Unanswered Questions
190 questions with no answers
12
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Do "only if..." and "if... only then..." have the same LF representation?
I'm currently writing a term paper where I am comparing if... then..., only if..., and if... only then... statements.
I've noticed that only if p q and if p, only then q have the same truth conditions ...
CommunityBot
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6
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Do most semanticists maintain that there is a distinction between secondary agents and tools?
I've heard some people say that there are two types of instrument: secondary agents and tools.
A secondary agent is something that accomplishes a task when the agent wields it. So we CAN say ...
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5
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Is there evidence that English speakers associate black with bad and/or white with good
Prompted by the recent move towards replacing the terms "blacklist" and "whitelist", I wonder if there is research around the topic of how people feel about the words "black&...
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How was excession expressed in Proto-Germanic?
The state of excession (of an adjective) is indicated differently accross Germanic languages.
West Germanic Languages (E: too long, Du: te lang, G: zu lang) build it by the use of descendants from ...
- 193
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How does the Natural Semantic Metalanguage deal with proper names?
The natural semantic metalanguage gives definitions of common words in terms of semantic primes, as can be found here.
I am curious, however, as to how the NSM deals with proper names (or does it?) ...
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5
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Research on development of language of modality in children 8-12?
Let me quickly introduce myself to provide a context for my questions. My PhD research focuses on ways that we can teach primary school children (9-12) ways of handling complex, contradictory and ...
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5
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Do puns necessarily involve referring to two (or more) extant words?
What exactly constitutes a pun? Do the words in the pun have to both be extant, or can one be a nonce/nonsense word? — Over the years, I've heard numerous usages of "puns" where one word in the ...
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4
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Any examples of any language bifurcating the past into past before one's life and past during one's life?
It can be either from a conlang or a natlang but I wasn't able to find any examples.
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4
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Is there a linguistic term for a term in a language refering to a specific technology, outliving said technology?
In language, phrases and various semantic expressions referring to technologies often make their way into the language, even if that technology is mostly obsolete.
Examples of this could include "...
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4
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Why are reflexives prohibited in partitive constructions?
In a partitive construction, reflexives do not usually occur:
Julie and Bob are talking about the two of them/*themselves.
The following example is from COCA:
The men, all of them, stared into ...
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4
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How would languages that use an absolute frame of reference say that the heart is on the left side of the body?
In languages that use a relative frame of reference we can say that the heart is on the left side of the body, and no matter what direction you are facing that is true. But in an absolute frame of ...
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4
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Term for universally-used quote with additional, non-compositional meaning
There exist certain fixed expressions which people use to convey quite specific meanings and (at least to me) always invoke a famous saying which is assumed to be common knowledge, such as
I am not a ...
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4
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0
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Using (e.g.) Stanford NLP for retrieving specific “indirect” objects
I am a computer scientist using Stanford NLP for extracting a Semantic Graph from plain text.
Through this tool I am already getting the universal dependencies but now I want to get all the possible ...
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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 ...
4
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Tool for manually POS tagging texts
I'm interested if there is a text or set of texts where each word is correctly POS tagged.
I know there are algorithms that can associate POS tags to the words, but there are always many of ...
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