8
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Accepted
Do all languages have the same set of grammatical relations?
I assume, based on the your posts elsewhere, that by 'sentence parts', you are referring to grammatical relations (GRs) like subject, object, etc. In the future, it would be clearer for you to call ...
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6
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What is the difference between 'actor' and 'subject' in systemic functional grammar?
In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a clause is analysed for transitivity in different ways depending on the type of process the main verb represents. Let's consider the following clauses:
[I] ...
- 161
6
votes
Is a language without inflection a language without subject?
"Subject" is not defined as the argument which agrees with the affixes of the verb. Sometimes, "subject" is defined as that argument which verbs agree with. In the modern era, you might start with the ...
- 83.4k
6
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Accepted
Instrumental - nominative inversion in Polish
TL;DR: Your assumption is correct, "the new relation" is the main subject, while "result of the expression" is the nominal predicate.
It's a remnant of the ancient Essive/Translative grammatical ...
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5
votes
What is ''syntactic behavior"?
The short answer is that there's no exact answer. There is no clear cross-linguistic definition of what a 'word' is, and therefore no real distinction between syntax and morphology. Indeed, there are ...
- 3,472
4
votes
Accepted
What is the subject of a passive sentence?
The former object becomes the new subject. That is clear -- the new subject has all the properties one could reasonably associate with a subject. Number agreement with the verb and subject raising ...
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3
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Are "Inverse copular constructions" accurately described by Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia article is inconsistent and incorrect in part concerning the issue flagged in the question. The correct analysis of the “riot/revolt” sentences is as follows (but altered a bit to allow ...
- 5,805
3
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About the universality of the notion of subject and the description of ergativity
Greenberg's universal #38 ("Where there is a case system, the only case which ever has only zero allomorphs is the one which includes among its meanings that of the subject of the intransitive verb") ...
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2
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Accepted
how do SOV langues mark Subject?
Zillions of possibilities here. If I understand correctly, you are mainly concerned about the possibility that there is no obvious boundary between the subject and object in case there is a multiple ...
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2
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Accepted
About the universality of the notion of subject and the description of ergativity
in the end it seems to me that the definition of ergativity in terms of intransitive/transitive subject and object is hardly satisfying and looks either circular or ethnocentrist. So why is it still ...
- 18.7k
2
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Raised object vs. Subordinate subject (I didn't want 'Kim' mistreating my cat)
Yes, Kim is a raised object in (2). But it's not in (1) or (3). They all come from similar structures, a main clause I didn't want NP, where the NP is a complement clause with Kim as subject and ...
- 10.1k
2
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Do CP adjuncts of N require/have a subject?
It is not so much a question for the EPP but for the analysis of relative clauses. You analysed the "that" as a C-head, and that looks ok to me. However, there is some uncertainty in the ...
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what's this linguistic phenomenon?
The questions examples are all topic-comment sentential-phrase pattern. Most languages other than English do this even more than English does, but as your examples demonstrate, it is grammatical in ...
- 264
1
vote
Accepted
Help with syntax analysis
The classical transformational analysis is that the deep structure is [[(Someone)] [must confess [that he was disappointed]]]. This gives you "the meaning" of the sentence. This is ...
- 83.4k
1
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Raised object vs. Subordinate subject (I didn't want 'Kim' mistreating my cat)
Yes - syntactically, 'Kim' is raised to object. A pronoun there (such as 'him') would be in object form.
'Kim' is the subject of the embedded clause, but that clause is the direct object of 'want', ...
- 666
1
vote
Looking for the name of research area *my brother helps me (to) translate*
The example is a classical linguistic question with the canonical example phrase "help him (to) write" (for an overview and more references, see, e.g., Pinson (2015)), but it is not a named ...
- 31.1k
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What is the difference between 'actor' and 'subject' in systemic functional grammar?
I thought a shorter answer might help some people:
The actor (or agent) performs the action (upon the patient).
The subject is what the predicate gets filed under.
With a verb in active voice, the ...
- 666
1
vote
Second Person Inanimates in Swahili
The second person singular object marker is always -ku-. The marker -ki- is third person and only used for inanimates, which a rhinoceros is not. Addressing something in 2nd person, even something ...
- 145
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Which languages have Subject-object agreement in relative clauses?
I would not call this object-agreement because (to my knowledge) it also holds for non-object relative clauses, such as adverbial relative clauses (but not for subject-relative clauses, as I'm sure ...
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