Questions tagged [sentences]
A sentence is a grammatical unit that is composed of one or more clauses or of written texts delimited by upper case letters and markers such as . , ? and ! .
54 questions
1
vote
0
answers
81
views
Is "because" always a subordinating conjunction introducing a subordinate clause?
My grammar book says that a word like "because" is a subordinating conjunction, meaning that it is a word that can introduce a dependent clause. I know that a dependent clause contains its ...
0
votes
1
answer
243
views
Why do Spanish words change meaning when put in a sentence? [closed]
The word "ponga" means "I put" but when put in this sentence: Que solo la mire de lejito y se ponga asi" is "That he only looks at her from afar and gets like this" &...
4
votes
1
answer
100
views
Does the function of a clause belong to semantics or syntax?
In linguistics, is it correct that a clause is classified according to its function into declarative/statement, interrogative/question (yes-no, or content one), and imperative/request/command?
Does ...
0
votes
3
answers
120
views
Do "imperative" and "declarative" belong to the same or different categories?
As I understand:
There are three moods: imperative, indicative, subjunctive.
There are three types of sentences:
declarative (ends with "."),
interrogative (ends with "?"),
...
2
votes
2
answers
530
views
Do sentences have primary and secondary stresses?
I know that stress can shift in an English phrase or sentence to emphasize the words that mean more specifically what the speaker wishes to express, however I'm talking about the general stress where ...
-1
votes
2
answers
96
views
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?"
0
votes
0
answers
28
views
In the sentence 'he was very early', would it be correct to say that 'early' functions as both a noun and the object of the sentence?
I'm currently trying to construct my own language as an exercise, and I need to know if such a description is linguistically accurate, or if the word should be described otherwise.
4
votes
1
answer
164
views
Peculiarities of English as spoken/written by Norwegians [closed]
I'm writing a fiction book. Some of its characters are Norwegians who exchange emails in English. I'd like to lightly stylise their texts.
What mistakes / peculiarities / word choice / sentence ...
1
vote
0
answers
266
views
How can I identify whether it is local or global ambiguity?
I am currently learning about local and global ambiguity and we had the following example in of the texts explaining what the topic is about:
Paul sent the note to Elena.
Paul sent the books, a record,...
5
votes
1
answer
546
views
Name for seemingly incomplete sentences
I remember reading about sentences that naturally seem incomplete (ending in the middle as if the second half were missing), but are actually grammatically correct. The listener/reader just wrongly ...
2
votes
3
answers
833
views
How did verb conjugation by person, number and gender appear? Why do we still use it?
I'm Russian native,learning German and English. I'm interested in teaching myself some linguistics.
Russian verb inflects for person, number in present and future tense; for gender in past tense.
...
0
votes
0
answers
94
views
What advantages might the Reed-Kellogg diagramming method provide over other diagramming methods?
What advantages might the Reed-Kellogg diagramming method provide over other diagramming methods, and is the R-K diagramming method English specific?
1
vote
0
answers
73
views
Could certain languages encourage different models of sentence processing?
I'm gonna be frank: I'm a high school student who has limited experience with linguistics. I've never studied it, I've just read a textbook and a handful of seminal studies. Recently, though, I was ...
1
vote
0
answers
83
views
Carrying a mistake in a sentence until contradiction
I am new to the field of linguistics so please forgive any ignorance or naivety, but there is something I have been thinking about recently and cannot find anything about it online. I suppose there ...
0
votes
2
answers
50
views
Negativity score for sentences
I am working on a dataset of airline customer complaints. Since it is "complaints" the general consensus is all the sentence are "negative" sentiment. So I am think of an approach to quantize the ...
1
vote
2
answers
235
views
Subordination. Chinese vs English
Linguists claim that subordination is universal across the world languages.
Subordination in English looks can be understood by looking into these examples:
I know a person who has a dog
I know a ...
1
vote
1
answer
120
views
Does this sentence have two meanings?
The sentence is
Some employee must leave.
I was told that it is actually ambiguous and has two meanings. But I can only see one. What are the two meanings?
0
votes
2
answers
84
views
How to derive that a sentence is a question from parts of speech
I have recently discovered extraction of parts of speech and I'd like to see what I can get from patterns once a sentence is POS tagged. I am aware that some sentences will be difficult to categorise ...
2
votes
3
answers
1k
views
What sort of sentence is a request?
Wikipedia describes five broad types of sentences, classified by purpose. They are: declarations, questions, commands, instructions, and exclamations. Under this classification scheme, where would a ...
-1
votes
2
answers
125
views
Do any languages allow merging of two sentences without punctuation?
I teach some students who are not native English speakers and commonly make this mistake in their writing: They often combine two complete sentences without any punctuation or break between them.
...
1
vote
3
answers
1k
views
Looking for tool to split german text into sentences
I want to train a german embedding and need to split text into sentences. That is not easy since "z. B." and "Dr." are not endings of a sentence. Does anybody know a tool to do that for german texts? ...
3
votes
1
answer
1k
views
What are the best NLP sentence alignment tools?
Which tools are worthwhile for aligning sentences from pairs of paragraphs of source and target languages.
2
votes
2
answers
98
views
Is either of these meanings of the word "sentence" more conventional?
The Wikipedia article on Generative Grammar states:
Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a
system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words
that ...
3
votes
0
answers
124
views
In English, what rules govern the optimal order of nouns in a list?
For example, is noun word-order governed by a universal ranking of semantic fields, as with adjectives, or do other considerations in general English word choice and order (well-formedness of ...
1
vote
0
answers
61
views
Sentence to Image [closed]
Does anyone know of a database or tool that can be used to produce or find images that help describe or reinforce the meaning of a given sentence?
For example:
"The car was going very fast."
I am ...
-2
votes
3
answers
10k
views
Sentence/Utterance/Proposition
I'm very new to this field and I'm now studying semantics. I got a question on the difference between Sentence/Utterance/Proposition. Could someone clarify the following example to me?
1: I have a ...
3
votes
2
answers
149
views
Are there languages with discontinued subordinate clauses?
As for the languages I know I think to believe, that a subordinated clause comes in a chunk and not scattered throughout the main clause.
For instance:
I LIKE TO SING, while i slave away
while I ...
2
votes
0
answers
77
views
Why do so many grammars divide a clause into Subject and Verb instead of Subject and Predicative?
I used to start learning a few languages, admittingly my interest ,stamina and brain force didn't last for more than a couple of days each.
Nethertheless, I noticed , that the different grammars ...
0
votes
0
answers
46
views
Is there a chart showing all assignments of phrases to functions within a sentence?
For practical reasons, it is obvious to assume there is chart giving an overview which phrases can be assigned to which functions in a sentence.
For instance, one sentence function is called an ...
1
vote
1
answer
66
views
English sentence patterns or verbs in the order of the degree of introduction
I've been wondering if there is any classification, academically established or researched, of verbs or sentence forms that introduce new referents, with the forms/verbs enumerated in the order of the ...
1
vote
2
answers
62
views
Does it belong to the same or a separate sentence when adding some more words after the sentence was actually finished?
I have seen some scenarios where someone says a sentence like, "I'm sorry" to some of his/her co-workers and then after three or four seconds he/she says, "That you guys are idiots".
For a slightly ...
5
votes
4
answers
270
views
Is there a definition of "sentence" that applies to all languages?
Is there a definition of "sentence" that is applicable to all languages?
3
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Split a sentence using nltk and python
I am working on a task which involves information extraction, for which I require splitting a complex sentence into a bunch of simple sentences. For instance,
In optics a ray is an idealized model ...
3
votes
0
answers
210
views
Is it possible to write complex sentence without subordinate (or dependent) clause? [closed]
My first language is NOT english. Currently I am preparing for IELTS exam at the moment. Today I saw a youtube video about IELTS writing task. In this video, the teacher gave an example of complex ...
4
votes
2
answers
1k
views
How to identify context independent (self-consistent) sentences?
There are questions that are self consistent in the sense that they can be understood without a context. In other words, the sentence itself provide a clear information. An example of such a sentence ...
0
votes
0
answers
117
views
Incomplete sentences
I am looking for studies which looks at understanding and preference of incomplete sentences.
For example, is there a higher workload for (in)complete sentences or even though the sentence might be ...
3
votes
2
answers
73
views
Said tags in Sentence detection
I am trying to apply NLP to fiction but I don't know how split dialog into sentences. Specifically how to split said tags.
ex.
"Awake? How long have been asleep?" asked teenagers at the same time.
...
1
vote
0
answers
290
views
Average number of independent clauses in a compound sentence
I'm working on a NLP project, where we analyze large text samples (think a novel), and produce some metrics that help us answer interesting questions about the text. One of these metrics is average ...
0
votes
1
answer
355
views
Relation of Persian "Ke" and English "That" [closed]
First I should say I am not a linguist, but try to understand it to help my English.
In my native language, Persian, we do much use "Ke" (که) which almost corresponds to "which, who, that" in ...
7
votes
0
answers
424
views
Why were written sentences longer in the past?
These ELU answers affirm, but do not explain, the decrease in written sentence length. So why?
To allow for comparison with modern dialects, I restrict this question to:
writing in European ...
2
votes
0
answers
179
views
Do subject-object-verb language users perceive the world differently than SVO or VSO users?
So based on linguistic relativity, I'm wondering if there are any ways that people perceive the world differently based on sentence order, or rather, if this has even been studied at all?
-1
votes
2
answers
728
views
Regular expression that captures sentences [closed]
This RE :
((?:\w+ )?|((?:(j|J)e )|(tu )|(il ))?)(?:ne )?(?:veu(x|t)\b|voul(ais|ait)\b|voudr(ais|ait)|voul(ez))-?(?:vous)?(?: pas)? qu(e |')
Captures these French sentences :
On voulait que nous ...
1
vote
0
answers
93
views
Is there a term for this use of an indirect object?
I have noticed that some Americans from the mid-South will use indirect objects in their speech where standard English would use a prepositional phrase. Is there a name for this phenomenon? Is it ...
0
votes
1
answer
403
views
Identifying phrasal verbs
I'm helping some native English speakers to learn Swedish. I have a large list of sentences which I wish to organise by linking each sentence to its associated set of meanings. For example:
Jag:
...
3
votes
4
answers
8k
views
Complex sentence without a subordinating conjunction?
Here's the sentence that's been confusing me:
Compared to dogs, cats showed more enthusiasm.
I feel this should be a complex sentence because there's one independent clause and one dependent ...
4
votes
1
answer
4k
views
What metrics can be used to rate the complexity of an english sentence?
I want to rate a sentence by its complexity in the sense of:
Rating of 1: A very simple sentence which is just S+V+O, example: "I eat bananas."
Rating of 10: An uterly complex sentence with lots of ...
-1
votes
1
answer
745
views
What are the names of the study of words and of the study of sentences in English?
What is the name of the study of words in English?
How do you call the study of sentences in English?
Does English grammar or linguistics concerns about the study of units larger than sentences?
...
0
votes
1
answer
643
views
determine if noun is person or person's name
How can I determine if a noun is the name of a person based on other words in the sentence?
For example, I was able to determine that a noun is a place by it following ' to ' or ' from '.
Are there ...
3
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Cohesion within a sentence?
I know the definition of cohesion (which was described deeply in Halliday and Hasan's famous book, "Cohesion in English", or shortly summarized in wiki).
If I understand correctly, the aim of ...
2
votes
0
answers
1k
views
How to analyze this sentence in a tree diagram?
I tried to draw a tree diagram of this sentence
In 1816 they were purchased by the British government and from then on displayed in the British Museum.
but it leads nowhere. I think I'm fine ...