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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Why do object pronouns precede the predicate in French, while R-expressions follow it?
Words like je, le, lui are historically pronouns (meaning: they derive from Latin freestanding pronouns) and are treated orthographically as separate words, but from a synchronic point of view they ...
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What kind of phrase is "until recently"?
Your 'rules' mix traditional and contemporary grammars. It's true in both traditional and contemporary grammars that a preposition phrase [PP] consists of a preposition and an object; but in ...
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How VSO or SOV languages deal with nouns with lots of adjectives
There are two main ways that such languages deal with this problem. I'll be focusing specifically on SOV languages, since they're more common and I know more of them.
The first solution is what Latin ...
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6
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What other languages can get by in some cases without prepositions or particles like Somali?
Lots of languages, depending on exactly what you mean or are looking for. We have examples like your Somali examples in English: "middle of the road, outside of the town". Niger-Congo ...
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5
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Term For A Prepositional Phrase With A Verb?
I want him to run.
"To" is not a preposition here but a subordinator that serves as a marker of to- infinitival clauses.
"Want" is a catenative verb and this is a catenative construction where the ...
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Can one sentence have two or multiple possible phrase structure grammars? And what is this called?
At the risk of redundancy, I'll offer the canonical example:
Time flies like an arrow.
Readings:
Time passes rapidly in human experience.
Those 'time flies' sure do like arrows.
(Hey you:) Go (as ...
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What is the difference in a constituent and a phrase?
A constituent is easly identified by a series of possible tests. Among them, the replacement of a phrase for a pronoun, thus working as a single unit, for instance:
The good man drinks the water
It ...
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"but" usage (redundancy of "but")
I think you answered your own question!
"but" is used to […] indicate that the first clause is contrastive to the second in a way
In your first example, "I am not a teacher" contrasts with "I am a ...
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3
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Evolution in number of words from Greek to Latin to modern languages
I'm assuming that the "we" in your question means "English speakers". (ETA: it actually seems to mean "speakers of modern European languages", but the difference doesn't substantially affect my ...
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Evolution in number of words from Greek to Latin to modern languages
An example of change in sentence length over time is discussed here. The number of words per sentence in English in the past 400 years has decreased, which is the opposite of what you predicted. Other ...
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3
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How Nesting Verbs Works (and if it is Even Possible)
There are also very common examples of nesting in other languages, especially ones with a SOV word order, such as latin. In latin, because of the fact that the subject and object come before the noun, ...
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Why is the subject outside the VP in most theories of syntax?
First of all, it should be noted that in nearly all generative theories--even in ones which generate subjects inside the VP--the subject practically never stays there for long. Subjects generally move ...
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Difference between primary and secundary predicates(/argument small clauses) and their (overt) 'heads', and transition/ambiguity between the two
I think it is appropriate to take a step back and consider what grammarians understand predicates to be. I have asked a number of established syntacticians directly how they use the term predicate. ...
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3
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Alternative sentence structures in historical languages
I'm interested in what is known about the structure of languages and
how much they might differ. In Indo-European languages (and Hebrew as
well), the basic sentence structure is (not necessarily in ...
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Do any languages have interlaced phrases?
This is known under the term Cross-serial dependencies and is considered a rare phenomenon among the languages of the world. A famous example of cross-serial dependencies comes from Swiss German and ...
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2
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Does a generative grammar of the English language exist?
Unfortunately, there has never been a truly complete description of English (or any natural language) in generative terms—or in any formal system, in fact. Such a thing would be wonderfully useful, ...
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2
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Infinitive clauses referring to an adjective before a noun
(the question should be on ELU or ELL)
In the first group (both sides), the infinitive action is done by the subject.
In the second group (right side), the infinitive action is done by the main ...
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How Nesting Verbs Works (and if it is Even Possible)
You have three distinct phenomena here.
I bought farmed food.
"Farmed" here is a participle: an adjective formed from a verb. You can use it anywhere you could use an adjective: "this food is ...
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2
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How do noun-noun compounds fit into a noun phrase in syntax?
Noun-noun compounds are nouns: N -> N N. The structure of your example is
[N [N [N [N chocolate] [N chip]] [N cookie]] [N dough]]
or possibly
[N [N [N chocolate] [N chip]] [N [N cookie] [N dough]]]...
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How could you summarise the noun phrase of a certain language?
The list of "things that are useful when describing noun phrases" cannot be complete, because there is no one list of what is relevant to every analysis. That being said, here are a few relevant ...
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What is the difference in a constituent and a phrase?
While a constituent is any proper subpart of a sentence (a morpheme, a word, a phrase, or even a clause), a phrase is typically a sequence of words built around a word class (the head) and existing as ...
2
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What is the difference in a constituent and a phrase?
Contrary to the suggestive nature of the question, the answer already produced by Ergative Man, and a couple of the comments, there is an important difference between the constituent and the phrase. A ...
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Meaning of superscript numbering in phrase structure trees
Superscript 0 is universally the symbol for the head of a phrase - note how in your examples, it occurs only on T, Pred and V (as opposed to TP, PredP or VP).
I can't say that I'm immediately familiar ...
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Do all frameworks of syntax view the string following an inverted auxiliary verb in English as the complement of the auxiliary?
Most modern phrase structure grammars will assume that the string immediately after an inverted auxiliary is the complement of the auxiliary, as the question implies. This fact is largely due to the ...
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what is the headword in this sentence?
Many approaches to syntax would view the finite auxiliary verb had as the head word of the entire sentence. The part in bold arguably contains four nominal groups (the Saturday kidnappings, ...
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Alternative sentence structures in historical languages
It seems likely that “thought” (whatever that is) is different from “expression”, and that language is a system for encoding thoughts into some system of expression. Linguists analyze that system of ...
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2
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Introductory texts / papers for learning bare phrase structure?
Coming back to this question: after talking with my professor, I can pretty confidently say that introductory texts do not exist. This set of notes from Nicholas LaCara at the University of Toronto is ...
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Why is the subject outside the VP in most theories of syntax?
The object is a kind of complement since it satisfies the licensing requirements.
The subject is rather different: all canonical clauses contain a subject, so in a sense subjects are compatible with ...
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