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Unanswered Questions

130 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
8 votes
0 answers
292 views

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 votes
1 answer
2k views

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 votes
0 answers
887 views

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 votes
0 answers
170 views

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 votes
0 answers
191 views

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 votes
0 answers
133 views

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 votes
0 answers
226 views

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 votes
0 answers
61 views

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 votes
0 answers
65 views

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 votes
0 answers
555 views

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 votes
0 answers
118 views

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 votes
0 answers
54 views

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 votes
0 answers
43 views

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 votes
0 answers
476 views

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 votes
0 answers
529 views

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 ...

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