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Syntactic status of 'than'

I'm not terribly familiar with the syntax of PPs, but I've noticed that a handful of them do not seem to satisfy any constituency tests, particularly 'than'. 'Than' is listed in dictionaries as both 'preposition' and 'conjunction'. The former is…
WavesWashSands
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How often does an individual encounter a novel linguistic construction?

I've heard it said that most utterances we encounter on a day-to-day basis are novel. That is, the individual has never heard that exact sentence before in their life. My intuition is that the source of this productivity mostly comes from which…
Tiffany
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In cultures where genders speak different language varieties, how do genders quote each other?

In some cultures, females and males speak different language varieties[1]. When retelling, for example, what a man said, would a female say it in the male variety or translate it into the female variety? Would a male do the same when retelling…
diN0bot
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What is a middle voice and a medio-passive voice?

In order to explain the evolution of the third person accusative pronoun in IE languages, Mark Beadles makes use of the concepts of middle and medio-passive voices. But the discussion that followed his answer seems to show that these concepts are…
Otavio Macedo
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Is there something deeper behind the “verb classes swapping” of the subjunctive endings in Romance languages?

I first asked this question in https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/15929/11155 However the Spanish community has not found any answer yet and the phenomenon is observable in many Romance languages. I am wondering it anyone here in the Linguistics…
Honza Zidek
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Is a Gerund-Participial a "clause adjunct" or a "noun/adjective post-modifier"?

I'm not sure how the "doing my homework" phrase is to be analyzed in the following sentences: I felt good doing my homework. I had trouble doing my homework. I needed help doing my homework. Does "doing my homework" modify the preceding…
TotoKalvera
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Do Sign Languages have ambiguities?

I just noted that there exists a whole literature on Sign Language. I didn't even know there existed more than one... It's very interesting now. :) I then found computers can already interpret some sign language. Do these languages have the property…
kmels
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Does the syllable/word ratio in a language determine the number of vowel phonemes it has?

I've recently stumbled on this site dedicated to teaching English as a second language to Portuguese speakers. Right at the beginning, while making a comparison among English and Portuguese phonologies, the author states the following: In less…
Otavio Macedo
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Rationale for diphthongs

What is the rationale for considering di-, tri- &co. -phthongs separate entities? Why aren't these sounds interpreted as sequences of a vowel and a glide? How would be linguistics deficient if aliens came to Earth to erase the term from everyone's…
kamil-s
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Should I use square brackets or slashes when transcribing an oral text in IPA?

I am transcribing an oral text into IPA in order to compare it with the "correct" pronunciation of words (e.g. according to the dictionary). I am using slashes for both versions, but it feels incorrect. Example: (actual written text); /hɛː san was/…
furendaaa
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Focus-marking in different varieties of Spanish

Spanish is often described as putting focused constituents at the end of the sentence, leading for instance to VOS word order in sentences with a focused subject. (For instance, Maria Zubizarreta's 1998 book Prosody, Focus, and Word Order describes…
Leah Velleman
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Place feature metathesis

Familiar cases of metathesis involve segments changing places, but metathesis can also operate at the subsegmental level, affecting individual features. I'm specifically interested in metathesis of POA features, like the following examples: German…
TKR
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How come I cannot get my "oral" English to a native speaker level after 25 years of trying?

I was born in Russia and moved to the US at the adolescent and prepubescent age of 12. Before my relocation to the US I had never really been exposed to the English language at large, and after my relocation I was promptly forbidden to speak…
user74809
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c- in Irish clann "offspring"

Irish clann "plant; offspring; child" (the source of English clan) is borrowed from Welsh plant with the same meanings, which is itself a borrowing of Latin planta. Why did Irish change the initial p into c? PIE p was lost in Celtic, so the…
TKR
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PIE -enk reflexes in Modern English

I recently found out the origin of the verb 'bring' as being derived from bher- (carry) and enk- (to go to) and how they fused together and came into Germanic as *bhrengk- then coming down into English as 'bring'. I was wondering if anyone knew if…
Alxmrphi
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