Unanswered Questions
303 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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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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In X-Bar theory, what could the Specifiers of PPs and AdvPs ever be?
In X-Bar theory, do prepositional phrases, adverbial phrases, adjectival phrases etc. ever have specifiers? What could they be?
The only phrases I know the possible specifiers for are: Noun Phrases, ...
CommunityBot
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Stacking of prepositions in English?
The Cambridge Grammar Of The English Language recognises the existence of intransitive prepositions (p. 612):
The case for allowing prepositions with no complements is most compelling where the same ...
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Dataset for distribution of different systems for 'yes' and 'no' cross-linguistically?
The Wikipedia article for 'Yes and no' lists various distinct, common, systems for expressing the affirmative and the negative, ranging from no explicit terms (instead relying on echo responses) to ...
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What is the syntactic function (if there is any) of the prefix in some German verbs?
Consider the following sentence:
"Ich rufe dich an".
It is a very simple Standard German sentence with the verb "anrufen", the unusual thing about it is this prefix that comes ...
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What would count as a counterexample to the Final-Over-Final Constraint?
I'm interested in what the constraints are on head-directionality and, in particular, which combinations of features are disfavored, unstable, or thought to be impossible.
I came across the final-over-...
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Usage of the implicit objective subordinate clause in English
I'm not a fluent english speaker. While speaking this language, we usually prefer the implicit objective subordinate clauses (with subject in the accusative case, if it exists) to the corresponding ...
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Types of adjuncts - What can be adjoined to what and why?
In generative grammar, more specifically in GB and Minimalism, what are the possible types of adjuncts we can have and to which other categories can they be adjoined. E.g.: the man [next to him] many ...
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Understanding Symbols in Chomsky's *Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory*
I've been reading Chomsky's The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, and have come up rather suddenly against a stumbling block. On page 133, he uses without explanation some notation that's ...
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How can we account for head-final PPs and VPs in Classical Chinese?
According to Koopman (1983), there is an explanation for why Chinese, despite being a head-final language, has SVO and prepositional features. She suggested that Chinese assigns Case to the right but ...
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Resource that gives examples of many different sentences described in tree diagrams
I've devoured the book "Beginning Syntax" by Linda Thomas, but there are areas it doesn't go into in enough depth (presumably to keep it simple). For example, modal auxiliary "ought to" - it doesn't ...
CommunityBot
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Are there any natural languages in the subordination of a clause is marked only in the matrix clause?
In English, and many other languages, subordination is often marked in the subordinate clause.
So complement clauses can, for example, begin with a complementizer such as English "that."
e.g. "I ...
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Why must adversative coordination be binary?
At Glottopedia we read that adversative coordination expresses semantic contrast between the coordinands. In English, adversative coordination is usually accomplished with “but,” as in these sentences....
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Is this phrase a CP or another DP?
If I were to have a DP, such as "the car which I had washed in the garage", the "which I had washed in the garage" sounds a lot like a CP. However, I have never seen CP's embedded ...
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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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