examples of having 2 or more nouns in the same case but with the different semantic roles given by the differing referents of the nouns, not entirely by one of morphological case, ...
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Morphology: Machine-Learning
Isn't the compound 'machine learning' problematic, inasmuch as the non-head of the compound is the external argument of learning. This would make it an auspicious compound (http://www.bobaljik.uconn....
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Corpus Linguistics: Is it possible to add a tag for "sentence ending"?
I'm new to Corpus Linguistics and I'm writing a paper about the English and Portuguese "because noun", a type of construction such as "I'm going home because GTA5".
However, when I try to search this ...
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Are there right-branching agglutinative languages?
The major agglutinative languages like Turkish and Japanese are also notable for being almost strictly left-branching, much more so than, say, English is right-branching.
Is it a coincidence, or is ...
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"Ought" omission of "to" [closed]
Does anybody know anything about the distribution of the modal "ought" without "to" (in other words, "ought" taking the base infinitive). Eg:
They ought to go home.
vs.
They ought go home.
Is "...
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"used to" for past habitual: analysis
I teach ESL at the adult level. I am trying to analyze "used to" for past habitual, as in:
My car used to malfunction a lot.
Is "used to" an adverb-phrase meaning something like 'for a long time in ...
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Balto-Slavic Infinitive and PIE 3rd p., sg, present endings
I'm curious to ask if the suffix -tī for the infinitive in Balto-Slavic is related to the PIE third person, singular, present suffix -ti?
Although there is no reason (from a functional point of ...
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What is some standard analysis for "Look me in the eye"
I am looking for hints where to find a ("standard") analysis of something like this english dative construction:
Look me in the eye
Clearly, the "the" in this phrase is semantically scoped BY the me ...
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Why "Monotonicity" Hypothesis? (Koontz-Garboden)
Should't it be "monodirectionality hypothesis"?
In my understanding, this is about the one-way that material/structure can be added to a sentence-while-generated, but never deleted. (Harley 2013 ...
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Why is syntax called "grammar outside the word " [closed]
In my book said that syntax is grammar outside the word but i don't understand why can you explain me
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How frequent are different morphosyntactic types?
I started wondering what share of all world's languages are polysynthetic (on any practical definition of polysynthetic, i.e. the prototype approach, the macroparameter theory (Baker 1995), etc.), and ...
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Particles and Words Affixing Heads and Phrases
In Malay, there are quite a few words and particles that can affix or modify both heads and phrases. The interrogative suffix -kah is one of them.
-Kah affixing heads
Tidak-kah sakit kecederaan ...
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What are the dimensions along which English & Portuguese differ? [closed]
What are the dimensions along which English & Portuguese differ, and how are these dimensions of variation related and restricted?
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I'd like to know your point of view about that [closed]
Are there explanations for the morphological similarities and differences between languages? Which ones?
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