Questions tagged [reference-request]
Questions seeking books, websites, articles, papers, research, or downloadable content on any linguistic topic.
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Research on Preposition semantics
Is there any literature on preposition semantics available online?
Much of it is centered around spatial prepositions but what I want to know is more general approaches to the subject matter.
Thank ...
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What is the name for this phenomenon, and what are some other examples of it?
Sorry if this is a duplicate, but I couldn't figure out how to search for this, especially since my only example involves two function words.
In English, we can say "I have not eaten." "...
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Energy to convey an amount of information in different languages
I am fluent in Assamese, Hindi and English, having learned all three of these since I was about 1 year old. I can speak Bengali with a little bit of effort.
I have developed this feeling that it takes ...
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What measures are there of similarity between languages? And where can I find data on such measurements?
Perhaps the most natural measure of similarity between two close languages is the ease with which a native speaker of one can understand the other. (This might not be symmetrical in some cases, ...
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What are the basic linguistic characteristics of the Maltese language?
I've been looking for a website or something helpful for my presentation about the Maltese language and I didn't find something that offers good explanation of the Phonological, morphological, ...
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What is a standard encyclopedia article about clauses?
I would like to get a deep, multifaceted, modern overview of the concept of a “clause”; its nature, characteristics, properties, definition, where it came from, how it came to be, and so on.
What is a ...
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Classification of kinship system by languages
I'm looking for a way to compare "closeness" of languages based on their kinship systems.
The only thing I found is this classification, which classifies kin systems to: Eskimo, Hawaiian, ...
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The sequence of parts of speech in English
Considering the main eight parts of speech, every two adjacent words in a sentence can be one of the possible 64 pairs. The probability of these pairs significantly varies, as some might even be ...
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What are the tenets of Relevance Theory?
What are the elements upon which one can base to process a speech with relevance theory?
I've been reading but I couldn't find an answer to this question.
I take the example of the Speech act Theory ...
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Speed listening
I have just heard that there are people out there (mostly blind people) using screen readers at overspeed, achieving speech rates twice as high as usual, and even higher.
What I want to know is: Are ...
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Complete list of possible tone sequences across languages?
Wikipedia has all the tones for 3 languages listed on the Tone numerals page.
Do we have anything more robust, including at least the possible tones for other popular languages such as Thai, Tibetan, ...
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Could Cimmerian be a transitional language between Iranian and Slavic?
After a period of reflection, I am currently no longer considering a direct kinship between Iranian and Slavic languages, but rather turning to the existence of another transitional language between ...
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Can someone share with me an article in which the author claims that the get passive is not a passive (or at least a true passive)?
Can someone share with me an article in which the author claims that the get passive is not a passive (or at least a true passive)?
I need an article in which the author says that he or she doesn't ...
user36925
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What is linguistics?
I would like to read a book similar to "What is mathematics?", but about linguistics.
In other words, I would like to see a text that touches different branches of linguistics in an ...
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Is there a list of common English verbs with all of the inflectional "principal parts"?
I am looking for a list of common English verbs (1000 to 2000 most-frequent) which gives the distinct inflectional forms (spelled: pronunciation is irrelevant). For example, "sits, sit, sat, sat, ...
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Request for Texts Giving an Overview of the Evolution of the Indo-Iranian Laguages
Does anyone know of any good accounts of the evolution of the Modern Indo-Iranian languages?
I'm especially interested in comparative overviews of either the entire family's historical phonology, or ...
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Good book to learn the empirical aspects of linguistics, and language families in particular
I wanted to know about how empirical works are done in Linguistics. I have very little idea about this field, but I am interested to know.
I know many empirical "facts" about languages and ...
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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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Native English speakers: worse understanding of other accents?
In this video, Lily Tomlin (an American) doesn't really understand what Kevin Bridges is saying at all with his Scottish accent. She also says she doesn't fully understand what Chris Hemswoth (an ...
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How much (or little) will living in solitude affect the language ability of a grown up?
For example, is the fictional case of Robinson Crusoe realistic? He's still able to speak after being alone on an island for more than twenty years.
I read that people would lose their ability to ...
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A timeline of schools and theories
Is there an academic source for a timeline of schools and theories of linguistics? I can’t find any good source.
This is sort of what I’m looking for (https://prezi.com/d2261rzsz3ah/history-of-...
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How is Urkesh spelled in cuneiform?
I can only find two cuneiform inscriptions mentioning "Urkesh", here. It seems to be spelled differently in the two tablets. Is it 𒌨𒄊? Is the second grapheme of "Urkesh" in ...
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What happened to this isolate language of China?
This is a rather complicated and vague question because I have forgotten a lot about the circumstances where I learned about the language in question, specifically I have neither the reference book ...
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Series of textbooks to learn semantics from beginners' to advanced level
I am not a student of linguistics, but my interest in mathematics, philosophy and computer science inevitably leads me to many terms and concepts used in linguistics, particularly semantics. I have ...
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Up-to-date performance comparison of speech recognition over time
I am looking for an up-to-date (as of 2022) figure or table which displays the improvement in speech recognition on benchmarks for read and spontaneous speech over time, ideally in terms of word error ...
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Why isn’t the letter “G” immediately after “C” in the alphabet?
I have absolutely no formal linguistics background, but I enjoy learning about it a lot. I’ve seen multiple times before how the alphabet mutated from Roman times to our own:
The letter “J” was a ...
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Are there any detailed studies on Phonology of Georgian language?
As a native speaker of Georgian, I'm interested in learning more about Phonology of my native language.
user35900
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Looking for socio research on "Latinx"
I'll crib the intro from Wikipedia:
Latinx is a gender-neutral English neologism, sometimes used to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States.
"Latinx&...
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Bilingual corpora work from the late 1980s
Does anyone know if the paper by Warwick and Russell (often cited as below) exists? I have looked on the EURALEX website and the authors are not listed as speakers in the 4th Conference. Maybe the ...
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What are some example linguistic glosses for the early languages which lack definite articles ("the")? [closed]
My working assumption is that definite articles evolve in language after much of more simpler language, though they can later be lost from a language as it evolves further. First, it appears to me ...
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Books on historical writing systems
Can you recommend books on the writing systems that are not widely used today (e.g. the Germanic runes, the Old Turkic script)?
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Is there any database with English verb argument structure?
To simplify -- different verbs require different number of nouns to be complete. Some of arguments may be implicit in the real usage of language. So, my question is there any database containing many ...
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request: linguistics self-study exercises (worksheets or exercises)
I am looking for linguistics exercises to do over the summer. These can be from websites providing worksheets, or recommendations of textbooks which contain such exercises or worksheets, or ...
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How to learn syntax
In elementary school I was told of the eight "parts of speech" (and in English they should really have said ten rather than eight, including articles and particles). I understood six of them....
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What's a good second formal semantics book?
I'm almost done reading Heim and Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar and I'm looking for a good "second" book on formal semantics. Ideally, I would like it to emphasize the syntax-...
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Book recommendation on language acquisition of phonetics and phonology in American children?
I'm looking for answers to the following questions about language acquisition, as far as phonetics are concerned. I'm particularly interested in American English, though failing that any language ...
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Translation into English of first Mel'cuk publications
Does anyone have copies of these papers English translations ?
Mel'cuk, LA. (1958). “O maSinnom perevode s vengerskogo na russkij”, Problemy Kibernitiki 1, 222-264 [English translation : “Translation ...
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Book suggestions for a compelling introduction to linguistics for younger readers?
In particular, I'm looking for English texts which try to give some sense of the vast diversity of human languages through examples of unusual linguistic features exhibited in only one or in a small ...
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Can you share authors (papers) that give a percentage of active and passive vocabulary?
I’m looking for a scholarly source that gives an approximate ratio of speakers' active vs. passive vocabularies.
Where, roughly speaking, active vocabulary relates to the vocabulary a speaker uses ...
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Dataset for distribution of different systems for 'yes' and 'no' cross-linguistically?
The Wikipedia article for 'Yes and no' lists various distinct, common, systems for expressing the affirmative and the negative, ranging from no explicit terms (instead relying on echo responses) to ...
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Havlík's law, 3, & 4 in Czech
According to Wiktionary, the words for 3 and 4 in Proto-Slavic are *trьmi and *četyrьmi, respectively, in the instrumental case. In (current) Czech, they evolved into třemi and čtyřmi. But if you ...
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Historical explanations for soft/hard declensions in Czech
Declension patterns in Czech is traditionally categorized into hard and soft ones based on the final consonant of the stem. Materials for learners, e.g., Lída's Czech Step by Step or Michael's ...
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Syntax as error-correction-code
I vaguely recall from my academic studies that a professor mentioned that the syntax of sentence could be seen as error-correction-code in signal processing.
In other words, from a pragmatic view - ...
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What are good references on Eblaite cuneiform?
According to Wikipedia's article on the Eblaite language:
Studying the usage context for the symbols I, I2, A, ʾA, ḪA, etc. with regard to the writing conventions of Akkadian scribes enabled the ...
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Book recommendations for Second Language Acquisition
Can anyone please suggest some good books to read on Second Language Acquisition?
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Is there a word for the opposite of jargon? [closed]
I've noticed this phenomenon in language which I've come to think of as "the opposite of jargon", but which I'm hoping there's a better name for. I don't know anything about linguistics, ...
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Is there a document to summarize characteristics of various languages?
I have a question on languages and their respective characteristics.
Different languages are good at expressing certain things. For example,
Japanese is good for expressing sublime images very ...
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Where can I find a modern overview of Luvian hieroglyphs?
According to Melchert, the reading of Hieroglyphic Luvian (HLuvian, HLuwian) was completely revolutionized in 1974 by Hawkins, Morpurgo-Davies, and Neumann.
However, I haven't been able to find an ...
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Is there a grammar of Middle Tamil?
I am studying the Thiruppavai, a Middle Tamil poem, as a linguist and I wondered if any of you by any chance know of resources pertaining the grammar of Middle Tamil. Overviews of the history of Tamil ...
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Looking for a theoretical treatment of closed- and open-classes
The concept of open-class (e.g. English nouns) and closed-class (e.g. English prepositions) word categories seems to be taken as a given in a lot of papers and textbooks. I'm looking for a treatment ...
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