11
votes
Origin of Present Perfect in Romance Languages
The similarity is due to a common pathway of grammaticalistion. The have + past participle form comes from a resultative construction (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca, 1994), which commonly leads to the ...
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9
votes
Origin of Present Perfect in Romance Languages
To the excellent answer by @WavesWashSands I'll only add that some Latin verbs employed a perfective construction with the verb esse "to be" and a participle, which at some point could have motivated ...
- 1,185
6
votes
Subject/Complement Agreement. How to describe problem with "The thing is the objects."
The question addresses an aspect of English syntax that is still somewhat in flux. The mechanism known as copular inversion should be part of the answer.
The direct answer to the question(s) is that ...
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5
votes
How do various frameworks account for situations when multiple cases can be assigned?
Case assignment is a big problem for formal frameworks that postulate some sort of deep agentive case-like structures like theta roles in GB because whenever the morphology clashes with the deep ...
- 10.5k
5
votes
Accepted
Where can I find a list of pronunciation rules for different languages?
eSpeak, or its more current fork eSpeakNG, are formant-based speech synthesizers that cover a decently large number of languages, although not all with the same quality. Their grapheme-to-phoneme ...
- 1,696
4
votes
Morphology: Machine-Learning
It's one of many kinds of compounds, and is not even exocentric (its head is "learning").
As it happens, it is exactly parallel to "machine stitching" (recorded in COHA in 1917) and "book learning" (...
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4
votes
Constructions like the double accusative outside of the Ancient Greek word "διδασκειν"
Latin is full of these:
Illum meum amicum appelo. (I call him my friend)
Romulum regem romanum fecerun. (They made Romulus into a king)
This is with verbs of change (somebody changed/made into ...
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4
votes
Where can I find a list of pronunciation rules for different languages?
If you mean literally all "rules of pronunciation", you are extremely out of luck. That's a call for "knowledge of all phonological and phonetic systems of all languages", which we don't have, not ...
- 66.6k
3
votes
"used to" for past habitual: analysis
Preliminary point: The verb-form is the single word "used", not *"used to". Take your example:
My car used [to malfunction a lot].
The bracketed sequence is a non-finite clause acting as complement ...
- 780
3
votes
Are there right-branching agglutinative languages?
Elamite is agglutinative and (mainly) right-branching, though quotative phrases are left branching.
https://archive.org/stream/TheElamiteLanguage1969/Reiner1969TheElamiteLanguagetext#page/n15/mode/...
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3
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Vocatives and Case Assignment
Russian actually presents a curious example here: on the one hand, as Dominik Lukes pointed out above, it lost the original Slavic vocative case save for a few remnants, but it's also innovated a ...
- 977
3
votes
are words more independent from syntax in non-analytical languages? Does this affect language processing?
Though there is no clear measure for linguistic independence, I'd be tempted to say no to your question: "are words more independent from syntax in non-analytical languages?".
Analytical languages ...
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3
votes
Accepted
Vocatives and Case Assignment
Vocative is problematic because it's not even clear, it should be considered a case since it plays a discursive rather than syntactic role (although you could make an outside case for the syntax by ...
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3
votes
How do formal theories analyse the syntax of polysynthetic languages?
The question is too broad to answer completely (to start with, it presupposes a shibboleth to distinguish formal theories of syntax), but the answer is easy for minimalism.
The comment in the ...
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3
votes
In Latin protases, what's the different between the future and future perfect tenses?
Usually the difference between Fut. I and Fut. II has been argued to be aspectual. For example, Ernout and Thomas 1964 mention that Fut. II often expresses "une antériorité par rapport à un fait qui ...
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3
votes
Constructions like the double accusative outside of the Ancient Greek word "διδασκειν"
The first example that comes to my mind is the dative shift in English, i.e. the construction found in the following sentence:
I gave John a book.
Both arguments are NPs (rather than PPs), so ...
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3
votes
Accepted
Does Morpho-syntax = Grammar?
Linguistics is a notoriously divided field and it's unsurprising if people do not agree on these terms (and grammar can be a particularly loose term -- I think lemontree gets at that in the answer you ...
- 196
2
votes
How does one gloss a case that has both locative and genitive meaning?
Given your examples, I'd recommend that you don't think of the case as GENITIVE at all but only a LOCATIVE with a metaphorical extension of property and possession.
You have a very good precedent ...
- 10.5k
2
votes
Can a language have both nominative/accusative and ergative/absolutive syntactic systems in its syntactic structure?
Sticking to the question of the title, yes, some languages exhibit clearly both a nominative-accusative syntactic systems and an ergative-absolutive system. A famous example of such a language is ...
- 1,846
2
votes
How do various frameworks account for situations when multiple cases can be assigned?
“‘Me and her’ meets ‘he and I’:
Case, person, and linear ordering in English coordinated pronouns”,
by Thomas Grano (2006) seems relevant. Grano says
The puzzling distribution of case in English ...
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2
votes
How do various frameworks account for situations when multiple cases can be assigned?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems pretty straightforward:
From the Halliday's functional standpoint, both sentences are equivalent, since they deliver the same message and have exactly the same ...
- 8,501
2
votes
Why is syntax called "grammar outside the word "
I take that to mean that morphology, grammar inside the word, and syntax, grammar outside the word, share the same concerns, methods, and assumptions, with the only difference being that the first ...
- 12.3k
2
votes
"Ought" omission of "to"
In present-day English ought may behave like a 'modal' verb, taking an unmarked infinitive, only in negatives and questions, not in ordinary declaratives:
Ought I take that seriously?
You ought ...
- 1,449
2
votes
"used to" for past habitual: analysis
I don't see why this should be an adverb phrase.
Of course, the construction is highly conventionalised, probably even lexicalised and no longer productive (you probably couldn't say My car uses to ...
- 6,120
2
votes
Terminology: types of inflection and features
Geert Booij defines inherent inflection as “inflection of a word that is not required by its syntactic context” whereas by contextual inflection he understands “inflection that is required by the ...
- 8,394
2
votes
Is there a database of literal linguistic glosses across languages or per language?
It's not clear what you are looking for (alternatively, your expectation is unrealistic). Drawing on the Cree example, you can locate the gloss "2-like-DIR?-N thus:CNJ-speak.Cree-...
- 66.6k
2
votes
Where can I find a list of pronunciation rules for different languages?
Wikipedia articles titled "[language name] orthography" or "[language name] alphabet" typically have a list of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences.
A site called Omniglot also has summaries of ...
- 4,652
2
votes
Where can I find a list of pronunciation rules for different languages?
Basically, the variations in pronunciations of the written letters based on the context.
There are two separate steps here.
The first is going from the orthography (written language) to the ...
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2
votes
Accepted
What's the difference between a light noun and a nominalizer?
The terminology is most commonly used in Sino-Tibetan, Japanese and Korean contexts. I suggest taking a look at this (warning: gigantic volume, probably a good idea to find an electronic version if ...
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2
votes
In English, is the use of the -ing participle verb form as adjectives or subjects or objects an example of conversion (a.k.a. zero-derivation)?
None of your examples has a present participle. All the examples have gerunds or, in other words, Poss-ing nominalizations: a sentence with the verb "bake" has been converted into a noun phrase. ...
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