Unanswered Questions
1,945 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
20
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Are there any studies on some English passive verb constructions currently being replaced by new intransitive senses?
In the past couple of years I've noticed a new trend in younger generations of native English speakers, at least in American English and Australian English. But I can't find it discussed anywhere on ...
CommunityBot
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16
votes
2
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Do dialects without the meet-meat merger neutralize the distinction in some contexts?
For many dialects of English (including my own) multiple historical lexical sets are merged into one "FLEECE" set (this diaphoneme can be represented with IPA /iː/).
I've read about the basics of the ...
- 638
13
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0
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421
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Is linguistic change pushed by humor?
Through "meme culture," young people are inventing all sorts of new linguistic constructions purely because they think they sound funny. The interesting thing is that these jokes don't end at a ...
12
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0
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Do "only if..." and "if... only then..." have the same LF representation?
I'm currently writing a term paper where I am comparing if... then..., only if..., and if... only then... statements.
I've noticed that only if p q and if p, only then q have the same truth conditions ...
CommunityBot
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11
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0
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300
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What kind of features support the claim that Slavic languages are closer to Germanic languages than to Indo-Iranian languages?
Inspired by this answer to a different question, I ask what kind of features justify a claim that Balto-Slavic languages are closer to Germanic languages than to Indo-Iranian languages.
The features ...
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10
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0
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211
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Is Riau Indonesian really monocategorial?
There have been plenty of publications (mostly by David Gil) discussing how Riau Indonesian is a unique language that lacks word categories.
To me, this sounds huge: a truly unique language, no word ...
- 201
9
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1
answer
404
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Merger of perfect and aorist in Italic and Celtic
One of the common features of the Italic and Celtic branches is the merger of perfect and aorist. So, in the surviving "perfect" forms we find a mixture of old aorist stems and old perfect ...
CommunityBot
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9
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0
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Is anything known about the origin of the hard "g" in "guénti" in Santiago, Cape Verdean Creole?
There is a word "guénti" /'gɛn ti/ in the Santiago dialect of Cape Verdean Creole, which is used to mean "people" or "you people/you all". It clearly comes from the ...
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9
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0
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304
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Positive & Negative Polarity Items, and Interrogatives
There are certain items in some languages that tend to occur largely in negative clauses. In English, one such item might be the word ever:
*I have ever been to Paris.
I haven't ever been to Paris.
...
- 3,817
9
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1
answer
94
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Languages with nominalized verbs that specify the thematic relation of its possessor
In English, nominalized verbs have only one form regardless of the thematic relation of its possessor:
The robot's destruction (of the city) terrified authorities.
The robot's destruction (by the ...
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8
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0
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282
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Which writing systems have the highest/lowest stroke-to-sound ratios?
Preemptive note: This question is about sound-based writing systems, excluding logographic systems like Chinese. Transitional systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya script or Man’yōgana are also ...
- 3,536
8
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0
answers
82
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Was the "a" glyph ever used for ajV in Hittite?
As fdb mentioned in a comment:
The sequence a-a is a scribal convention for ajV [in Akkadian]. Some Assyriologists treat it as a single sign with the “Lautwert” aju, aji, aja
In Hittite, ...
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8
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0
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183
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Historical pronunciation of Hindi यह and वह
The Hindi 3rd person singular proximal and distal pronouns यह and वह are commonly pronounced [jeː] and [ʋoː], in contrast to the [hyper-correct?] pronunciations [jəɦ(ə)] and [ʋəɦ(ə)] one might expect ...
- 3,084
8
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0
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Does anyone know if there are plans for a 'successor' to Huddleston and Pullum (CamGEL or CGEL)?
Huddleston and Pullum's The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGEL or CGEL) is widely considered a 'successor' to a previous 'great English grammar': Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's ...
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8
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Phonological development of Middle Chinese 學 /hæwk/ to Mandarin xue /ɕye/
學 was /hæwk/ according to Baxter-Sagart transcription of Qieyun, and according to this wikipedia page, -æwk became /Jye/ in modern Mandarin, where J is a palatalized initial consonant.
What I'm ...
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