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Grammaticalization of third person singular -s in English
Is there any evidence that the third person singular -s can be traced back to a lexical item before it became an inflection? I am trying to see if the theory of grammaticalization applies to its diachronic process. The cline of grammaticalization is…
marta
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Online etymology dictionaries for French, beyond CNTRL?
Are there etymology dictionaries for French available on the Internet? To wit, what's a French equivalent of http://etymonline.com/?
I already know about
TLF informatisé (TLFi), but often, it does not retrograde to Latin and PIE etymons;
Littré…
user5306
10
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4 answers
A list of parts of speech
I want to know if there are other parts of speech -other than particles- in other languages than English or other Romance/Germanic languages.
Morella Almånd
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Why do some people speak/whisper the words they are reading?
Not sure if this is the right stack exchange site but here goes..
Couple of people at my workplace seem to whisper or quietly speak the material they read. They do this routinely, and they speak more loudly when they don't understand what they are…
Caius Jard
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Positive uses of vagueness and ambiguity in language
Background
The two common explanations for vagueness/ambiguity in language come from Zipf and Chomsky, and both seem to inherently assume that vagueness/ambiguity do not serve a positive purpose.
In the case of Chomsky, ambiguity arises out of the…
Artem Kaznatcheev
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Origins of Turkic language family? Alternatives to Altaic?
I was just reading about various Altaic language grouping hypotheses on wikipedia. According the article, evidence for an Altaic language family that would include Turkic, Uralic, Mongolian, Tungusic, etc. has mostly been rejected by specialists in…
Thomas Shaw
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Is there a comprehensive account of the development of laryngeal theory?
The laryngeal theory proposes that Proto-Indo-European contained a number of consonants that are absent in (almost) all daughter languages. Their existence was proposed (by Saussure, under the term coefficients sonantiques) because certain vowel…
user444
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7 answers
Biggest freely available English corpus?
Any help on finding the biggest freely available English corpus that can be used on research?
So far I have found OANC with 15 M words.
Tt22
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Where do the spelling rules for French imperatives come from?
French verbs are, for historical reasons, typically grouped into three classes. The loss of final consonants in French has resulted in a serious divergence, wherein the verb conjugation system of the spoken language is significantly simpler than…
hunter
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How to test if a string of words is a grammatical sentence
Is there a way to test to see if a string of words forms a complete sentence?
For example:
The dog jumped over the fence == Good
The cat square seven the triangle == BAD
I was thinking the type of words (verb, noun, etc.) and order of the words…
Steven Smethurst
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What are the alternate morphological typologies to isolating, agglutinative, fusional, polysyntehtic, etc.?
The above typology seems to also be called "Humboldt-Schleicherian".
While reading this answer in the question "Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?", I was seized by a desire to know what…
MatthewMartin
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How exactly does an obviate proximate system work?
There seems to be some controversy about how an obviate proximate system works. I get that it doesn't work like a nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive system.
In some attempts to illustrate obviate-proximate systems, multiple sentences are…
MatthewMartin
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Why "Kampuchea" → "Cambodia"?
Many place names in English are anglicizations/transliterations of their native names. Of those, many place names in Asia seem to have undergone a change over the past few decades: they've gone from a more anglicized name to a name more faithfully…
msh210
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Is there a reason behind the phenomenon of English becoming more vulgar with time?
In the last few years I have noticed both with colleagues and from online discussions a tendency for English language writing and speech to become more and more vulgar. That is, I see explicatives used in casual conversation, where in other…
dotancohen
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Two questions about Sappho's name
The Greek poeter Ψάπφω/Ψάπφα beared an interesting name, probably not Greek. I have two questions, about the first and the last letter of her name :
(1) what was the value of the initial Ψ ? This letter was later written Σ but I read in a French…
suizokukan
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