Syntactic theories typically distinguish 2 types of word or phrase accompanying verbs: arguments are accompaniments that can be present if the verb permits them to be present (‘licences’ them). Some arguments of some verbs are mandatory but others are optional. adjuncts are optional accompaniments that can be present without needing permission from that particular verb.…… Continue reading Arguments and adjuncts
Tag: Basic concepts
Heads, complements, specifiers and adjuncts
Theories of syntax do not view analyse sentences as an unstructured sequence of words. Instead, they analyse sentences down into immediate constituents, and then further down into sub-constituents and ultimately down into single words. For example: the sentence Jane helps John might be analysed down into the immediate constituents Jane and helps John; and the…… Continue reading Heads, complements, specifiers and adjuncts
Antecedents of reflexives and pronouns
Theories about ‘binding’ try to explain when a noun phrase must, may or must not refer to the same item as an earlier noun phrase in the same sentence (an antecedent). Binding theories typically identify 3 types of noun phrases: anaphors, such as herself in example 1 below. An anaphora must have an antecedent in…… Continue reading Antecedents of reflexives and pronouns
Phonemes and allophones
Phonologists and phoneticians typically distinguish phonemes from allophones. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another word. For example, the English word mat is distinct from pat because mat starts with the phoneme /m/ whereas pat starts with the phoneme /p/. A phoneme is not always pronounced in the…… Continue reading Phonemes and allophones
Leipzig glossing rules
Books and papers on linguistics often contain examples in a foreign language. To aid understanding, examples typically provide both: an interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, giving information about the meanings and grammatical properties of individual words and parts of words. an idiomatic translation of the foreign language text. A useful set of standardised conventions for writing glosses…… Continue reading Leipzig glossing rules
Vowels and consonants, vocoids and contoids
Most people probably have a rough idea of what vowels and consonants are. But drawing the line between them isn’t that easy. So, in 1943, American Linguist Kenneth Pike introduced the terms vocoid and contoid to help clarify the distinction. In essence: a contoid is a sound produced without narrowing the vocal tract enough to…… Continue reading Vowels and consonants, vocoids and contoids
Some World Atlases about languages
I’ve recently discovered 2 useful atlases, each devoted to a specific feature of languages: the World Atlas of Transitivity Pairs (WATP) the World Atlas of Classifier Languages (WACL) They provide more detail than is found in more general databases, such as the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), which I’ve mentioned in some other posts…… Continue reading Some World Atlases about languages
C-command
Linguists often refer to a relation called c-command. Some types of syntactic operation are often analysed as being possible only if one item c-commands another item. Examples of such operations include relations between quantifiers (such as all and some) and the items they qualify. What is c-command? C-command is a relation between some of the…… Continue reading C-command
How mouth shape affects vowel sounds
One way to describe vowels is by how they are produced (articulated)— for example, whether the tongue is raised, and whether the raised part of the tongue is nearer the front of the mouth, or nearer the back of the mouth. Another way to describe vowels is by the nature of the sounds produced—for example,…… Continue reading How mouth shape affects vowel sounds
What is a word?
Ordinary people and linguist talk about words all the time, but it is surprisingly difficult to define what a word is. In a recent open access paper in the journal Word, the linguist Martin Haspelmath has had a go. The paper is Defining the word, Martin Haspelmath (2023), WORD, 69(3), 283–297. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2023.2237272 Proposed definition of word…… Continue reading What is a word?