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In languages with quotative markers, is extraction allowed out of quotative-marked clauses?
That is, is there a language that allows the following type of movement
WH1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1
DP-TOP1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1
Aaron Steven White
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How could the Sumerian cuneiform impose constraints on some languages?
It is said that the adoption of Sumerian cuneiform by Akkadian and other languages in the Middle East imposed constraints on those languages (due to the limited number of sounds represented in Sumerian).
Is this true? In what way does the adoption…
Louis Rhys
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Is our mental lexicon structured like a tag-cloud system or hierarchical?
Thinking about this discussion on meta i was reasoning about simple self-experiments you can do in psycholinguistics, where you don't need great background knowledge in Cognitive Psychology or Neuroscience. But where you can investigate and find out…
Hauser
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Why can verbal roots in PIE only contain the vowel e?
Verbal roots of PIE are generally reconstructed as (C5) (C3) C1 e C2 (C4) (C6); with certain phonetical restrictions, especially on the outmost consonants.
I wonder why only "e" should be allowed as a root vowel and why it is generally attempted to…
zwiebel
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Free Word Order Languages: How Much Freedom?
Persian, Russian, German, Turkish and Czech are generally described as free-word-order languages, but do you know any quantitative, corpus-based, or information theoretic definition of word order? Is it a matter of zero/one (to be free-word-order…
Masoud Komeily
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Across agglutinative languages are there tendencies for morphemes to occur in certain orders?
In agglutinative languages there are normally roots for nouns and/or verbs that can have multiple morphemes attached as affixes, following certain rules, to add information such as tense, aspect, mood, person, number, etc.
There is a lot of…
hippietrail
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Are there some studies or resources comparing the two living creole languages in Australia?
In Australia there are two creoles in daily use, Kriol (rop, also known as Roper River Creole etc) in the Northern Territory with about 30,000 speakers and Torres Strait Creole (tcs, also known as Broken etc) in the Torres Strait Islands in far…
hippietrail
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What diagnostics distinguish demonstratives from definite articles?
Historically, definite articles are often related to demonstratives.
How might one characterize whether a word in a language is a definite article or a demonstrative?
James Tauber
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Which part of speech are 's' and 'r' in Wordnet?
From taking the synset of the word 'fantastic', I got a list of senses below:
[Synset('antic.s.01'), Synset('fantastic.s.02'), Synset('fantastic.s.03'), Synset('fantastic.s.04'), Synset('fantastic.s.05')]
What does 's' stand for?
Another example,…
user3101
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Are there languages with indefinite articles but for which the word for "one" is not related etymologically to any of the indefinite articles?
This is part of a set of three related questions but note they are each specific and distinct, they are not duplicates.
In all the languages I'm familiar with that have an indefinite article, the word is related to the word for "one". In fact in…
hippietrail
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What range of strategies are common in natural languages for providing unambiguous answers to negative yes-no questions?
I have been told that, in Chinese, terms for "yes" and "no" used as answers for questions are not needed because one answers yes-no questions by either repeating the verb in the question or adding a negative word to the repetition of the verb in the…
James Grossmann
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Can the Chinese script be used to record non-Chinese languages?
I know of at least 3 countries in the Sinosphere that have historically used the Chinese script (or scripts derived from it) - Vietnam, Korea, and Japan.
So how did it work? Did they use it to read and write their native languages phonetically, or…
sashoalm
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Did a "cave man-style" language ever exist?
I recently had a discussion with a friend about whether a "cave man-style" language was likely to have ever existed. You know, the stereotypical "Fire bad! Need hunt, go tree-place now!" sort of thing. I guess for this purpose we can define it as…
Nerrolken
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How is Sanskrit "va" supposed to be pronounced?
I'm confused as to how I'm to pronounce Sanskrit's "v" letter. My teacher mostly pronounces it as a "w" in words such as "deva", "svara" or "dvipa" but invariably utters a "v" in syllables "vra" or "vya".
The definition my teacher once quoted, from…
Joe Pineda
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Why does the English complementizer "that" look like the relative pronoun "that"?
Why does the English complementizer "that" look like the relative pronoun "that"?
for those
This question may need to be carted off to the English Stack Exchange, unless there are other languages in which complementizers and relative pronouns also…
James Grossmann
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