All Questions
Tagged with syntax universal-grammar
8 questions
3
votes
1
answer
88
views
What should we do to disagreements on sentence judgments
I am currently working on a project about pronouns and reflexives. I have encountered something very confusing. Sometimes it is claimed to be coreferential, whereas, in other literature, it is not.
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- 643
2
votes
1
answer
581
views
Principles and Parameters vs. Government and Binding
I'm a little confused about the difference between P&P and GB.
This Wikipedia article suggests that they are the same as grammar frameworks, from what I understood:
Principles and parameters as a ...
user31981
2
votes
0
answers
41
views
Is the sequence of time adverbials, place adverbials and manner adverbials appearing in the same sentence universal or typologically determined?
For example, in English there is "I bought a dress with my friend at the mall yesterday" where the sequence is manner-place-time, while in Russian it is time-place-manner, in Mandarin it is ...
- 1,087
6
votes
1
answer
383
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Is Wikipedia's argument for Universal Grammar completely fallacious?
Wikipedia's article about Chomsky makes the following argument for Universal Grammar:
For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and
finite subset of the allowable syntactic ...
- 1,140
4
votes
2
answers
458
views
What are the structural similarities that exist common to all languages?
What (if any) are the structural similarities that all languages share that allows them to be taken in and learned by virtually all humans starting at a very young age?
- 143
3
votes
5
answers
578
views
Is the concept of a verb-subject complete sentence a cultural/linguistic invariant?
In english, a 'complete sentence' seems to refer to having at least a single, complete clause — i.e. a subject (noun) and verb — e.g. "I run". This seems to be engrained in the concept of a complete ...
- 139
17
votes
6
answers
6k
views
Does Pirahã syntax contradict the principles of Universal Grammar?
The Wikipedia article on Universal Grammar cites the research by Everett (2005) about the Pirahã language:
Finally, in the domain of field research, the Pirahã language is claimed to be a ...
- 8,228
9
votes
2
answers
1k
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What is the origin of the "hierarchy of projections", the language system or (some) conceptual system?
All languages display some form of the hierarchy of projections, to the extent we understand what this is: in a given clause, roughly, complementizers are higher than inflectional heads are higher ...
- 1,976