Unanswered Questions
130 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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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 ...
8
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1
answer
2k
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Agglutination in Proto-Indo-European
Based on numerous sources, it seems clear that Proto-Indo-European was
Productively agglutinative with non-root morphemes (and perhaps some specific roots that are also able to act like bound ...
7
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0
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887
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I'm confused by the term 'adjunct' as used in A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (2nd Edition 2022)
According to the authors of the book, adjuncts are divided into two kinds: modifiers, which are thoroughly integrated into the syntactic structure of clauses, and supplements, which are much more ...
7
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0
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170
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Are there any languages where the first person cannot be an object?
In some languages, nouns low on the animacy hierarchy, particularly inanimates cannot surface as A, and if a situation arises where they are underlyingly A, some reparative strategy such as a passive ...
7
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0
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191
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Combinatory Categorial Grammar (комбинаторная категориальная грамматика) developments and lexicon for Russian language?
I am trying to apply Cornell Semantic Parsing framwork https://github.com/cornell-lic/spf (implementation of Combinatory Categorial Grammars CCG) to Russian language. This framework takes natural ...
6
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133
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Are Rhyming, Alliterative Verse etc. forms of linguistic Error Detection/Correction Schemes?
Rhyme (Wikipedia)
Alliterative verse (Wikipedia)
Metre - Poetry (Wikipedia)
Mechanisms such as these appear to help lower information corruption during long range communication, especially during pre-...
5
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0
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226
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How does syntax of our language affect our thoughts?
Our language affects the way we perceive the world. I know it is not only because the words that don’t exist in one of the languages may exist in the other ones, but also because of the grammar. We ...
5
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61
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What to reference for grammatical features being more reliable than lexical features for diachronic research?
I often hear people mention in passing that grammatical features are more reliable than lexical features in diachronic research, specifically when detecting pseudepigraphs, because it is relatively ...
5
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65
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Combinatory Categorial Grammar for inflected languages?
Can combinatory categorial grammars be used for inflected languages like Slavic and Baltic languages? I am aware only of this thesis https://pwmarcz.pl/pm-thesis-final.pdf
As far as I have ...
5
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555
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Why did English change so rapidly between the late 1600s and the early 1700s?
I am currently reading the King James Version of the Bible and am slowly getting used to the text-—English is my second language. I then wondered with what ease would I be able to understand the ...
4
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Are there languages where grammatical parallelism does not matter?
English has a strong preference for parallelism (Wikipedia link), even though sentences lacking parallelism are still considered grammatically correct:
Good:
She likes cooking, jogging, and reading.
...
4
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0
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54
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Where can I find a table/list of all/many languages' plural/singular forms for hours/time?
Even though I'm natively Swedish, I'm seriously unsure if it's "1,1 timme" or "1,1 timmar". That is, what in English would be "1.1 hour" or "1.1 hours".
Even as ...
4
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0
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43
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How broad should the corpora be to describe the grammar of a proficient speaker?
What's the minimum size of a corpus that you need to cover substantially the grammar of a language?
I know that the limits of 'substantial' might be open to speculation. But imagine you wanted to ...
4
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476
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Past participle agreement in French
Background (skip if you know French)
In French, to generate the past tense, you use the past participle of the verb, attaching in front a conjugated form of avoir or être. For example:
J'ai mangé. (I ...
4
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529
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Types of questions and questioning "ordinality"
I would like to know if there is a system for classifying the types of questions that can be asked in languages. In other words, how are sentences that query the why, where, what, who, when, and how ...