New answers tagged syntax
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You can find a somewhat detailed, yet informal discussion of this topic in Chapter 5 of Isac and Reiss 2008/2013 I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cogntive Science. (I am one of the authors.)
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As already mentioned by others, there are many biases at play here.
There is no such thing as "the sound of European languages", and most European languages sound nothing like English.
Similarly, CJK languages sound very different from each other.
The program that you wrote is not actually reading words aloud, it's just spelling.them. How they ...
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If you generate a bunch of random strings like that it will not match any patterns that your friend's brains recognize and those brains are going to categorize them into the "most unknown" bucket. If your friends are English speakers then there is a good bet that bucket is "Asian".
So it may not be at all that the words are similar to ...
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Asian languages don't "sound alike" and don't "sound different" from European languages, because languages of Asia include Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Indian languages, and Chukchi (among others). Most people don't know what Chukchi sounds like, nor do they know about Khakas, Ket, Mongolian, Malay etc. However, actual exposure to ...
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It can function syntactically in several ways. As subject: "The one who spoke hasn't been identified yet." As predicate: "He is the one who spoke." As direct object: "They caught the one who spoke," and "They caught him, the one who spoke."
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Well, yes, it is finite. It would only rise to infinite if you have a sentence with infinitely many words. And Computational Linguistics is an entire field based around going off of viable patterns in order to construct sentences with an AI.
English is Adjective-Frontal SVO, and it is only as such because that's what it became over its development. For ...
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The original sentence for the question “Which canvas appears to have been painted with a red paint?” is “This/That canvas appears to have been painted with a red paint”, and the answer would be “This one/canvas” or “that one/canvas”.
The reason why that sentence has no does is that it is the subject noun phrase (NP) that is being questioned. When, say, an ...
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PIE had a rich inflection system, as is echoed in the oldest attested daughter languages. Owing to this, if adjective and noun were each appropriately declined, the order could be either way.
As to the actual order, there is not enough evidence to support an absolute trend either way in PIE.
Remember that word order is more important in modern Germanic and ...
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Lots of languages precede proper names with a definite article. The phenomenon is called the 'preproprial definite article'. You can find an article with a quick survey of languages and some theoretical conclusions here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253773804_Why_Rose_is_the_Rose_On_the_use_of_definite_articles_in_proper_names
The main ...
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