Unanswered Questions
92 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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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 ...
CommunityBot
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8
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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
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What linguistic sources discuss doubled -ed in -edly and -edness words?
Some linguists have written analyses of "double -er suffixation" in English, in formations from particle verbs such as fix up > fixer upper. For example: "Double -er suffixation in ...
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7
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How to determine the direction of conversion?
Recently I have been researching the topic of nominalizations. I learned that such structures might be created by means of morphological derivation (be it affixes, clitics, light verbs) or zero-...
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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 ...
5
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Are there any universals about how m-case can pattern for predicate NPs?
Predicate noun phrases (NPs) have different patterns of case in different languages.
Even closely related languages can show significant differences (Sigurðsson 2008). For example, among the Germanic ...
CommunityBot
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5
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What is the origin of the Latin suffix -alis/-alia?
What is the origin of the Latin suffix -alis/-alia? Can it be an Etruscan borrowing? Is Russian adjectival suffix -аль- a borrowing from Latin?
CommunityBot
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4
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Why do languages almost never have negative comparatives or superlatives
Many languages have comparative and superlative suffixes or other morphological forms such as English ‘-er’ and ‘-est’, Latin ‘-or’ and ‘-issimus’, and Arabic ‘afʕal’ template, but I couldn’t find ...
4
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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 ...
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4
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Is there count/mass distinction in European Portuguese as it is in English?
It is said that European Portuguese has count/mass distinction as many Indo-European languages. However I noticed out that all products/items at stores in Portugal are labeled in singular form. In ...
3
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Semitic verb extenders
Whenever I look up how Semitic created its triconsonantal template system, one tidbit I see frequently mentioned is that the older roots seem to have originally been biconsonantal, and were only later ...
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How does tense evolve from a tenseless parent language?
Whenever someone asks something about TAM evolution, they seem to inevitably be pointed towards the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (Kuteva et al., 2e, 2019) and The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, ...
- 600
3
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Dependent-marking on adpositions?
Is there a language such that an adposition is dependent-marked so that one can infer that it depends on head X but not Y?
As a possible example, an affix is attached to an adposition to show that it ...
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What do Georgian thematic suffixes even do, and where do they come from?
Georgian has two sets of verb affixes that don't really mark a specific tense or aspect themselves, but the combination of them narrows down which TAM-indicating conjugation you're looking at - the ...
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Can you provide a cheat-sheet for turning Proto-Indo-European dictionaries from the older style into laryngeal notation?
Much of the resources I have for Proto-Indo-European itself (not etymological dictionaries for other languages) either use Laryngeal notation but are limited in scope (like Wiktionary) or are written ...
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