zompist bboard

1) Around the time that I was starting with my linguistics courses more than 10 years ago one of the languages I was most interested in was Icelandic. Now that I have read about Swedish I can sort of see where the different declensions come from, comparing it with Icelandic. The exception is the ne...

I recently applied for a PhD job in Stockholm, and though my chances are slim I will have the job since I have been told that there are a hundred other applicants, I am now reading about Stockholm and Sweden, and as a linguist, I am also reading about Swedish, though to be honest I have mostly been ...

In my opinion, the problem with a lot of these generative theories is they try to go in too deep. They make too many assumptions about cognitive processes that we don't even have the means to observe directly, when they should be focusing more on the surface. That is definitely an issue. Both the m...

Since my freshman year as a linguistic student I have never come across a linguist who would describe Dutch, and by extension German, as SVO underlyingly and not SOV*. The reason for this is that there are three exceptions to the SOV rule: 1) a normal clause where the order is V2: 2) when the object...

Animacy is pretty counterntuitive in languages that grammaticalize it. I would actually say that a good way to define it is "anything that can be the subject of a transitive verb". So ocean, rain, fire, wind, etc can all be animates. I dont know about rocks, so I think a language in which rocks are...

I think that I have to clarify myself. It wouldn't surprise me if there are languages where inanimate nouns cannot be subjects of transitive verbs, and although I am skeptical about Proto-Indo-European being such a language, I don't exclude the possibility. I am amazed tho by the assumption that the...

An equally good way of explaining the distribution of case markers in PIE is assuming that 1) animate nouns were marked accusative but not inanimate nouns (crosslinguistically quite common for example Spanish a) and 2) a topic marker was generalized as an animate subject marker since both subjects a...

Now, what regards cases, active-stative languages tend to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns, of which the latter may not be used as agents. Hence, in an active-stative language which has cases, the inanimate nouns have a defective paradigm, lacking an agentive case. This would explain...

This is where you're wrong. Not all adverbs behave the same morphosyntactically and therefore not all adverbs are classified the same. You are right, I was specifically referring to verb-modifying adverbs, not to clause- or adjective-modifying ones. Similarly, I would argue that the difference betw...

Voice has both semantic and syntactic sides, so I don't know if saying that the difference is just semantic is a valid reason to say that it is essentially the same voice. Well, aren't all adverbs essentially the same adverbs, from a morphosyntactic point of view? There's many different semantic ty...

"These books read easily" I would say that's a pretty normal middle voice, cf. "these vases break easily", "these clothes wear comfortably". They translate nicely to "these books are easy to read", "these vases are easy to break", "these clothes are comfortable to wear" etc. There may be a semantic...

I think I have linked this article before, which is about the Dutch "krijgen"-passive, where the indirect object is promoted instead of the direct object. IIRC this construction also exists in German. A Dutch example is "Zij kregen het boek aangeboden" which means "they were offered the book" lit. "...

In the mean time Everett has posted a new article on lingbuzz. I haven't read it yet but I have skimmed through the first pages, which he spends arguing that where Hauser, Finch and Chomsky talk about recursion they are not talking about recursive merge* but about whatever Everett's definition of re...

bump AND I found a real life example in Afrikaans; most of this opinion piece including its first sentence:"Laas Sondag roep Pous Benedictus XVI gelowiges op om tog nie stil-word te vrees en van stil-wees weg te deins nie." Translation "Last Sunday pop Benedict XVI urges believers not to fear becomi...

So combining the information in this thread with Wikipedia the descendants of the latin perfect are still used colloquially in: Spanish, Portuguese, southern Italian dialects, Romanian spoken in the region of Oltenia, and Acadian French. It is only used in the literary language (or not at all) in Fr...

Yo, I've been wondering about Bantu languages' noun classes and noun phrases having more than one argument, which aren't in the same class. In Romance languages we got the "50 women and a rooster rule" where mixed groups are masculine if there's a masculine element-- e.g. "Las cincuenta mujeres y e...

@Legion and Brussels Sprouts, I had looked on wikipedia, to answer my question but I don't rely on wikipedia, or most grammars, with describing the colloquial language; I am not sure if differences between the formal and colloquial language are always mentioned. So thank you! @Nancy Blackett, Thank ...

Is there any Romance variety in which the descendant of the Latin Perfect is still used in the colloquial language?
And in a somewhat related question, where did the Latin -v- in the perfect come from? Was it epenthetic?

In the meantime Everett has posted an answer here: http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/001119

Another more theoretic article about Pirahã and recursion is here: http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/001110

Thank you, both Rory and Roninbodhisattva! I have been on the look-out for good introductions to morphology other than Distributed Morphology, which is sort of "my" framework. I am a syntactician interested in the syntax/morphology interface, how syntax informs morphology and how morphology informs ...

I think the answer to your question is dependent on how you define participle. A few Bantu languages (including Zulu and Swahili) have relative verb constructions where there is no relative pronoun but the verb is marked morphologically to be the verb of a relative clause. Both in Swahili as in Zulu...

I actually think that if there's a universal order of constituents, it's not as rigid as cartography supposes, but also that its origins are in the semantics, so that it's not so much part of UG but rather an emergent phenomena that results from UG + structure of semantic objects. But then, I also ...

There are two schools of thought about morphology. One treats morphemes as basic and pareadigms as epiphenomena (distributed morphology is probably the best known of these approaches) and the other treats paradigms as basic and morphemes as epiphenomena (so-called word-and-paradigm approaches). The ...

I take it that you are familiar with Marit Julien's PhD dissertation? Because she tried to see if the combination of the Cartographic approach to verbal functional categories, combined with Kayne's antisymmetry combined with "all morphology is in the syntax" approach is viable from a typological poi...

hwhatting wrote:
Merijn, if I understand you correctly, you want to check whether the English change can be linked to the Norse change?

Yes.