58
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Is it unusual that English uses possessive for past tense?
This is what's called a "Sprachbund" feature: it's a trait shared by a bunch of languages in an area, even ones that aren't genetically related. In particular, this one is a feature of the "Standard ...
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46
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Why isn't "I've" a proper response?
English syntax makes a distinction between auxiliary verbs and full verbs. (Note that this answer is only talking about English; other languages do things differently. And as people have pointed out ...
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38
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Are there languages that don't have this kind of ambiguity?
Yes there are. Examples include Greenlandic and Cree.
It's not exactly what you asked for, as it doesn't depend on whether it's the last antecedent, or second-to-last antecedent. But in these ...
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31
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Is there a term for when you use grammar from one language in another?
This is usually called interference. Here is the Wikipedia on the subject:
When the relevant unit or structure of both languages is the same, linguistic interference can result in correct language ...
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22
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Fourth person (in Slavey language)
The fourth person is a (rare) synonym for the obviative. In languages with this feature, when there are two third-person referents and one of them is less salient, the less salient one may be marked ...
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22
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Fourth person (in Slavey language)
As a layman in linguistics I found this explanation pretty illuminating:
In English, when we have a non-SAP (speech act participants) involved in the discourse, there is the potential for ambiguity. ...
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21
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Why do we use the names we do for grammatical genders?
The names currently used for French are inherited from Latin, which had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. (Some ancient grammarians added "common" and "epicene" to ...
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17
votes
What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?
While it is not clear to me what should be considered as "unique" to a language, since all the languages are different, so also unique in many ways, but they also share many basic features and ...
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17
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Example of a tenseless sentence
A common saying in linguistics is, languages don't vary in what they can express. They only vary in what they must express.
In English, it's morphologically impossible to have a finite verb without ...
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16
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Can one sentence have two or multiple possible phrase structure grammars? And what is this called?
Yes, this is possible, and the phenomenon is called syntactic ambiguity. A classical example sentence is
He saw the man with the telescope.
which has two different readings and syntactic analyses.
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14
votes
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Besides logics, what mathematical tools are used in the study of linguistics?
Nice question, I think this is good to ask for linguistic theory in general, because people who are not so familiar with linguistic research often find this hard to imagine.
First of all, logic in ...
- 6,478
14
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Are there languages that don't have this kind of ambiguity?
In some sign languages, pointing is used as a pronoun. It makes different distinctions to the ones made by English pronouns.
In English, he, she, this, that and it are different. He and him are ...
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14
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Why are there grammars in languages in the first place?
This is a very general question about acceptance of scientific theories, and you can analogously ask if you should really believe that your body is made up of little tiny cells, the cells are made up ...
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14
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Is there a term for when you use grammar from one language in another?
It's often referred to as L1 transference, or L1 interference, where the term L1 refers to the speaker's first language and transference refers to the projection of aspects of the first language onto ...
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13
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What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?
John McWhorter recently explained some. I'll add to that here. English has a number of features that, while not absolutely unique to English, just rare in the world, are unique to English as a ...
- 4,445
13
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Does English have [ inchoative aspect ]?
This is a case where we have to distinguish between the ability to express something in a language and the presence or absence of a grammatical structure dedicated to expressing that something.
...
- 6,689
13
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I have my hair cut - "my hair" a Direct Object?
First of all, the sentence
I have my hair cut.
is an example of a Construction. That is, there is a special model for this clause, with its own unique sets of meanings, uses, restrictions, and ...
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12
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Are there any known natural languages in which tense is never (or very rarely) expressed through the modification of verbs?
In Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, the verbs never change their form, it is the pronouns that have the tense. In Wolof there is I-which-is-now, I-that-will-be, I-that-was, ...
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12
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Are words classified (PoS) according to their use in a sentence, or does classification precede usage?
Short, snappy answer: parts of speech are a lie perpetuated by Big Syntax.
Longer, actually useful answer: parts of speech are an abstraction created by linguists to explain how syntax works. There's ...
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12
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Are there languages that don't have this kind of ambiguity?
Aside from obviative third person pronouns mentioned by OmarL, some languages have what are known as 'reflexive' pronouns. These pronouns refer directly back to the subject of the clause that they are ...
11
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When does language "evolve" and when is it just wrong grammar?
It's right if other people who speak your dialect (other people in your speech community) also say the same thing systematically. In the Japanese case, it's clear that the construction is correct in ...
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11
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Are there languages where the tense depends on time elapsed between events?
Having one or more remoteness distinctions in the past tense is reasonably common, particularly in Papua, parts of the Amazon and parts of Africa: http://wals.info/feature/66A (note that the map is ...
- 316
11
votes
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"Den" or "det" in Swedish
Many languages have such an ambiguity built in. It's very common that you can't tell the morphosyntactic properties of a word or even its phonological interactions just from its form, even given ...
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11
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Why isn't "I've" a proper response?
You can't delete a vowel and also stress it. That's obvious. So deleting a vowel prevents stressing it, and stressing a vowel prevents deleting it. A principle of English stress is that the last ...
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11
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Is it possible in Sanskrit to distinguish between the names Rāma and Rām i.e. राम and राम् when used in a sentence?
In the dictionaries, the Sanskrit name राम (Rāma), together with most other Sanskrit words, is given in the form of the stem. राम (Rāma) is the stem, and in a sentence it can be used only as a direct ...
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10
votes
What's the difference between syntax and grammar?
Syntax is the study of the internal structure of phrases and sentences, and the hierarchies, grammatical functions and relations between constituents.
From my proposed tag wiki for syntax:
The ...
- 6,478
10
votes
Accepted
Declensions in Polish
I can recommend this book: Słownik odmiany rzeczowników polskich by Stanisław Mędrak. The good news is that it's exactly what you want: a dictionary that lists all the noun declension paradigms. The ...
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10
votes
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Intuitive English example of why linguists think natural language grammar is stronger than CFL?
I don't personally believe that CFL are insufficient, but among linguists who care about weak generative capacity (probably most don't care about the issue), the consensus seems to be that they are. ...
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10
votes
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Why is sign language different from spoken language?
Sign languages are true natural human languages, so the first misconception to overcome is that anyone has the power to control it like the question suggests. We can set conventional spellings in a ...
- 6,126
10
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Why couldn't one combine rules from languages for sentences with the same intended meaning?
You can if you want; nothing is stopping you.
But if you're writing in Finnish, it's presumably because you want Finnish-speaking people to understand you, and Finnish-speaking people are used to the ...
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