Questions tagged [syntax]
The study of the internal structure of expressions, especially between words and phrases, and the principles and processes that determine it. This includes words order, but also the grammatical relations that hold between words, as well as structural ambiguity, binding, reference, and similar issues. Common approaches are numerous phrase structure grammars (GPSG, HPSG, LFG, G&B, X-bar, Minimalism, ...) and, on the other hand, dependency grammars.
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What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?
After wondering about this today at work, I turned to the Internet.
A short piece that focuses on pronunciation points toward "none". I've scoured ELU and Google (perhaps not as thoroughly or ...
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What's the difference between syntax and grammar?
From what I've read, both terms have to do with the rules of formation of sentences. I've seen grammar used in mathematical contexts, in computability theory, where it has a precise definition. But ...
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What is word order used for in "free word order" languages?
Consider languages whose case-systems allow the order of arguments to be changed without changing the arguments’ grammatical relations. (Note the 189 languages noted as having “no dominant word-...
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Why isn't "I've" a proper response?
Suppose someone asked me the question, "Have you completed the project?". A standard response would be "I have". Why does the equivalent "I've" sound so strange and never used as a replacement?
I am ...
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Why are certain there-sentences infelicitous in English?
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language states that the first three of the following four excerpts are semantically or pragmatically anomalous (to give that term some context, it cites We ...
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Articles before the name of a person
In the question “La” or “le” before a person's name? on the French SE site, the asker refers to the phenomenon that in some rural/dialect settings the first name of a person is preceded by the ...
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What meaningful distinction is there between morphology and syntax?
While I am not interested in hearing the common distinction made in introductory text-books, I am interested in hearing what meaningful distinction there can be between morphology and syntax. Is there ...
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Why is constituency needed, since dependency gets the job done more easily and economically?
I do dependency grammar (DG), and my personal view is that dependency gets the job done more efficiently than constituency by far. The average constituency parse (= phrase structure parse) contains ...
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Why do Polish and Belarusian have an atypical greeting if compared to other Slavic languages?
While chatting with a polish penpal, I've discovered that in Polish the expression for "good morning/good day/hello/good afternoon" varies if compared to the other Slavic languages; later I saw that ...
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How are mathematical operators like "plus" and "cos" analyzed?
Consider the mathematical statement
1 + 2 = 3
It is read in English as
One plus two equals three.
One plus two is equal to three.
In English at least, equals is obviously an ordinary verb, ...
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Are there any languages in which verbs are a closed class?
In English, the verb "do" can be a transitive verb whose object stands for an action. So, we English speakers can "do a somersault," "do a back flip," and "do a cartwheel." The productivity of this ...
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What divides semantics from pragmatics?
To my understanding... Semantics is the raw meaning and connotations a word carries on it's own and pragmatics is the context-dependent meaning a word holds.
Is this accurate? Can anyone explain it ...
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Why do even completely illiterate persons, who speak their national language poorly, speak their local dialect with perfection?
Disclaimers: I have no linguistic knowledge whatsoever, I'm just fascinated by these subjects. Also, I will use the word "dialect" due to my lack of a better word, although I see that the ...
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Are there any languages that mark nouns as mass?
Nouns like water, mud, furniture in English are odd with plural morphology (adding -s, as in furnitures), with numerals (three furniture(s)), and seem to have their own quantifier (much water but not ...
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What empirical evidence can be produced that all syntactic structure is binary branching?
A tenet of the Minimalist Program is that all syntactic structure is binary branching. Merge always merges two constituents to a greater constituent until the greatest constituent, the sentence, is ...
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Are there any languages that don't permit instrumental subjects?
In English, and no doubt in many other languages, instruments can be subjects. We can speak not only of John (an agent) cutting the canvas, but also of the knife (an instrument) cutting the canvas. ...
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Do any languages mention the top limit of a range first?
In many languages we usually say "between min and max" (e.g., grades "between 1 and 10").
Are there any languages where the reverse construction ("between max and min", e.g. grades "between 10 and 1")...
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Why are many ancient languages so complicated compared to many modern languages?
Many ancient languages have a structure that is more complex than that of the "respective" modern languages. Modern languages like English have simpler structure, without case, gender or declination, ...
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What are the chief advantages & disadvantages of describing sentences with dependency vs. phrase structure trees?
What are the chief advantages & disadvantages of describing sentences with dependency vs. phrase structure (aka. constituency) trees?
From what I've read, dependency grammar trees lack phrase ...
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Which language would be easiest for a computer to parse?
I have an idea for a programming language that would work more like a spoken language. "sentences" would have an initial context in which specific subjects, verbs, and objects would have meaningful ...
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What are the criteria that distinguish clitics/particles from affixes?
This question inspired me to finally ask a question that has been bothering me for years: how does one distinguish clitics and/or particles from affixes, especially when those clitics are ...
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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 ...
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Why is English so much more simplified than other, similar languages?
English seems to have rules that are much more simple than its cousin German and its influencer French, as well as most of the languages that those are related to. What caused this? I suspect it's ...
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Are there languages in which plural classifiers co-occur with numerals?
I'm aware that a number of classifer languages have what might be called "plural classifiers" which -- unlike "normal" classifier -- force a plural, count interpretation, instead of being ambiguous ...
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What is the relationship between syntax and semantics?
There are a number of positions you can take on what the relationship between syntax and semantics.
You could think that syntax is prior and so think that an expression's syntactic function ...
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What is the difference between "anaphora" and "deixis"?
I've been trying to understand an answer from another SE site (Japanese Language & Usage) where the answer involves the differences between anaphora and deixis. Here is the link.
What would be ...
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What is this feature of British English called?
In British English you'll often hear them post-fixing expressions that American English tends to keep up front.
For example, I've heard British English speakers (golf commentators in particular) say ...
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What's the difference between accusative, unaccusative, ergative, and unergative?
What does it mean for a language or verb to be one or the other of these typologies (examples would help)? Can it be more than one at once?
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Ontological status of syntactic transformations
Syntactic theories in the generative tradition involve transformations, i.e. movement of constituents, between deep structure and surface structure. What is actually meant by this? Is it intended as a ...
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What determines how noun compounds are formed in a language?
In English and other Germanic languages, noun compounds are formed simply by “appending” the nouns in a certain order. For example, phrases like this are very common:
electricity price comparison ...
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Can English syntax alone tell apart a person's background?
I was wondering if English syntax alone can tell apart a person's background? For example, if two strangers are exchanging texts - without looking at their spelling, word choices etc, just by the ...
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What is an example of a syntactic structure that can't be represented by a BNF grammar?
The tools for working with BNF grammars are a little more discoverable (ANTLR, Gold, etc) and usable than for other types of grammars. What sort of sentences can't be represented with ordinary BNF ...
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Does Chinese have proper nouns and are they distinguished morphosyntactically or only lexically and or semantically?
In an earlier question I wanted to learn about the nature of proper nouns in a language-neutral way, but the comments and answers to that question so far state that this is not possible, that only ...
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Do "only if..." and "if... only then..." have the same LF representation?
I'm currently writing a term paper where I am comparing if... then..., only if..., and if... only then... statements.
I've noticed that only if p q and if p, only then q have the same truth conditions ...
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Is there anything analogous to grammatical gender for verbs?
Grammatical gender often seems arbitrary from a semantic point of view. When I was taking French many years ago, we were told that one must simply memorize the gender for each noun. Are there any ...
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Languages with stricter and less strict word order?
I'm sure most people here know, but for completeness, let's define what syntax is:
The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. [NOAD]
N.B. It can also refer to ...
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How usual is it for languages to have both prepositions and postpositions?
It has seemed to me (though I might be wrong) that languages usually take either prepositions (English, German, Spanish) or postpositions (Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish). (Yes I know sometimes a ...
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Languages where articles occur to the right of nouns
Are there languages where articles appear—as independent words—on the right-hand side of the noun phrases they occur in - in other words after the head noun in the noun phrase?
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How can adjective-noun order in French be explained by parameter theory?
I just finished reading The Atoms of Language. The gist is that languages have parameters, one of which will tell you which side of a phrase to add a new word.
But in some languages, like French and ...
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Why are affix hopping and head movement considered as distinct operations?
Affix hopping is a morphological operation by which an unattached affix in the T position is lowered onto a verb. This attachment is done by the "Phonetic Form component" (the posited component in the ...
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Languages with subordinate imperatives?
English does not allow an imperative to be used in a subordinate clause:
Eat that pizza!
*There's a pizza on the table, which eat! (="which I order you to eat")
*I told you eat that pizza!
(A ...
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Textbook suggestions for syntax, semantics/pragmatics and phonetics/phonology
I am coming to linguistics from a completely non-linguistic background; I was a mathematician. Next year I will start taking some serious (Master's level) linguistics courses and I would like to have ...
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How exactly does an obviate proximate system work?
There seems to be some controversy about how an obviate proximate system works. I get that it doesn't work like a nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive system.
In some attempts to illustrate ...
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Can prepositional phrases with "of" ever be adjuncts to nouns, or only complements in English? If they can't be adjuncts, why?
This question came up while doing syntax homework. It seems to me that prepositional phrases with "of" can only ever be complements to nouns, not adjuncts. The basis for my conclusion was that, while ...
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Why exactly is *“I Am America (And So Can You!)” ungrammatical?
Stephen Colbert wrote a book entitled “I Am America (And So Can You!)”. As discussed in a question on English Language and Usage, the title is an intentionally strange way of saying "I am America, and ...
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Difference between Minimalism and old P&P
What are the differences between the old Principles and Parameters approach and the developing Minimalist Program?
As I understand it, though the MP is just a framework for developing theories in, in ...
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Italian passato prossimo agrees with subject with 'essere' but not 'avere'. Why?
Another question about Italian grammar aside from this one which has bugged me for ages.
In Italian, when forming the passato prossimo with an intransitive verb, we use forms of the auxiliary verb ...
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What is the role of syntax in understanding event descriptive sentences?
I've been closely following the work stemming from St. John and McClelland's Sentence Gestalt Model, which uses a connectist model to extract semantic information about events from sentences without ...
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What are the different ways in which languages express the notion of passivity?
In English, the passive is expressed by the use of an auxiliary and past participle. The agent is demoted to an optional by-phrase, and the theme/patient is promoted to the subject position.
Rome ...
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Why do adjectives come before nouns in English?
Why does the attributive adjective come before a noun in English? In most languages, the adjective comes always after a noun. For example, white car is written as the equivalent of car white in Latin ...
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