Linguistics thread

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-26, 23:47

razlem wrote:Anyone here good with X-bar syntax?

Oh, sorry, I meant to respond to this but forgot! I had to study X-bar syntax twice...I'm not sure how useful I'd be for answering questions, but I guess it's worth a try anyway. Why do you ask?
Levike wrote:Why does Russian use its pronouns despite having a conjugation system?

Because it just does?

Tamil has a conjugation system, too (it even has gender-specific forms in the third person singular, so e.g. 'he sings', 'she sings', 'it sings', 'they (singular) sing', and 'they (plural) sing' are all different words), and Malayalam does not (at all), but both apparently have similar rates of pronoun usage/pro-drop.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby razlem » 2017-04-26, 23:52

vijayjohn wrote:
razlem wrote:Anyone here good with X-bar syntax?

Oh, sorry, I meant to respond to this but forgot! I had to study X-bar syntax twice...I'm not sure how useful I'd be for answering questions, but I guess it's worth a try anyway. Why do you ask?

I just need a paper topic but I'm absolutely stuck. Everything seems to have things written about it already, unless I find a speaker of a minority language :/
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-26, 23:55

What are the requirements for your paper?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby voron » 2017-04-27, 8:35

linguoboy wrote:Personal endings are found only in certain tense/mood combinations. They are notably absent in the past tense and in all forms of the copula.

In the future tense the copula in Russian does have personal endings:
я буду
ты будешь
etc

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby razlem » 2017-04-28, 5:46

vijayjohn wrote:What are the requirements for your paper?

I actually just talked with my professor and she said I could just solve some challenge problems from the book :mrgreen:
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby lingasms » 2017-05-18, 0:15

Levike wrote:Why does Russian use its pronouns despite having a conjugation system?


linguoboy wrote:Personal endings are found only in certain tense/mood combinations. They are notably absent in the past tense and in all forms of the copula. So I would conjecture that use of subject pronouns was generalised from instances without personal endings to all instances.


I understand why you would ask this question/conjecture that generalisation, but if you think about it the cross-linguistic picture is not as simple as "if there are person and number endings on the verb, then pronouns can be dropped". Even regarding Russian, there are after all some situations in which the pronoun can be dropped even when using the past tense forms (that only have number agreement) because it can be inferred from contextual information):

"Домашнее задание сделал?" "Did [you] finish your homework?"
"Cделал." "[I] finished [it]."

Not only that, but the cross-linguistic evidence is actually quite interesting (and complex). Both Chinese and Japanese allow subject and object drop, though they have no person or number agreement on their verbs. Or there are some languages in which not all pronouns can be dropped (Finnish can drop first and second person, but not third person pronouns).

Essentially, there is a theory regarding the behaviour of pronouns across languages, and it involves a series of yes/no parameters that would manage to classify all the quirky pronoun behaviour that is attested in natural languages, but the very first parameter is basically "Can you drop pronouns?" (and keeps detailing with "Is this restricted to syntactic subjects?", etc. but the starting point is still that) sooooo it's not exactly super informative. The answer to your question about why Russian does that, essentialy, as far as theories go at the moment, is exactly:

vijayjohn wrote:Because it just does?

:D
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-19, 20:54

So, I was kinda curious to know precisely on what bases the Romance languages are classified into Western and Eastern, I only knew the plural in -s thing and I wanted to know what the other criteria are, especially because Italian is classified as Eastern together with Romanian despite it looking much more similar to French and Spanish... well, turns out there are no other criteria (at least according to Wikipedia).

Now, I cannot help but wonder why exactly the plural in -s was deemed such a salient feature on which to base the entire categorization of Romance languages. Ok, if I got it right, it's only one possible categorization out of many (for example, apparently Italo-Western Romance is a thing) but nonetheless seems to be the most popular one.

Moreover it also seems quite simplistic and inaccurate to me, for example, Ladin (which is classified as Western) has many ways of forming the plural, and adding an -s is only one of them.

E.g:

père ---> pères

but

ors [ors] ---> orsc [orʃ]

bacan [ba'kan] ---> bachègn [ba'kɛɲ]

giat [d͡ʑat] ---> giac [d͡ʑat͡ɕ]

ciaval [t͡ɕa'val] ---> ciavai [t͡ɕa'vaj]

and nope, they are not just irregular plurals.

The same could be said about other languages of Northern Italy AFAIK, for instance I'm pretty sure that some of them don't even have a plural marker.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-19, 21:37

Dude, go back and reread the article(s). It's very clearly stated that the chief isogloss bundle is the La Spezia-Rimini line, which divides the languages of Italy based not only on the basis of plural formation but also on the degree of degemination/lenition of intervocalic consonants. It's this latter set of isoglosses that was presented to me as primary when I first learned of the grand division of Romance into Eastern and Western.

See here for more discussion on classification schemes, including a tripartite one which splits Romanian et al. (as "Eastern" or "Balkan Romance") from the varieties of Central and Southern Italy ("South" or "Italo-Romance"). There's even a proposal for a primary diachronic division between Insular and Continental Romance.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-20, 15:26

Thanks for clarifying. I also re-read the article from where I got my info and it does mention the weakening of consonants. For some reason I totally overlooked it.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 6:33

vijayjohn wrote:
razlem wrote:Anyone here good with X-bar syntax?

Oh, sorry, I meant to respond to this but forgot! I had to study X-bar syntax twice...I'm not sure how useful I'd be for answering questions, but I guess it's worth a try anyway. Why do you ask?

What is X-bar syntax?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 6:34

How to distinguish clitics from morphemes or words?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-30, 6:55

Irusia wrote:What is X-bar syntax?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory

Irusia wrote:How to distinguish clitics from morphemes or words?


Clitics are morphemes (not all morphemes are clitics, though). I guess Wikipedia can help you out again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic

And AFAIK, "word" is a very murky concept that linguists prefer avoiding, that's why they came up with the idea of morpheme in the first place.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 7:38

IpseDixit wrote:
Irusia wrote:What is X-bar syntax?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory
Irusia wrote:How to distinguish clitics from morphemes or words?

Clitics are morphemes (not all morphemes are clitics, though). I guess Wikipedia can help you out again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic

And AFAIK, "word" is a very murky concept that linguists prefer avoiding, that's why they came up with the idea of morpheme in the first place.

Thank you!

If there is someone who knows Ukrainian: are the future tense endings -му, -меш, -ме, - мемо, -мете, -муть clitics?

What about Bulgarian articles or ще, which is used to form future? What about да, which is used to form subjunctive?

Are clitics always derived from independent words?
Last edited by aaakknu on 2017-05-30, 8:00, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-30, 7:53

Irusia wrote:If there is someone who knows Ukrainian: are the future tense endings -му, -меш, -ме, - мемо, -мете, -муть clitics?


Nope, those are just bound inflectional morphemes.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 7:59

IpseDixit wrote:
Irusia wrote:If there is someone who knows Ukrainian: are the future tense endings -му, -меш, -ме, - мемо, -мете, -муть clitics?

Nope, those are just bound inflectional morphemes.

Why do you think so?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-30, 8:05

"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").

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-30, 8:21

Irusia wrote:
IpseDixit wrote:
Irusia wrote:If there is someone who knows Ukrainian: are the future tense endings -му, -меш, -ме, - мемо, -мете, -муть clitics?

Nope, those are just bound inflectional morphemes.

Why do you think so?


Because they do not fit the definition of "clitic" that you can read here and here.
Last edited by IpseDixit on 2017-05-30, 8:38, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 8:34

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?
The endings му, меш... come from the shortened form of the verb мати (to have), as far as I know. They are attached to infinitive: робити-му, співати-му, читати-му etc.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 8:53

What book would you recommend for the study of phonetics? I have found "A course in phonetics" by Peter Ladefoget. Is it good?

IpseDixit

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-05-30, 8:58

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?
The endings му, меш... come from the shortened form of the verb мати (to have), as far as I know. They are attached to infinitive: робити-му, співати-му, читати-му etc.


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.


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