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 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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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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What are the motivations for which direction syntactic trees are built in (top down or bottom up)?
When I learned x-bar theory, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that trees were built top-down, from IP or CP to the VP and its complement, etc. However, as I am learning more about Minimalism (...
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Is there any difference in meaning or nuance when the adjective follows the noun in Georgian?
Many languages allow the order of adjectives compared to nouns to vary, but for different reasons:
Some languages have very free word order in which case there is little difference between adj + noun ...
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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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Is there a term for "the number of words that must follow a given word to complete a phrase"?
I've been struggling, for a couple of months now to find the term for a concept from computational linguistics. It means something like: the minimum number of words that need to be placed after 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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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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Thematic roles in some languages
I have a question about semantic roles in Latin and Russian.
Latin
Quibusdam […] sudor erumpit.
someone. DAT.PL sweat. NOM.SG come out.PRES.3SG.
‘Some people start sweating.’
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What is a theta role?
What is a theta role? Is it the same as a thematic role?
And what does it mean for a theta role to be undischarged/unsaturated? I came across these terms in a syntax paper. It seems like both ...
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Are there any other rules for adjective order?
At the English Language and Usage Stackexchange site, the question was asked What is the rule for adjective order? and the answer boiled down to:
(article) + number + judgement/attitude + size + ...
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Are there any recent articles on the current state of Case theory?
Specifically I'm interested in the split between Structural Case and Morphological case.
Structural Case has been part of Chomskyan syntactic theory since at least Government & Binding (GB). ...
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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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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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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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Is there any language that expresses the category D but doesn't have inverse scope?
By "expresses the category D" I mean, preferably, that there is solid evidence/argumentation for a given morpheme to be analyzed as overtly heading a Determiner projection. I would limit such ...
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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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What's the "state of the art" for methodology in syntactic/semantic experiments
I'm looking for good recent books or articles on experimental methodology in syntax or semantics. Ideally they'd be geared towards working formal linguists who don't know much about psycholinguistics ...
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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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In languages with quotative markers, is extraction allowed out of quotative-marked clauses?
That is, is there a language that allows the following type of movement
WH1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1
DP-TOP1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1
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Why does complementiser drop not occur in negative English sentences?
English that can often be dropped from a sentence.
(1) I think (that) she can come.
(2) I don't think (that) she can come.
In some negative constructions, complementiser dropping sounds marked....
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Semantic head vs Syntactic head parsing
I've run into "semantic head parsing" and "syntactic head parsing" and while I think I have a feel for the difference, I was wondering if anyone could give a more concrete definition or reference to ...
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Are there some analyses or linguists with the view that Chinese does not have lexical word class?
I'm not a linguist but a language enthusiast and I read lots of stuff about all languages mostly on the internet in blogs but also in accessible books and sometimes attempt to read some things not ...
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Case reassignment without change in number of cases
Most languages with cases seem to be either gaining or losing them diachronically (The Indo-European languages are an example of the latter, and the Uralic languages of the former). Manchu and Xibe (a ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Relationship between SOV word order and osV prefixes
I've been reading about the Native American language isolate Washo, and looking at the Universals Archive. If an ergative language is SOV, the object and subject affixes will be prefixes and the main ...
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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 ...
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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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Verb-attraction parameter in Portuguese
Prof. John McWorther, in his course on Linguistics, said, in a lecture about principles and parameters: "if a language is pro-drop, the verb attraction parameter is always set on. If a language ...
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What is the difference between transitive and intransitive finite complementizers?
I know that an intransitive verb accepts only one argument, i.e., the subject. So, such verbs do not need a complement. But how could one understand the concept of an intransitive complementizer, in ...
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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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