Unanswered Questions
292 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Corpus studies on the frequency of subject questions in English
Are there any corpus studies which show the relative frequency of different types of interrogative main clauses in English, in particular the relative frequency of subject questions (which do not ...
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Is there a "Range" Phrase?
Is anyone aware of any discussion in linguistics of the possibility of a "range" phrase? As I tentatively conceive of the range phrase, a true range phrase refers to a readily identifiable ...
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What is the argument position of a noun in vocative case in a sentence?
What is the argument position (e.g. subject, direct object, ...) of a noun in vocative case in a sentence, for example, in Latin?
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What is an unaccusative or an ergative adjective?
When I was reading papers, I found these expressions. So what is an unaccusative adjective and an ergative adjective?
And what is their relationship with the distinction between raising and non-...
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Exception to word order in quotative situations
I'm very uneducated in syntax, so I apologize if this question is something really basic that everyone already knows.
English is a subject-verb-object language, and it is known to follow that pattern ...
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syntactic analysis under Split INFL Hypothesis
I'm a beginner in linguistics, and so here is my problem under the early theory of Split INFL Hypothesis (Pollock, 1989; Belletti, 1990; Haegeman, 1994).
Here are the sentences.
a.They must have been ...
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Conditional followed by imperative
In English, we have often sentences like so:
If you are interested, send me a message
WHEN you are ready to do it, start with the laundry
To my understanding these are a conditional followed by an ...
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Can clauses with transitive verbs that stand for experiences be passivized across the attested languages that have passive voice?
In English, verbs that stand for experiences (e.g. see, hear, sense, notice, realize) can occur in passive forms and clauses as we see in these examples:
"Tommy sees the baby sloth." --&...
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How do languages without passive voice foreground constituents that don't stand for agents?
one: Passive voice can be used to foreground noun phrases that don't stand for agents by putting those noun phrases in subject position. e.g., in English,
"The man bit the dog." --> &...
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Inherently reflexive verbs
What is the status of herself in the following sentence?
Mary behaved herself during the class.
Is herself an internal argument? I'm a bit confused.
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Do sentences that mutually entail each other have similar predicate-argument structures?
An active sentence entails its passive counterpart, and vice versa. Thus, the two sentences John likes Joan and Joan is liked by John mutually entail each other. My question in this regard concerns ...
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How can you 'test' for grammatical properties in A Student's Introduction to English Grammar?
According to the book A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (2005), grammatical terms, e.g., subject, object, noun, verb, adjective, etc. should not be defined by meaning, but by grammatical ...
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Object of certain constructions
I am sure you have all come across constructions such as these:
She slept a long sleep
He lived a productive life.
These verbs are traditionally intransitive verbs, and yet here are transitive. ...
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When are complementisers implied, but not present, and when are they actually not present?
I have recently been learning about complementisers and relative clauses etc. and how they relate to x-bar theory. It is a feature of English that some complementisers are optional, especially in ...
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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 ...
