@Alenanno Yeah some people are impossible. But perhaps sometimes the community should just vote based on their own discretion rather than according to detailed rules.
Hmm yes, especially if it is dialectical and requires "papa mim" or something.
Then I can't really imagine how this que came to be substituted for de, if that is what happened: such things usually only happen if there are two very similar constructions. Or perhaps if que and de fulfil very similar functions in a wide variety of other, unrelated constructions?
A recent question on this site led to some discussion which provoked the following comment by one of our community members:
UG is "controversial in the latter interpretation" only insofar as
there are linguists who are sure there must be domain-independent
explanations for all the phenome...
Does anybody happen to know of any good and fairly readily-available surveys of the language-specific semantics of definiteness cross-linguistically? Specifically, I'm interested in all the various ways of defining definiteness in terms of which things are grammatically definite in a given langua...
If a language permits only CV or CCV syllables, how does one tell where the phonological word boundaries are?
For example, suppose a language has a definite morpheme, /li/ that conveys what English "the" conveys. Suppose this language has another morpheme, /stulu/, meaning "dog."
If t...
Some colleagues and I would like to put together a grammar compendium to teach English grammar and would like to record the rules and examples in XML so as to increase the kinds of ways it can be utilized.
As with any XML, much of the work is defining the schema, what to leave out and what to le...
i just realized proper nouns have at least one linguistic property that can't be argued. they are lexical. many proper nouns in many languages do not exist also as common nouns
i think i read that if the autocomplete doesn't work for somebody's name it could be that they've never been in the chat room, in which case the @ ping also doesn't work... not sure though
hmm the opposite would be to say that linguistics also has no theory of verb or noun or morphology or syntax but starts with a tabula rasa with each language
it also sounds like none of the work has been done before. maybe the "if a similar category has been found in many languages" part has already been done in the history of the science of linguistics
Yes, that's true, but linguistics is still young, lots of things are defined then discarded. I describe it as being like Gallilean physics.
So re verbs and nouns, we don't start working on a previously undescribed language and say 'where are the verbs and nouns, I'll look here'. Rather, we look the behaviour of lexical items and when we see a category has semantics of a certain type, we'll call that 'verbs', although it might be a very diffirent category from 'verb' in (eg) English, or Sardinian, or whatever.
also i think i need to ask not just about undescribed languages but about all languages, for the wording of the new more basic question mentioned in the comments to the existing question
yes this is great and seems to be greatly overlooked/ignored/misunderstood - especially in the case of chinese and polynesian languages where word classes are often extremely amorphous
So 'proper nouns': yes, they name a individual entity, but there are languages where that's not true, but the nouns that do name an individual entity form a category with terms for relatives and artefacts, so we'll call that 'proper nouns' even though it's quite different from 'proper noun' in many other languages
i want to know if there's a concept in linguistics of proper nouns abstract to any particular language, besides the fact that lexically they are the names of individual people etc
In each language proper nouns will be defined by the morphosyntax. If they're not defined by the morphosyntax then they don't exist as a separate category in that language.
maybe i want to ask "is there a cross-linguistic definition of 'proper noun' as a morphosyntactic entity?" - looks pretty scary worded that way though (-:
If I work on a new language then I will be aware that within the nouns there will be subcategories, and one might have semantics such that it indicates unique entities. That category may well also do lots of other things, but if it is the subcategory for nouns that indicate unique entities then I could call it 'proper nouns'.
obviously the morphosyntactical relationships and behaviours will vary totally from language to language... but this is also true for more basic concepts like "noun" and "verb" yet we are able to roughly define them cross-linguistically
There's nothing I can think of with a cross-lx morphosyntactic definition. Every language will be diffirent in the way it defines its categories, and will differ in what's included in that category.
for instance things like tense and aspect and mood are features of verbs rather than nouns, abstract of the morphosyntax of how those features are represented in a given language if it all
yes the trick is for me to say what i want well enough for you to know what i'm saying and then express it in the right words so i know we're talking about the same thing (-;
i've also tried to be careful never to say anything like "all languages" because relative truths are also useful
tense/aspect/mood (=TAM) is a category, but you can't say in advance of looking at a language how it will be expressed. Well, you can guess if you know the language's relatives...
...or if it will be expressed. Hold on, that's not quite right. Everything you can say in a language can also be said in other languages (barring things that might be unknown, eg spinifex in greenland), but each language forces things to be expressed in a certain way
sometimes you also can't express the same ambiguity between two languages. language a might have a certain aspect of ambiguity which needs to be concrete in the other language
So you use the categories in a given language, eg in one language you'll use tense (ie morphological marking) to express location of an event in time, while in another language there might be no tense marking, so you use adverbs.
Theoretically you can explain ambiguities, but they may not work, and it might take lots of words!
There are Australian languages with past hodiernal tense: these indicate that the event happened before now but today. There's nothing like this in English, but we can say 'earlier today' or 'this morning' or something, so we can express it but we don't have the morphosyntactic category of hodiernal tense.
I've had scotch and I'm probably becoming voluble (or whatever for typing).
I don't know if what I've said helps, but I'll try to use this discussion to inform an answer to the proper noun question.
one thing i keep stumbling over. i keep saying stuff like "abstract morphosyntax" to distinguish proper nouns in two languages because i don't want to say "semantics" since that already means something else. but there doesn't seem to be a term in between that means what i want to say
I'm back. "abstract morphosyntax" would mean a formal description of language behaviour that would apply cross-linguistically, such as Chomskyan Government-Binding Theory, of Lexical-Functional Theory. This is very abstract and doesn't look anything like natural human language, but tries to describe it.
Maybe if you look up, say, X-bar theory on WP you'll get a taste of what parts of these kinds of theories look like.
Also, there is lots of typological work in linguistics that's not about formal theories but does try to capture cross-linguistic generalisations. Again, WP has a useful article 'Linguistic typology'.
I'm retaking this question and slightly change it to address a larger issue.
Since we don't want any broken windows on our site, but only nice shiny questions, we are going to do some spring clean up and clean the site from bad/closed/etc questions.
Start date
2th March 2012
From now on we ...
hey what do you think about proposing a "less well known languages & usage" SE? the two languages i've studied this year have both lost their proposals due to inactivity
i know a bit about all of your languages then. i fake italian and portuguese sometimes but when i try to read either i give up. my second language is sub-fluent mexican spanish
Under my answer to that question, I talked about a category of nouns that exist in Italian. The italian name is "Nomi sovrabbondanti" or "sostantivi sovrabbondanti", the meaning is roughly "overabundant nouns".
There are three subcategories for this type of nouns. Sometimes the plurals or the si...
A recent question on this site led to some discussion which provoked the following comment by one of our community members:
UG is "controversial in the latter interpretation" only insofar as
there are linguists who are sure there must be domain-independent
explanations for all the phenome...
If a language permits only CV or CCV syllables, how does one tell where the phonological word boundaries are?
For example, suppose a language has a definite morpheme, /li/ that conveys what English "the" conveys. Suppose this language has another morpheme, /stulu/, meaning "dog."
If t...
