11
votes
Accepted
Name for seemingly incomplete sentences
They are called garden-path sentences and the definition is more or less what you said: "The reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning.&...
- 2,392
6
votes
How did verb conjugation by person, number and gender appear? Why do we still use it?
More theory than history for you, but one take on it:
Language evolution is an eternal tug-of-war between ease of articulation and information density. We want to say things quickly and learn how to ...
- 2,392
5
votes
Peculiarities of English as spoken/written by Norwegians
What about translating literally some Norwegian expressions? I've heard someone says "it wasn't only-only" before now, with a thick accent of course. "only-only" is not a ...
- 4,440
5
votes
Do sentences have primary and secondary stresses?
No, this is a common misconception.
When considering languages like English, it's a good idea to distinguish from the outset concepts such as 'stress' (in connected speech), 'accent', and 'nucleus' (...
- 3,962
5
votes
Do "imperative" and "declarative" belong to the same or different categories?
The mood applies to the verb in a clause, not to a sentence.
English has a barely functional system of "moods", nearly all verbs are used in indicative (even in situations that plainly call ...
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4
votes
How did verb conjugation by person, number and gender appear? Why do we still use it?
The systems employed in Germanic and Slavic result in part from inheritance from Proto-Indo-European, with changes (such as the loss of agreement in Norwegian, massive reduction in English, and the ...
- 82k
4
votes
Are there any languages where you can put the demonstrative at the end of the sentence?
The Malagasy language has a verb–object–subject (VOS) word order, so in the sentence “This is blue” the subject “this” is the last word in the corresponding Malagasy sentence:
English: This is blue.
...
- 17.7k
4
votes
Does the function of a clause belong to semantics or syntax?
In Pullum and Huddleston’s CGEL grammar, a clause is first a matter of syntax, second a matter of semantics. That is, it is a particular form that is observed in words and sentences, but which may ...
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3
votes
Does this sentence have two meanings?
The two senses are specific and non-specific:
Specific: A certain person, who happens to be an employee, must leave. ("Employee" is not in the scope of "must".)
Non-specific: There is a requirement ...
- 12.4k
3
votes
Do any languages allow merging of two sentences without punctuation?
There is no punctuation in spoken languages (ignoring constructed languages like Lojban with spoken punctuation). It is debatable whether punctuation is a feature of language at all.
Even in written ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
Is there a definition of "sentence" that applies to all languages?
Yes:
A word or set of grammatically linked words expressing a complete
thought.
"Expressing a complete thought" is context-dependent: "Sure" might or might not be a sentence. It is as an answer ...
- 252
3
votes
Split a sentence using nltk and python
If you are familiar with spacy, you can use the dependency of the words in the sentence:
import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
doc = nlp("Apple is looking at buying U.K. ...
- 31
3
votes
Do "imperative" and "declarative" belong to the same or different categories?
"Mood" is a category that's been invented to describe how certain languages work. In some languages, it makes sense to analyze verbs this way. In others, it doesn't.
Types of utterances, on ...
- 64k
3
votes
Do "imperative" and "declarative" belong to the same or different categories?
The first thing to do is say what "mood" is. Mood is a formal property of verbs forms (formal in the sense "the form of the verb") that signals modality. In other words, "mood&...
- 82k
2
votes
Is either of these meanings of the word "sentence" more conventional?
I think we can confidently conclude that there are two or even more conflicting definitions of "sentence". Analogously, there are multiple definitions of "markedness". However, your first quote:
...
- 82k
2
votes
Sentence/Utterance/Proposition
I can vouch for my answer from the perspective of how philosophers in general (and philosophers of language at the introductory level) answers this. For linguistics, I include what I was able to glean,...
- 127
2
votes
Looking for tool to split german text into sentences
spaCy does sentence boundary detection (sentence segmentation, sentence breaking). It also supports German.
See https://spacy.io/api/doc#sents for an example:
- 7,531
2
votes
Looking for tool to split german text into sentences
Just searching for tokenizer german I came up with Stefanie Dipper's tokenizer for German. It comes with a somewhat non-commercial license (read it before download).
- 29.8k
2
votes
What are the best NLP sentence alignment tools?
There is hunalign available from github. It is the current standard tool for multilingual aligned corpora.
- 29.8k
2
votes
Negativity score for sentences
In general, this is called sentiment analysis aka opinion mining; putting either of those into Google will give dozens of different possible starting points.
One model I've used before is VADER, ...
- 64k
2
votes
Subordination. Chinese vs English
Just keep spamming 的-clauses. To use your example:
我认识一个[有狗的]人。
我认识一个[有[向猫吠的]狗的]人。
我认识一个[有[向[在屋子里的]猫吠的]狗的]人。
我认识一个[有[向[在[[...的]城市的]屋子里的]猫吠的]狗的]人。
My own judgement is that the longer sentences don'...
- 3,431
2
votes
What sort of sentence is a request?
I don't think requests are a sentence type. Requests are polite commands, but any sentence type can be used to make a request. Sentence type concerns the grammatical form of a sentence -- like ...
- 12.4k
2
votes
Complex sentence without a subordinating conjunction?
These are SIMPLE SENTENCES. These are not complex sentences because they don't have a dependent clause. Any type of clause should have a subject and a verb (an action / conjugated verb). A dependent ...
- 21
2
votes
How to derive that a sentence is a question from parts of speech
From a part of speech perspective, you'll be interested in the the tags that begin with "W" found here: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/penn_treebank_pos.html
However, the PoS ...
- 664
2
votes
Are there any languages where you can put the demonstrative at the end of the sentence?
Classical Latin allows such a word order e.g. "caeruleus ille est" (literally "blue that is"). This word order, with the predicate first adds emphasis to it, and "ille ...
- 6,547
2
votes
Why do Spanish words change meaning when put in a sentence?
Why do Spanish words change meaning when put in a sentence?
Is this unique to Spanish, that one surface form can have many senses?
Let me put it like this:
He put his shares at 80.
He is a shot put ...
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1
vote
What sort of sentence is a request?
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston, Pullum et al, 2002) describe three broad categories of ɪʟʟᴏᴄᴜᴛɪᴏɴᴀʀʏ ғᴏʀᴄᴇ with which a clause or sentence may be used:
Statement
Question
...
- 3,962
1
vote
What sort of sentence is a request?
I suspect you're asking about the five major 'clause types' that are used to perform different kinds of speech acts. I believe there to be a broad consensus that they are:
Declarative: You are very ...
- 830
1
vote
Do any languages allow merging of two sentences without punctuation?
In Berber, the coordinating conjunction "and" between utterances doesn't exist (A part from some varieties). They say: I ate, I watched TV yesterday.
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