Unanswered Questions
303 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Was there a tendency of Indo-European languages to avoid syntactical ambiguity by introducing more complex morphology?
In (Peškovskij, 1914, p. 246) I stumbled upon the following (Russian) assertion:
Opisannoe vytesnenie predikativnogo imenitel'nogo tvoritel'nym možno
rassmatrivat' kak častnyj slučaj obščego ...
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Syntax as error-correction-code
I vaguely recall from my academic studies that a professor mentioned that the syntax of sentence could be seen as error-correction-code in signal processing.
In other words, from a pragmatic view - ...
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Are there tests for conditionality?
I am looking for ways to test whether something that (at least superficially) looks like a conditional actually has the necessary properties to qualify as one. Are there any such established semantic ...
- 162
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Inverse scope reading
It is well known that any sentence with two or more quantifiers will result in in multiple possible readings depending on the ordering of the quantifiers. To take a known example (1), there will be ...
- 135
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Does the stem of a word carry the sense information of its inflections?
From what I understand the lexeme or lemma of a word carries the sense information of the word, and hence for an inflected form like tablets, it can have a different lemma, each one for each sense of ...
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Can first order logic represent a past occurring adverbial dependent clause with a present main clause to form the perfect tense?
Can first order logic represent a past occurring adverbial dependent clause with a present main clause to form the perfect tense?
Is this the way to represent an adverbial dependent clause with first ...
CommunityBot
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3
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vocabulary and notation for syntactic changes
As a layman I have picked up the terminology and notation for changes in phonology. But I know very little about diachronic changes in syntax other than that they happen: things like shift from SOV ...
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Confusion over Adverbial Adjuncts (X' Bar Theory)
For my Syntax class this semester, we've been asked to look at a language more in depth and try to develop X-Bar compatible rules for it. In doing so, I've come across a reoccurring problem that may ...
- 131
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Feature values [+/- interpretable], how these values are set?
In Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) and in Derivation by Phase (DbP) (Chomsky, 2000, 2005, 2008), call it Phase Theory, features enter narrow syntax with predefined values, these values are binary (-...
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How often is MP taught by teaching GB first?
When a student starts learning syntax,1 how common is it to first teach them GB (or a stripped-down, GB-flavored approach), and then teach MP once they've got the hang of it?
This was obviously the ...
- 2,645
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Specification of Dependency Grammar
My understanding is that, while natural languages aren't completely context-free, you can get a good approximation of a specification of English in Backus-Naur form, in that if you look at a given ...
- 345
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Are there any languages that have words for open and closing quotation marks in speech?
It seems to me that most languages have some way of bounding quotations in written form. European languages have their apostrophe quotes and angle-brackets, while eastern Asian languages have those ...
- 131
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Is there a phrasal verb corpus somewhere online?
I'm working on a project where I have syntactic frames in the form of something like "N.agent V PP.stimulus", where each PP consists of a P and a N.
I have a set list of verbs, and a list of PPs for ...
- 1,282
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Test for function or content word? (LFG)
This might only apply to LFG, but are there any tests for if a word is functional or content/lexical?
I have been trying to ascertain whether or not there is a lexical 'be' in English. The active '...
- 6,337
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On +/-Pied-Piping of A's in AP's containing wh-degree words
When a degree wh-word (e.g., E. how, G. wie, F. que, Sp. qué, It. come, Port. como, etc.) grades an adjective, in some languages (= the 'Pied-Piping Type') the adjective must accompany the degree ...
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