Linguistics thread

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 9:15

IpseDixit wrote:I don't feel comfortable going into detail as I'm not an expert on these things, but if you're telling me that -му, -меш, -ме, - мемо, -мете, -муть are used to form the future tense in Ukrainian, then I'm pretty sure we're dealing with inflectional affixes and not clitics.

I'll think over this more, because now I don't understand it very well.
Thank you for the explanations.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 9:31

vijayjohn wrote:"Clitic" is actually a pretty hard term to define, too. In one of my classes, when the professor was explaining to us how difficult it can be to distinguish affixes vs. clitics vs. words, one of the students blushed and (basically) said that she sounded like an adult telling a child what sex is, and she joked that it's the growing-up talk of linguistics. :lol: ("When you first start learning about clitics, you might be really confused about whether something is an affix or a clitic and that's okay").

:)
So there are different opinions about what clitic is and there is not only one definition?
What are the other views about clitics then (besides the one explained by IpseDixit)?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-30, 12:07

Irusia wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:"Clitic" is actually a pretty hard term to define, too. In one of my classes, when the professor was explaining to us how difficult it can be to distinguish affixes vs. clitics vs. words, one of the students blushed and (basically) said that she sounded like an adult telling a child what sex is, and she joked that it's the growing-up talk of linguistics. :lol: ("When you first start learning about clitics, you might be really confused about whether something is an affix or a clitic and that's okay").

:)
So there are different opinions about what clitic is and there is not only one definition?

Not really. It's more like something that's hard to explain and you just have to develop a feel for over time.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 12:26

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Last edited by aaakknu on 2017-05-30, 14:40, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-30, 12:35

Irusia wrote:
IpseDixit wrote:
Because they do not fit the definition of "clitic" that you can read here and here.

Why you've and I've can be considered clitics then?

Because of what they can attach to.

What are the Ukrainian equivalents of "what've", "shouldn't've", and "we'll've"?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 12:57

linguoboy wrote:
Irusia wrote:
IpseDixit wrote:
Because they do not fit the definition of "clitic" that you can read here and here.

Why you've and I've can be considered clitics then?

Because of what they can attach to.

What are the Ukrainian equivalents of "what've", "shouldn't've", and "we'll've"?


Ukrainian doesn't have such equivalents at all. We don't shorten words. I've said that those endings were shortened forms of the verb "мати" (I've read it somewhere, but I don't remember where exactly), but they have completely different meaning than that verb (because the verb "мати" does not have the meaning of the future tense) and can be used only after infinitive.

I'm not sure what these endings are though, that's why I asked. Maybe it's better to ask about it in Ukrainian forum, I think.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-30, 15:44

Irusia wrote:Ukrainian doesn't have such equivalents at all. We don't shorten words. I've said that those endings were shortened forms of the verb "мати" (I've read it somewhere, but I don't remember where exactly), but they have completely different meaning than that verb (because the verb "мати" does not have the meaning of the future tense) and can be used only after infinitive.

That's one of the criteria IpseDixit pointed you to: A chief defining characteristics of a clitic is that it does not attach to words of only one class. Compare the behaviour of the Ukrainian inflections to their Polish counterparts, which are true clitics:

Ty jego widzialeś. "You saw him."
Ty jegoś widzial. "You saw him."
Tyś jego widzial. "You saw him."

Is anything like this possible in Ukrainian?

Irusia wrote:I'm not sure what these endings are though, that's why I asked. Maybe it's better to ask about it in Ukrainian forum, I think.

Inflectional affixes. Their etymology isn't relevant for making this determination given the restrictions on their distribution. (A lot of verbal inflections developed from compounding non-finite forms such as participles and infinitives with worn-down finite verbs. Cf. Romance future tenses, the Korean past/perfective, the Turkish perfective and imperfective.)
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 16:06

linguoboy wrote:That's one of the criteria IpseDixit pointed you to: A chief defining characteristics of a clitic is that it does not attach to words of only one class. Compare the behaviour of the Ukrainian inflections to their Polish counterparts, which are true clitics:

Ty jego widzialeś. "You saw him."
Ty jegoś widzial. "You saw him."
Tyś jego widzial. "You saw him."

Is anything like this possible in Ukrainian?

In some western dialects we have similar clitics to those in your example, but not in the literary language.
We have other clitics, for example "би" (conditional mood, like Polish "by", but in Ukrainian it is the same for all persons). Unlike in Polish, we write it as a separate word.

linguoboy wrote:Inflectional affixes. Their etymology isn't relevant for making this determination given the restrictions on their distribution. (A lot of verbal inflections developed from compounding non-finite forms such as participles and infinitives with worn-down finite verbs. Cf. Romance future tenses, the Korean past/perfective, the Turkish perfective and imperfective.)


Thank you very much! I've finally understood.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-31, 10:01

Can antipassive be used in a nominative-accusative language?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-06-01, 4:13

Irusia wrote:Can antipassive be used in a nominative-accusative language?

Yes. Table 1 here shows a list of nominative-acusative languages with antipassives (mostly from either North America or Africa).

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-06-05, 12:53

vijayjohn wrote:
Irusia wrote:Can antipassive be used in a nominative-accusative language?

Yes. Table 1 here shows a list of nominative-acusative languages with antipassives (mostly from either North America or Africa).

Thank you!

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-06-16, 21:28

Are there languages which are polysynthetic and fusional at the same time?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-07-06, 5:51

Irusia wrote:Are there languages which are polysynthetic and fusional at the same time?

Yes. According to Edward Sapir, examples of this include Chinook (I'm guessing this means the Chinookan languages) and Algonquin.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-08-11, 20:56

vijayjohn wrote:
Irusia wrote:Are there languages which are polysynthetic and fusional at the same time?

Yes. According to Edward Sapir, examples of this include Chinook (I'm guessing this means the Chinookan languages and Algonquin.

Thanks! They should be very interesting to learn (and difficult).
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Bubulus » 2017-09-02, 21:42

Hmm, it seems that Ancient Greek, in spite of having all those many forms in a verb, did not actually have syncretism for person, number or tense-aspect in the vast majority of verbs! Latin, Spanish and Italian, in contrast, do have a little bit of it in regular verbs (Latin amaverit, Spanish amara and amamos, Italian amiamo), so I find this fact about Ancient Greek impressive.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-15, 19:49

How common is syncretism, though?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-10-02, 19:07

Could language analysis tools detect lone wolf terrorists before they act?

Computational Linguistics will be the death of our field :evil:
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-10-02, 19:16

The guy who wrote that paper isn't actually in a linguistics department, though, is he? I get the impression he's probably just some computer science guy.

Of course, computational linguists still take these kinds of things way too seriously and are way too much in awe of them.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-10-02, 19:24

Those people, the ones who do this "groundbreaking" kind of "research", are almost never linguists by training. They are programmers, statisticians, even physicists.

They are basically this guy:
Image
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-10-02, 19:33

That's true; they're not. I do remember seeing signs of computer science people just beginning to gradually realize that, you know, linguistics kind of matters with language-related problems. I hope they keep pursuing that line of thinking. Not much seems to come out of these kinds of papers; I get the impression that the authors get recognition and jobs or whatever and then they just keep doing their programming shtick, usually involving completely different projects.


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