5
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Do any languages treat conjunctions as nouns or verbs or such things?
I have a meta-comment, which I’ll make only once. Your questions relate to real issues in linguistics, but you aren’t declaring an identifiable theoretical framework for analyzing language. Maybe you ...
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What part of speech is the word "that" in "That you be happy!"
Your phrase is a fragment (not a sentence). It might occur as the answer to a question ("What do you want?"). 'That' is a complementizer -- it makes 'you be happy' the complement of 'what'. This is ...
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What is the difference between a conjunction and a preposition?
Conjuctions, as you say, connect sentences and clauses, but also phrases and single words. Examples are and, or, but, because, neither ... nor, rather ... than, etc.
Single-word conjunctions are ...
- 6,478
3
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Unusual sentence grouping with conjunctions
The question is concerned with the nature of the strings that can be coordinated. Certainly, coordination (conjunction or disjunction) patterns in many languages similar to how it patterns in English. ...
- 5,658
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What is the term for the formation of word groups with single meaning/function (e.g. "in relation to which") in lingustics
The term for such kind of phrase is multiword expression. I am not aware of a special term for the process that creates multiword expression. I am also not aware of some special treatment of them; in ...
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3
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Syntactic status of 'than'
In answer to your first question, acting as antecedent or deletee in anaphoric deletion is sometimes taken as evidence for being a constituent. And "than NP" does that:
"I like cookies better than ...
- 12.4k
3
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Accepted
Syntactic status of 'than'
The problem with your tests is that the than-phrase is a complement. The PPs that you compare them with are adjuncts (read adverbials). We expect to freely front adjuncts, but we don't expect to ...
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Are there languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive "or"?
I think the closest thing you can get in natural languages the distinction between choice-aimed and simple alternative. Finnish and Basque have already been mentioned, and here are some more:
There ...
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3
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Are there languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive "or"?
Just to coin one more way to express inclusive OR versus exclusive OR.
In Ukrainian, we use "or X, or Y" construct to denote exclusivity:
дай мені яблуко або помаранч — "give me an apple or an ...
- 8,599
3
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Accepted
Are there languages without subordination/only with parataxis?
First, your question at the end doesn't really make sense, because conjunction is not subordination. I think you're asking for languages without subordination, so you shouldn't add "or conjunctions".
...
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Are there languages without subordination/only with parataxis?
Apparently, all languages signed or spoken have some form of syntactic subordination. However, languages differ significantly in the types of subordinata constructions present, in how heavily they use ...
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Are there languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive "or"?
In Azerbaijani language there are separate connectives for both inclusive and exclusive ors.
VƏ YA — inclusive or
YA DA — exclusive or
Qapını ört ya da bağla — Close or open the door (exclusive ...
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2
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Are there languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive "or"?
In Arabic (classical) ʼam is exclusive, ʼaw is (generally) inclusive.
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2
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Accepted
How can you test whether a word is being used as a conjunction?
In The Syntactic Phenomena of English, McCawley uses Ross's CSC (Coordinate Structure Constraint) and RNR as diagnostics for coordinate conjunctions. See, e.g., p. 616, where M. investigates ...
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2
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Accepted
What is wrong with this way of looking at conjunctions?
I may have misunderstood the earlier comments (by Rchivers). The type of approach to coordination described with the diagram in the question is indeed how I prefer to view coordination; the diagram ...
- 5,658
2
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Accepted
Distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions
It is difficult to discriminate coordinating and subordinating conjunctions in English¹ on clauses alone, because there aren't easily testable differences between main clauses and subordinate clauses. ...
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2
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What languages reinforce imperatives with conjunctions?
The order is really arbitrary or a result of the syntactic constraints of the language.
(Generally SAE requires imperatives take the first position whereas even in neighbouring Eastern European IE ...
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2
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Do any languages treat conjunctions as nouns or verbs or such things?
Do any languages treat conjunctions as nouns or verbs or such things?
I’d say it’s the opposite:
Nouns, verbs and prepositional phrases (content words) evolve into conjunctions (function words).
For ...
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1
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x-bar theory - the conjunction "and" connecting different elements
In X-bar theory, “tired” is an adjectival phrase (adj becomes adj-bar becomes adj-double-bar) and “in a bad mood” is an adjectival phrase (prep+NP-double-bar becomes adj becomes adj-bar becomes adj-...
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Why are prepositions and subordinate conjunctions grouped as the same tag in the Penn Treebank tag set?
Look up here:
Complements of P
PPs are headed by prepositions and take complements of various categories. The most common are NP and CP, but ADJP, ADVP, IP, PP, etc. are possible as well. Since ...
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Is "Since + clause" a noun clause or adverbial clause in this phrase?
It's been a while since I've seen you.
Traditional grammar classifies this "since" as a conjunction. But "since" can also uncontroversially occur as a preposition when it has an ...
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Accepted
Why are constructions such as ‘AN historian’ commonly pronounced with a non-silent H?
The initial syllable of words like "historical" which take "an" can often drop the h (in pronunciation, not in writing). After dropping the h, of course, they start with a vowel and now satisfy the ...
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Whence אֶת between partners' names?
To give a much more global picture abstracting from the history of the Hebrew language: The change of a commitative adposition "with" to a coordinating conjunction "and" is not unusual and often seen ...
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Parallel coordination failures
The main issue here concerns the following three parses of the instances of conjunction in the example sentence:
(1) a. You [can [manipulate [lightning], [mist], and [wind]]; [traffic with air ...
- 5,658
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Is it possible that whole relative clause refers/describes one word/phrase in the main clause (without anaphora)?
No, anaphora is always involved in a relative clause construction, because relative clauses have relative pronouns (not necessarily explicit), and relative pronouns are anaphoric. The "which" of your ...
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Are there languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive "or"?
Let us understand the structure of XOR through boolean logic.
A XOR B is (A OR B) AND NOT (A AND B )
Assuming that inclusive OR appears in languages first... XOR could be obtained by applying a ...
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Grammatical term for inflectable conjunctions as used in the Arabic language(s)
The character ل can be used as a preposition. The preposition means "for".
The word أن means "that".
When you combine the preposition ل and the word أن together, It becomes the word لأن. The ...
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Grammatical term for inflectable conjunctions as used in the Arabic language(s)
In Arabic grammar this is called "'inna and its sisters". These encompass a set of particles that are followed by a noun in the accusative case, or by the accusative forms of suffixed pronouns.
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