@ssb Well, last year they added about 18 sites and graduated 2

Needless to say, the queue is backed up :-)

@ogicu8abruok Oh!! That is cute (and funny), thank you for the link :-)

@Ash I think it's from here, hehe

Maybe s/foreigners/linguists/ :-)

Yay, hippietrail came back! :-)

I remember he wrote that he got tired of Japanese.SE because some members here didn't like linguistics questions.

Me too! :-)

I think we have room for all sorts of questions on Japanese, from "I am not really interested in a technical linguistics perspective, I just want to know what I should say" to "What sorts of theories can be used to analyze such-and-such?" :-)

Or maybe for all sorts of answers.

Haha. There's all sorts of linguistics stuff I don't know anything about.

I think I can safely put "neo-Davidsonian semantics" into that bucket.

Thanks! I downloaded it for later :-)

Oh, yeah, I've seen that paper.

I haven't read the whole thing either.

My friend asked me how to say "Let the door close" in Japanese, as in "don't make an effort to keep it open". My answer was "Umm, I'm not sure!" :-)

Le sigh.

I actually think bracketing is more intuitive than syntax trees, from a visual point of view, but unfortunately bracketing doesn't scale well to complex sentences.

Well, it does, but not in an easy-to-read fashion :-)

Are you planning on a category-function distinction? CGEL distinguishes the two strictly in every tree and analysis it presents, and I think it's very useful conceptually

@DariusJahandarie Take a look through Chapter 2: cambridge.org/assets/linguistics/cgel/chap2.pdf

@ogicu8abruok Syntax trees are fine. But not everyone understands them intuitively, so it can take some teaching.

If you're writing for linguists, no problem. From a pedagogical perspective, there is a hurdle to overcome, though!

Of course, pedagogical grammars and reference grammars tend to be fairly different from one another :-)

In my experience, people seem to get them faster, yes.

Like, if you wrote "That's a tad askew." and an English learner asked "Huh? I don't understand what this 'tad askew' thing is. What is one of those?" You could explain: "That's [a tad] askew." [a tad] is like [a little] or [slightly]

It's not "a [tad askew]"

They go "Ohh. I get it."

But if you draw a tree, you get the hundred yard stare.

@DariusJahandarie Many grammars, such as McCawley's, don't break down every tree with every detail. They only give as much detail as is relevant to a particular point.

@DariusJahandarie A neat solution that has not been tried by any paper book I own :-)

Hah! Pop-Up Grammar!

NP raising, although they call the NP a DP

I try to ignore the DP hypothesis :-)

Oof, that is an opaque tree.

It's the node that rare belongs to there.

Being a passive voice thingy.

But then various lower nodes are extracted out from it.

Chomskyite grammar tends to be more theoretically complex than I think syntax needs to be.

I think syntax, in the end, can be relatively simple.

@ogicu8abruok You can say that, but you haven't really generalized the syntax / morphology or the semantics in a way that you can understand other stuff based on it.

That doesn't mean it's not useful to say, but maybe it's also useful to try to come up with generalizations

And it's true, there are a lot of things that remain undefined when you say it

You can say that. Then you're (probably) claiming -(r)are- is a derivational affix, which can be used to derive a new verb from a more basic verb

But if you want to generalize, you probably want to figure out how to relate the -(r)are- affixed verb to the more basic verb. After all, they're probably related in a relatively straightforward and predictable fashion

Well, I don't think it has to.

But, well, if you want to understand why they wrote that tree, you can read the paper :-)

Unfortunately, it will incorporate a number of unexplained concepts by reference, like EPP.

I don't really understand why the DP hypothesis is being applied to Japanese anyway--it doesn't seem to me that Japanese has determiners in the first place