Zompist Bboard Again

Ser has basically covered what I'd say about subjunctives. As Ser says, it's hard to disentangle "what the subjunctive means" from "what it's come to be used for after thousands of years of development". The prototypical meaning is (I think) still irrealis, but it's not exactly ...

For example: 1) Me alegra que haya llegado Juan. (Spanish) me make.happy.3sg that have.SBJV.3sg arrived Juan ‘I'm glad that Juan arrived.’ You can't say this sentence if you don't believe that Juan arrived. You're not saying that you're glad (or would be glad) if Juan arrived in some hypothetical w...

Does no one like "me and my wife's personal Christmas card"?

Mood, on the other hand, is less well formalized and studied compared to modality, at least within the semantics literature—a notable exception is Portner's (2018) book on mood. In it, he distinguishes between two notions of mood: sentence mood , which roughly corresponds to the notion of "sen...

Would it be correct to say that all languages have some way of representing modality, but not all have a way to represent mood? And if a language has mood, then does it tend to not have a grammatical category of modals? I think that the answer to your first question is yes, and I have really no ide...

I don't know much about linguistics beyond traditional grammar, but if I understand you well: it seems to me that, in French (or Romance in general), mood and modality are orthogonal. Mood (or at least verbal mood) is expressed through verb morphology ( je sais / je saurais / que je sache / sache /...

I think some of the discussion here re: mood and modality seems to be assuming that mood can be reduced to or is fundamentally the same thing as modality (or vice-versa). (I think some of the replies fight against this notion). Certainly Kat's original question presupposes that there's an inherent c...

I suppose I’m talking more about sentences like ‘He studies linguistics at the university’, which seems pretty simple but ends up with a tree like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Xbarst1.svg You're right that, just looking at this one sentence "He studies linguistics ...

If you exhaustively know what's possible, then you also exhaustively know what's impossible, and likewise if you exhaustively know what's impossible, then you also exhaustively know what's possible (assuming that …) Granted. The difference I'm pointing at is that syntax starts with enormously permi...

It appears to me that most arguments in theoretical syntax have the form "sentence X is bad/ungrammatical, therefore we shall explain this happening because…". Where does this come from ? This seems to me to be unlike anything else in linguistics. Nobody thinks it needs a particular expla...

It appears to me that most arguments in theoretical syntax have the form "sentence X is bad/ungrammatical, therefore we shall explain this happening because…". Where does this come from ? This seems to me to be unlike anything else in linguistics. Nobody thinks it needs a particular expla...

No it isn’t: ‘A chair is an item of furniture which is used for sitting on, fits one person, and has a back’. I have a friend who has an ergonomic kneeling chair: there's a seat that's slightly tilted forward that you sit on, two lower pads raised off the ground that you put your knees on (such tha...

There actually is somewhat of a literature within a broadly Chomskyan framework on this kind of phenomenon (you might see it called "matrix que ", since it's a que appearing in a matrix/main clause); for instance, Etxepare (2007) , Demonte and Fernández Soriano (2014) , and Corr (2016) , ...

Is a stool a chair? … it's hard to define "chair" in a way that excludes stools … No it isn’t: ‘A chair is an item of furniture which is used for sitting on, fits one person, and has a back’. I have a friend who has an ergonomic kneeling chair: there's a seat that's slightly tilted forwar...

Oh, while I'm here, is anyone aware of any resources on syntax of morphologically complex languages? My specific issue is that in researching Iroquoian languages, it became quite clear that they're most definitely not all morphology and no syntax... but reference grammars understandably focus on mo...

Thanks for coming by, priscianic! More syntax people are very welcome, and I hope you'll stick around! Thanks for the warm welcome! And the general broad conclusion that this body of work argues for is that some of these uses of matrix que suggest that we do want to syntactically represent certain ...

(Hi everyone, I'm the friend akam alluded to a few posts up talking about weak crossover; just thought I'd pop in to the ZBB because this is something I know a little bit about!) I don't know about Kayne's book (I just saw it's a nice long one, 490 pp.), but e.g. a few times I've tried to find discu...