Unanswered Questions
287 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Chosmky - Universal Grammar
I'm a graduate student and I'm struggling with Chomsky's ideas.
I understand the concept of universal grammar as an initial state, in which we are born pre-wired to acquire language.
What I don't ...
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Ellipsis with tože in Russian
Does anyone know literature on ellipsis with tože (тоже) in Russian? I've found papers only on verb-stranding, gapping, and yes/no ellipsis.
Here are some examples:
Я буду решать задачи. Я тоже буду (...
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How do I tell when a sentence is totally meaningless?
Consider the sentence:
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
It is meaningful, but to a person like me who does not know what the words "ontogeny", "recapitulation" and "...
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Has Attic Greek grammar been well-preserved enough or well-recorded enough so that it can be theoretically revived for daily communication?
Do scholars know enough about Attic Greek's grammar for us to learn to speak and write it fluently? Have enough grammar texts and records survived, and has there been a continuous line of textual ...
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What did they do in Old English when using the instead of an?
I know that in Old English the would place n infront of words that start with a vowel after saying the word a but did they still do it when they said the? For example would a napron stay as the napron ...
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What is a Grammatical Function in LFG?
I'm new to LFG and know that grammatical functions are considered to be primitives in it. But how can one know that the thing one is dealing with is indeed a grammatical function?
I am reading Falk's '...
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Insight into basic machine translation error from major email service
I recently ordered a product through a Japanese company (I live in Tokyo), and received an email response that due to a recent backlog of orders I should expect my product shipped within 2-3 weeks (in ...
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Information rate of ultra-information-sparse languages
Pellegrino 2011
Also Pellegrino
YoonMi
These popular researches found out information density (ID) inversely correlates with speech rate (SR) to make information rate (IR) of languages cluster around ...
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List of counter examples + statistics of Greenberg's universal
I could not find a list of counter examples/ statistics of Greenberg's linguistic universals.
There are numbers that I could find relevant information on WALS. There are some I could not find anything....
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Which language has grammatical tone but no lexical tone?
"Having only grammatical tone" seems to be a marginal case of the definition of "tonal language", and it sounds like the tonal system has collapsed a lot (that the lexical tones ...
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can we say that the word "these" in the sentence does not carry a clear specification of the number of "best cities"
can we say that the word "these" in the sentence does not carry a clear specification of the number of "best cities"
"Of all the cities in the world I love New York, Chicago ...
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What language has a small difference between word length of advanced VS basic vocabulary?
word length on Swadesh list
Zipf's Law
Basic vocabulary is used more frequently and the word length (#syllables/#segments) is generally shorter than advanced/technical/formal vocabulary.
In English:
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Meaning of tags starting with §§ and § in syntax structure software
So I have been working with a syntax parsing software called VISL (https://edu.visl.dk/visl/en/parsing/automatic/parse.php) to generate data about every word in a paragraph. I'm programming the ...
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Tensed infinitives across languages
As the Latin language shows, infinitives can be marked for tense (amare - present, amavisse - perfect).
English also shows that: to love, to have loved.
Can anyone suggest any literature regarding the ...
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Verification of R. Dixon's bound/free split prediction
In his book, 'Ergativity', R. Dixon makes a prediction on page 95:
if there is a split between bound and free forms, the former will
follow an accusative pattern, the latter - an ergative pattern.
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