All Questions

I know that theta-role has the distinctions like agent, theme, goal, etc., but all of them refer to entity, right? And argument can refer to both entity and sentence? Could you please explain them as ...

From what I understand the lexeme or lemma of a word carries the sense information of the word, and hence for an inflected form like tablets, it can have a different lemma, each one for each sense of ...

I have a physical dictionary of a language that has very few speakers. I have scanned it and would like to OCR it as it is over 300 pages long. The problem is It has characters like ł and ŋ. I have ...

In neurolinguistics, we come across event-related potentials such as N400 for semantic unexpectedness or P600 for error correction. Is there anything at all, linguistic or not, that we can infer from ...

What's the State of the Art in software for converting text to some sort of logical form? Pros and con's of different packages approaches, if more than one exists?

I want to create audio files for a conlect of Chinese I am studying, and therefore tone is one aspect I have to consider. Many of the IPA to speech software I've seen so far don't consider tone (or ...

For my bachelor thesis i am probing various text similarity metrics for how much they incorporate different aspects of sentences. To get those aspects I use datasets that are annotated for semantic ...

Pardon me if this question is naive, but I am wondering if there is a way to quantify lexical similarity between two corpora of text, each written in different languages whose alphabets differ greatly....

I am looking at this kind of French sentences: Le directeur de la banque Un directeur de banque Le livre de l'élève Le livre de français Having done some research about English grammar terminology ...

I'm looking for a formal, mathematically-minded introduction to contemporary generative grammar theory, where all the concepts, such as dominance, c-command, government, etc. are defined formally in ...

Can first order logic represent a past occurring adverbial dependent clause with a present main clause to form the perfect tense? Is this the way to represent an adverbial dependent clause with first ...

What are the regular sound laws that explain the modern form of the words in baltic and slavic languages? I am aware of the centum/satem separation, which already helps to identify a lot of cognates ...

There are some words in the German language that may seem to be familiar to a native English speaker, but in the end, it turns out that they are so-called "false friends" and have different meanings. ...

Some advertisements for language training material (like this and this) have a dubious claim that each language has its own frequency range of sounds, or a "pass band", so that listening to sound, ...

When listening to my 5-year-old son telling me a little story about dinosaurs, he used a lot of repetition in the following way: "The triceratops… the triceratops used his horns… the triceratops ...

When learning new Chinese words, I write down an example sentence from which I can infer its meaning. This way, when I've forgotten the word, I can simply read the sentence and deduce (or remember) ...

In the phonology of a series of languages, /r/ exists as a trill, and is reduced into a flap in informal speeches or in a syllable-final position. Why is it happened to be a flap, not a fricative? I ...

As a layman I have picked up the terminology and notation for changes in phonology. But I know very little about diachronic changes in syntax other than that they happen: things like shift from SOV ...

My question is in regard to semantic type theory in connection with syntax. I understand the underlying structure of what type a certain type of phrase is ( i.e., proper names are <e>, verbs can ...

Consonants and their phenomena are well studied for PRS (Puerto Rican Spanish). However, vowels and their phenomena are less well known. Known vowel phenomena in the dialect are unstressed/final vowel ...

I've been experimenting with analysing vowels in Praat. Sometimes it shows a clear F4 (which seems to mean that F4 has a narrow bandwidth - I don't know whether amplitude comes into it as well) and ...

A suborder is a set of related expression elements which are more strictly ordered with respect to each other than they are with respect to other expression elements. This is my own term. I offer ...

I noticed that modern Romance languages don't have a specific word for the verb "to stand", or - you could say - don't consider the notion of standing to be a verb. For example, in Spanish - you can ...

This Wiki article seems to suggest that words like makes had lost their final syllable schwa in normal speech already by Chaucer's time (palmeres > palmers is the example they give). The rule, as ...

A child can be raised in a sufficiently bilingual context that they learn two languages simultaneously, e.g. English & Spanish, Norwegian and Saami. The end product is that they have two ...

I am searching an English Whats-app Corpus in order to analyse a linguistic phenomena. I had some difficulties to find one and maybe some of you can help me out. It is only for corpus driven study and ...

Some languages have direct-inverse marking on verbs or hierarchical alignment. I'm wondering whether there are any attested examples of minimal direct-inverse systems where the verb is obligatorily ...

My question is: Which are the social differences which lead to the variance in the way to address a person? An example of the difference is T-V distinction some languages abolished it while others ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_natural_language lists some controlled languages, of which Attempto Controlled English seems to be the most recent. However, are there any Attempto extensions, ...

Are there any languages with a construction similar in meaning to an associative plural or elliptical construction that's used frequently within the language? I'm particularly interested in a ...

I am looking data set for reasoning. Basically, more examples like this one: 1. I like food. 2. Cake is food. Conclusion: I like cake.

Say that I wanted to compare Siri and Google Voice in terms of naturalness or similarity to human speech. Obviously I could give a bunch of people a survey and collate their opinions — but I wonder if ...

What are the sound changes that occur from Proto Bengali to Bengali? In which order did they occur historically? Ex. PB Būdhā became B Buro PB Karisi became B koriš PB dahī became B doi

From a computational linguist's point of view, is there a lower limit on the number of hours of speech needed to train a neural net to translate speech to text? An estimate from CMU is 3000-5000 hours ...

Principles And Parameters syntax posited that along with some principles, there were parametric settings for certain properties, which are either "on" or "off" in a language. Examples are the "head-...

I suspect not, and I'm being dumb, but ... Usain ran quickest. is parsed (https://corenlp.run) as NNP VBZ JJS. Why JJS (Adjective, superlative) and not RBS (Adverb, superlative)? Using extended ...

I'm attempting a word embedding analysis (think underlying meaning and implications, but computational) of certain keywords through time in the English language, but I am having some difficulty ...

It is well-known that it is difficult to compete with native speakers when learning a language as an adult. But is there a similar phenomenon with writing systems? Can non-natives (e.g. of Arabic or ...

QUESTION: I would like to ask if anyone knows any decent resources on how native middle easterners, particularly in Judea, might have pronounced greek koine in the first century. GOAL: My primary ...

I’m using p2fa to do aligning for a sound file. Because the speaker has some heavy breath that was misinterpreted as words, I used praat to denoise it, and it sounds pretty good. However, p2fa almost ...

Various simple sentences occur in English that I can't explain precisely. "In we went!" "Off he goes!" Is this an arcane idiom from an earlier grammar, or is there a general rule that can be ...

For my Syntax class this semester, we've been asked to look at a language more in depth and try to develop X-Bar compatible rules for it. In doing so, I've come across a reoccurring problem that may ...

The sentence would be "Whose dirty underwear is this?". I assume that the base (is that called deep structure sentence?) would be "This is whose dirty underwear" but I'm not sure what ...

I am trying to write a text processing script in R. I am interested in finding a word (from a list of words I have selected) only if it is in the same sentence as another word. Eventually I would ...

A common construction in some foreign languages, but seemly not in English, is to use a noun where we would use an adjective. The two forms are: A: PRONOUN "BE" ADJECTIVE B: PRONOUN "HAVE" ∅-...

In Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) and in Derivation by Phase (DbP) (Chomsky, 2000, 2005, 2008), call it Phase Theory, features enter narrow syntax with predefined values, these values are binary (-...

When a student starts learning syntax,1 how common is it to first teach them GB (or a stripped-down, GB-flavored approach), and then teach MP once they've got the hang of it? This was obviously the ...

I recently came across a paper, "The Quantitative Trochee in Latin" (by R. Armin Mester, 1994) that seems to argue that feet in Latin were "strictly" bimoraic. The arguments that Mester gives for ...

I've been mulling over the idea that articulatory gestures should be looked as excursions from a home base that varies according to language and accent, and that defining sounds just in terms of the ...

I have an idea on how fast a Dutch speaker speaks: 130 wpm = medium 160 wpm = fast 100 wpm = slow I'd like to have that same knowledge about other languages. Is there a list somewhere that ...