4
votes
Why are voiceless plosives (p, t, k) unaspirated after /s/?
A bit late to this very interesting question which had also troubled me for years to find the answer. My answer for this question is that it's simply the way those sound are pronounced in English! ...
- 152
3
votes
Do non-tonal languages evolve into tonal languages?
The general phenomenon you're looking for is called tonogenesis and there's a fair amount of literature on it.
It's behind a paywall, but in the event that you can get access this is a good overview ...
- 501
3
votes
Why do nouns typically have their main stress on the penultimate while verbs on the ultimate (according to theories other than that of Hayes)?
One version of a "why" answer is to study the history of the system: I would recommend looking at this paper and references therein (Danielsson 1948; Dresher & Lahiri 2005; Fikkert, ...
- 82.1k
2
votes
Accepted
Are the Croatian word "struna" (string of a musical instrument) and the English word "string" related?
Both Slavic and Germanic have str- as the regular reflex of word-initial PIE *sr- (and also *str-, although this is rarer), so genuine cognates beginning with str- in Germanic will be expected to ...
- 6,935
1
vote
Accepted
Chomsky on licensing parasitic gaps in English
Parasitic Gaps
The book(i) that you filed __(i) without reading __(i)
The book that [you filed the book [without reading the book]]
In the example noun phrase, modelled in (1) and (2) above, we see ...
- 3,962
1
vote
Do non-tonal languages evolve into tonal languages?
This is a challenge to the assertion in the question Native speakers have emphasized to me how much more compactly the same idea can be expressed in Mandarin than in English.
According to the paper ...
- 29.8k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible