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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Is there a language whose syntactic structure accepts a specifier of a PP?
We know a preposition (in X-bar theory) is the head of a prepositional phrase and it has a complement that is the sister of this very preposition. However I've never seen a language with a constituent ...
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Are there different "kinds" of meaningless sentences?
There is famous sentences by Chomsky ("Colorless green ideas sleep furiously") to show that syntactically sentences can by devoid of meaning, or at least have a very odd or dubious meaning. ...
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How common are "How" + infinitive interrogative sentence structures?
In English (or at least varieties with which I am familiar), if you want to ask how to do something, you can't just ask "How to do {something}?"--that's interpreted as a headless relative, ...
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Is derivation through valency change common cross-linguistically?
Sorry if this question doesn't make much sense, it's still a half-formed shower thought at this point. In my linguistics class yesterday we were going over ergative-absolutive alignment, and the ...
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how do we categorize verbs that come after copula verbs?
(1) The bird seems to eat.
Would eat be a verb?
I thought that it would be but now I'm having second thoughts about whether it's an adjective or a verb.
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"STARBUCKESE" syntax problem
In standard English, one can’t put a PP before a head noun that the preposition modifies. For example, the NP in (a) is completely ungrammatical.
a) *The with milk coffee.
But there is a major chain ...
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Does "Inchoative Construction" mean constructions with intransitive inchoative verbs?
The following is the sentence I extracted from a book, Binding Theory, written by Daniel Burning.
The fact that a language like English, which lacks a simple reflexive, has extremely few reflexive ...
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Why is the PP, according to this derivation, directly moved from the lower (farther) DP, not the nearer one?
The sentence being parsed:
De CHOMSKY varios libros han ganado premios internacionales, no de Trotsky.
of Chomsky several books have won awards international-PL, not of Trotsky
Why is the PP on top ...
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On the change of word order as languages develop?
While I understand the most common changes in word order, the whole SOV can go to OSV, SVO, and OVS, and so forth. But I do not exactly understand how and why word order would change. Can you explain ...
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Why is there a proxy reading in this sentence from Reuland (2011)?
For English, himself can function as proxy reading, for instance,
One of the well-known properties of reflexive pronouns is their ability to
have "proxy readings." This is illustrated in (1) ...
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Why is 'There are most of us in the party' ungrammatical?
Sentence a: There are many of us in the party.
Sentence b: There are most of us in the party.
Why is sentence b ungrammatical? Is it a matter of some kind of constraints?
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How does "own" affect binding?
How does own affect binding relationships?
I am studying binding theory as it applies to English. I have learned that own can influence the binding relations. For example:
(1) John is his boss.
The ...
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Are there languages which restrict adverb usage to only one of either preceding or following a verb?
We have adverb sentences like this:
I basically initially ran quickly.
That means the same thing pretty much as:
I basically initially quickly ran.
First part of the question is, why do some ...
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What does it mean for something to be extracted from islands? [closed]
So I understand that something like a complex NP is an island. And some languages are "sensitive to islands" but what does that mean? What is being extracted from the island and why would ...
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Flesch-Kincaid reading ease formula coefficients [duplicate]
About the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease formula:
F = 206.835 − (84.6 ∗ S) − (1.015 ∗ P)
I don't understand the meaning of the coefficient choices. Why those specific numbers? Are the studies behind the ...
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theta role, infinitival phrase
What is the motivation to assume an unpronounced Pro when there is infinitival phrase in the context of phrase structure grammar?
Eg. I hope to hit the target.
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How do you draw a x-bar tree with negative inversion? [closed]
For example: 'Never was I so offended'
There is already a T to C inversion with 'was', where do we put the word 'Never'?
And how should we label it? AdvP or Neg?
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Textbook: “grammar behaves as if something is left behind after movement” — How so?
From An Introduction to Language and Linguistics by Fasold and Connor-Linton, on auxiliary movement:
It may seem strange that movement is done in two steps, copying and deletion of the original, ...
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In syntax trees, why aren't single-word phrases reduced to that word?
Why do phrases like "the car in Texas" break down into
(NP (Det the) (N car)
(PP (P in) (NP (N Texas))))
Why is the prepositional phrase "in Texas" constituted of the ...
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When are prepositional phrases sibling to leaf nodes?
In syntax trees in English, can prepositional phrases, modifying either verbs or nouns, ever be sibling to the verb or noun itself for example and not a verb phrase/noun phrase?
I've heard the correct ...
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Can adjuncts modify nouns?
The Wikipedia page on adjuncts gives the example
Yesterday, Lorna saw the dog in the garden.
Notice that this example is ambiguous between whether the adjunct in the garden modifies the
verb saw (in ...
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can a binder bind two bindees where one is in secondary predicate and the other is in third predicate
(1)[Zhangsan] zhidao [ta] zuo de dui.
Zhangsan know he do right
(2)??[Zhangsan] zhidao [ta] zuo le zhejian shiqing.
Zhangsan know he do ASP this thing
Huang1988 proposed that the ...
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Why do object pronouns precede the predicate in French, while R-expressions follow it?
How to explain the situation in French where an object pronoun needs to precede the predicate, while an object R-expression stands to the right of the predicate?
Here is an example:
a. Il le regarde. (...
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What is a trace dependency?
Just came across the Nested Dependency Condition - if two wh-trace dependencies overlap, one must contain the other. What does this mean?
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In the following sentence, why "slowly ate" fit the replacement test but is not considered a proper constituent
She slowly ate a donut,
Where I was told that slowly ate a donut was a constituency, and ate a donut was a constituent,BUT slowly ate was not, since they are not under the same node...
Which all make ...
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Understanding why Antisymmetry gives us SVO and not SOV
I'm trying to understand the theory of antisymmetry as described here. I know the slogan that it treats every language as underlyingly SVO and derives other surface orders through movement.
I don't ...
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How should the Albanian "genitive" really be analysed?
The Albanian language is typically described as having a genitive case. In actuality, this "case" consists of an connective particle which agrees in number, gender AND CASE with the ...
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what is the headword in this sentence? [closed]
"Before the Saturday kidnappings, professional associations and businesses in Port-au-Prince had called for an indefinite strike."
How many noun groups are in the bold clause? and what is ...
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How to define sentence complexity?
I am not a pure linguist but rather at the intersection of computational linguistics, NLP and computer science. Thus please be cautious with me and my ignorance. I am looking for definitions of ...
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Why we do not usually say "who did eat the apples" while "What did she eat" is perfect to use? [closed]
I noticed that in English, it is incorrect to say "Who did eat the apples?" but it is correct to say "who ate the apples?" It would be very helpful if you can give me some clues ...
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Turing-completeness of Minimalism and HPSG
I read several times that HPSG and Minimalism are Turing-complete. Could someone explain (or tell me some references) why this is the case? And does this constitute a major problem since natural ...
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When / why can adjective phrases come after nouns in English?
When and why can adjective phrases come after nouns in English, if at all?
So, firstly: I am not talking about special usages like poetry or drama etc. where people may say things like "The night ...
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relationship between C-command and Binding
What is the relationship between C-command, binding and Co-reference? Does it mean that C-command is the precondition of binding? Can somebody help me get clearer about these three terms?
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How is collision entropy of German syntax higher than of English one?
As I explained in the draft of my latest paper about linguistics, I have measured the collision entropies of English, German and Croatian syntax. The entropy of consonants in a long English text was ...
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discontinuity in dependency grammar
According to Wikipedia, only about 15–25% of actual sentences contain a discontinuity, and the percentage of discontinuous dependencies is even much less, approximately 1–2%. What confuses me is that ...
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A question about dummy pronoun [closed]
According to Wikipedia, A dummy pronoun is a pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. It is often a dummy pronoun in English ...
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What determines the valency of predicates?
According to this example, arrive takes only one subject valent.
Can somebody specializes in syntax help me apprehend this notion of valence? Specifically, what factors are used to determine the ...
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When are complementisers implied, but not present, and when are they actually not present?
I have recently been learning about complementisers and relative clauses etc. and how they relate to x-bar theory. It is a feature of English that some complementisers are optional, especially in ...
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How to treat adverbial phrases in X-bar theory
My question is about how to represent so-called adverbial phrases like "last night" or "all day". My confusion arises because there seems to be a consensus that these phrases are ...
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Which syntactic dependency parsers perform best on search query phrases?
Lots of NLP libraries contain syntactic dependencies parsers (e.g. spaCy, NLTK, Stanford NLP, Spark NLP...). As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong), these are mostly designed to parse ...
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Is there a Chinese translation of Tesniere's Elements of Syntactic Structure?
Is there a Chinese version of Elements of Syntactic Structure written by Tesniere? Has anyone ever translated it into Chinese?
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Dependency Syntax tree problems
This is a Dependency syntax tree from an official website. As can be seen from this pic, "off" is deemed as a complete subtree. But when we use constituency tests to verify it, it does not ...
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What is subphrasal constituent? How to define it?
Could somebody specializes in SYNTAX help me explain the term subphrasal constituent? What is subphrasal constituent? How to define it?
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To what extent do the number and respective functions of performative constructions vary across languages?
For those who came in late, a performative predicate is one that denotes an act made possible by the use of the verb or predicate itself. For example:
When a clergyperson or justice of the peace ...
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Distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions
I am struggling with finding any remotely formal criteria for distinguishing these two types of clauses. There are typologies which already define certain groups of conjunctions, but there are tons of ...
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The grammatical analysis - "most of them civilians"
I came across this sentence today:
They were most of them civilians.
Now how will we analyse"most of them" here? Is it just a modifier in Noun Phrase - "most of them civilians"? ...
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Does a sentence with an adjunct entail the same sentence without the adjunct?
Entailment is a situation in which the truth of a given sentence necessitates the truth of some related sentence. If the sentence Susan is taller than Jane is true, then we know for sure that the ...
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When can FOR be used as a preposition and a complementiser?
This question is based on several suppositions:
For as a preposition is able to be transformed into a wh- question with the wh- phrase preposed with for, as below with senators John acting as the ...
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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 is extraction?
Chapter 1 of Parasitic Gaps, edited by Culicover and Postal, begins with this example:
Which articles did John file t without reading pg?
The italicized t is reported to be a "true gap" ...
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