New answers tagged syntax
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Accepted
What are the general word order trends of VO languages
For a start, see https://wals.info/chapter/83 "Order of object and verb", section 3 on "Theoretical issues". (Your question would seem to require a survey article or a book as an ...
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Accepted
Why do dominant VSO languages all have SVO as an alternative word order?
If you take a Chomskyan view of syntax, it's not possible to get a VSO order without some sort of movement. The arguments to a verb are always Merged in first, and then the subject attaches somewhere ...
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Accepted
Chomsky on licensing parasitic gaps in English
Parasitic Gaps
The book(i) that you filed __(i) without reading __(i)
The book that [you filed the book [without reading the book]]
In the example noun phrase, modelled in (1) and (2) above, we see ...
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Is the head function also called nucleus, or is nucleus a subtype of head?
This is a purely terminological confusion. The diagram is supposed to convey that in some specific cases, a head is called a nucleus. But in the "Head" article, the word "nucleus" ...
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How many beats is a syllable?
A syllable is an organizational abstraction, a grouping of consonants around a vowel (with various putative exceptions). Beyond that, it doesn't make any sense to try to "define" a syllable, ...
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On colorless green ideas
First, it should be clear that in natural languages nothing has a rigid definition. To make sense of a sentence is thus to select "definitions" so that the sentence has the intended meaning. ...
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Why is binarity emphasized so much in linguistics?
{a} + {b} -> {a, b} + {c} -> {a, b, c} seems much more complicated to me than {a} + {b} + {c} -> {a, b, c}
Complexity and difficulty are different problems. A recursive algorithm may have a ...
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On colorless green ideas
Chomsky observed (Syntactic structures p. 15) that
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" are both "equally nonsensical", but ...
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Why is binarity emphasized so much in linguistics?
Binarity is favored over alternatives by general scientific logic, therefor to the extent that a linguist is concerned with scientific logic, that is the expcted tendency. However the specific details ...
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