Zompist Bboard Again

I get less than 75% for English. Section 1: 1.1. English has periphrastic aspect, and what case-marking it has is by suppletion. 1.2. According to WALS the English verb inflects for 2-3 categories, and that seems about right to me, though maybe not more than one at a time. 1.3. I don't really know h...

Yeah, it's not raising, it's control, as zompist said. Though it's not as simple as deletion, I think. Supposedly you've got something like this: Mary persuaded John John to leave And then you delete the second John because it corefers with the object of the matrix clause. That makes it seem like yo...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 6:09 am It’s interesting that you mention that, as both Eʋe and Vai use the same copula for adjectives and locations (and, as I said, a different copula for nouns).

Hm, I hope I haven't misremembered the generalisation!

Turkish is often described as having a suffixed copula, for what it's worth (which is at least an option you don't mention). I do mention that option, as ‘nonverbal person agreement’. (And I even give Turkish as an example of that!) Beja is another one with this pattern. Right, I meant that as a po...

Turkish is often described as having a suffixed copula, for what it's worth (which is at least an option you don't mention). Sometimes a copula might be called nonverbal if it doesn't inflect the way verbs do (it might instead just be called uninflecting). There might also be obvious word order diff...

(I see that that I'm cross-posting with priscianic, fingers crossed...) So Minimalism made X-bar theory obsolete? I had thought that Minimalism and X-bar theory are still both widely used today. One central X-bar idea is still widely adopted, namely that you can do a fair bit of syntax without disti...

Does a glass house have windows?

Maybe I’m not understanding this correctly, but are you implying here that the past tense morpheme occurs together with the future tense morpheme? That’s what it sounds like — you say that ‘the past tense morpheme takes that new phrase as its complement’, where I believe that ‘that new phrase’ refe...

I found that pretty interesting! A question: they say that ‘The hierarchy of projections as reflected in free words is the same one that is reflected in morphological structure when morphemes express the same notions as the free words’. This sounds pretty interesting, but I can’t quite understand w...

What's supposed to be in a framework that's not in a bunch of tools? I suppose it might also include various results that you take to have been established, a set of priorities, some shared points of reference, things like that. Hard to see how those could be bad things, imo. Oh, on the first point,...

A friend caught a mistake in the weak crossover bit (no surprise there). Apparently you're expected to think that "Who₁ do her₁ friends admire?" is substantially worse than "Her₁ friends admire Mary₁," not just that they're both bad. So for some reason the (A-bar) movement makes ...

Isn't that rather a constraint on the use of "her" as an anaphor/cataphor? Compare: I saw you listening to Dolly₁'s news with her₁ Maybe? I think the main issue though is what the constraint is. I was thinking of it as implying that the antecedent has to be higher in the structure than th...

(Although I’m not convinced that languages would always use ‘the simplest structure-building operation you can imagine’ — I wouldn’t be surprised if languages actually work far less rationally than that!) The argument breaks down for me there, too. It sounds good if you're thinking about a creature...

I’d be curious to know: why a binary tree specifically? It's actually a tricky question, and one I'm not sure I can answer well, though it's fair to say that most linguists these days working in a broadly Chomskyan framework are convinced that's how it works. One reason for this is just that taking...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Jun 27, 2020 12:47 am the term ‘Ā-movement’

I wrote up an answer to this, but it got really long, so I put it in another thread: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=655&p=31046.

So this is my attempt to explain what Ā movement is. I hope it makes sense. And that there aren't too many mistakes :) First pass First thing: "Ā" is meant to be read "A-bar," and that's how I'll write it. (It's sometimes written "A'" instead.) And A-bar movement contra...

I wrote a reply to bradrn's question (on Linguistic Miscellany) about Ā movement, but it got too long for a comment, so I'm putting it here. And I'm putting it in a comment rather than the main post because I suppose it wouldn't be terrible to have a sandbox for reasonably involved syntax stuff.

I would like to point out that, in the case of perfectives, there is quite often a focus on the fact the event ended or will end Some languages get described as having perfectives that focus the beginning of the event, fwiw. I'm thinking especially of Komnzo as described by Döhler. E.g., a perfecti...

Sorry, looks like I misinterpreted your second clause. (I misread it as ‘all languages are not equally complex’ rather than ‘it is nonsense to say that all languages are equally complex’.) Ah, yes, maybe I should've been clearer, the idea was that the question might be a bad one, with no correct an...

(For the record, I'm not sure whether it makes sense to talk about the complexity of a language as a whole, and I'm all but certain that it's nonsense to say that all languages are equally complex.) Surely those two sentences are contradictory? (I do agree with the rest of your post though.) Not at...