Unanswered Questions
111 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
8
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1
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585
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Which languages have zero markers of comparative degree that coexist with non-zero comparative markers?
The zero comparative marker and the non-zero one should be more or less interchangeable. (The etymology of the non-zero marker doesn't matter.)
(A message asking to list such languages was originally ...
7
votes
0
answers
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 ...
- 6,337
6
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0
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109
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Are there any languages with second-person pronouns marked for a proximal/distal distinction?
I am curious if there are any natural languages where the personal pronoun used to refer to the addressee varies in some way depending on their distance to the speaker. For instance, one form might be ...
- 161
6
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0
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595
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Comparative markers coming from low degree markers ("attenuatives")? (List such languages.)
Which languages have a marker of the comparative degree of adjectives that coincides with a marker of a low degree? ...or which has evolved from such a low degree marker?
(A message asking for the ...
6
votes
1
answer
296
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Reference request: ways of indicating disagreement
There are lots of ways to indicate you disagree with some aspect of an utterance. I'm thinking here of the spectrum that includes "No, not-X," "Well, not-X," "Hey, wait a minute! Not-X!" "Yes, you're ...
CommunityBot
- 1
4
votes
0
answers
118
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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.
...
- 1,140
4
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0
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339
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Are there languages that mark mood but not tense or aspect?
Are there languages where verbs inflect for mood but don't inflect for tense and aspect?
For instance, if a language had one set of indicative forms and another set of subjunctive forms, but didn't ...
- 6,337
4
votes
0
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509
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Is there a phoneme distribution graph for multiple European languages?
I am doing some research on a manuscript which I need to identify the language. My hypothesis is that it is written in phoneme by someone who does not understand the language. Spoken aloud, one that ...
- 18.7k
4
votes
0
answers
173
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Month names variants
Regarding the question on TeX.stackexchange I am looking for generally used languages that use different cases for their month and day names.
Based on Czech and Slovak languages I can imagine two ...
CommunityBot
- 1
4
votes
0
answers
378
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Is there any evidence pro/contra Du Bois' Preferred Argument Structure (ergative patterning in discourse)?
In The Discourse Basis of Ergativity published in Language in 1987, John W. Du Bois proposed a theory which stated that (p. 850)
[universally] the distribution of new information vs. old ...
- 346
4
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0
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90
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Historical changes from 'not yet' to 'not again' and vice-versa
A two part question. Are there attested historical changes whereby a construction C in some language means 'not yet', and then C changes in meaning so that it means 'not again' at a later time (or ...
CommunityBot
- 1
3
votes
0
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146
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In any language, is there a word for a death relationship with one’s sibling?
In English, we have the word “widowed” for losing a spouse and “orphaned” for losing a parent. Is there any equivalent for one’s sibling in any language?
- 31.1k
3
votes
0
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21
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Raising and Case Marking
Can someone explain subject-to-subject raising and case marking from a syntactic point of view? How/where do the NPS get Case-marked?
Thank you
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3
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0
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46
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Quantitative methodology for contrastive pragmatics in corpus-based settings
I am interested in literature regarding methodology that could be relevant for quantitative research into differences in pragmatic meaning between two 'equivalent' concepts in two languages (in other ...
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3
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0
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151
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A question regarding semantics of "only"
I have a question regarding semantics of only provided by Beaver & Clark (2009) and Chierchia (2013).
for something like "Sandy only met [Bush]F" (let this proposition be called p). ...
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