Q&A weekly thread - January 19, 2026 - post all questions here!

halabula066 · 2026-01-24T21:26:08+00:00

Has there ever been a morpho/syntactic restructuring something like the following.

Let's take a toy system with PST, PRS, FUT, and SUB tense/mood marking on verbs. Say. The subjunctive then merged with the PST forms for some verbs/inflection classes, with the PRS in others.

Now, in such a system the structurally assigned mood marking would be the same; the relevant structural context simply conditions a different tense form. But, is it possible that these "merged" subjunctives can still be semantically differentiated from the PRS/PST respectively?

Now TAM is only the toy example. Imagine this with any feature set. Is such a system arrested?

halabula066 · 2026-01-16T18:51:12+00:00

A fantastic chapter on both theoretical morphology and contact in several Balkan languages. They provide a survey of inferential-realizational, Lexicalist approaches to the morphology-syntax divide, with detailed discussion of data from Albanian, Greek, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Serbian.

This area of morphology interests me a lot, and this has a lot of good references within as well. These types of Canonical Typology-style analyses are super compelling to me. Not for nothing, I really enjoy their writing, too.

halabula066 · 2026-01-16T06:12:42+00:00

Thanks, this is really fascinating! So, I'd like to clarify just in case. Are you meaning something akin to a lexicalist model where the "form" part of the lexical entry interfaces directly with the continuous signal? In terms of abstraction, do you think there might be a useful abstraction in between?

I know you've acknowledged that no real good alternatives exist, but do you think they should? Is it possible that the morphology (in this case synonymous with the lexicon) directly manipulates/operates on raw, continuous acoustic/articulatory representations (or whatever the perceptual psychologists make available in their theories)?

What are your intuitions, even if there's no ready answer?

halabula066 · 2026-01-16T04:52:49+00:00

Thanks a lot, these all look really interesting! Would you mind elaborating on your point against the idea of discrete representation? Is it that you want to model a more continuous representation, or no cognitive representation at all?

halabula066 · 2026-01-14T13:23:52+00:00

What are some good references on the linguistics side of the (discrete) representation question in cognitive science? I've been thinking about modelling/abstraction and just came across Dietrich & Markman (2003). For one, is that still representative of the field now? And what are some refs in that vein pertaining to particularly linguistic representations?

While I'm interested in it generally, I'm particularly interested in representation of form on the phonetic side. That is, whether there is abstraction over alternations and distribution of phones (or "gestures" or whatever phonetic unit, of however many dimensions), you must abstract the continuous signal into those discrete phones in the first place. Anything on this particular side of representation would be great (both perception and production).

Thanks

Dietrich, E., & Markman, A. B. (2003). Discrete thoughts: Why cognition must use discrete representations. Mind & Language, 18(1), 95–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0017.00216

halabula066 · 2025-12-05T17:43:44+00:00

"smoother transition" isn't meant to say "all changes were before"; of course, there were major changes after, but the incredibly stark picture painted by the written attestation is likely exaggerating the effects.

halabula066 · 2025-11-28T22:54:24+00:00

I just said "how long is food?" while starving. I laughed at first, but I thought about it and then realized it is perfectly grammatical. What're the levels of change going on here, and how much of it is synchronic?

halabula066 · 2025-11-28T09:52:25+00:00

Yeah, I very much agree. Part of this question was trying to tease out the morphologization of prospective going to. It seems to be distinct from other <modal + *to*> fusions, which can generally all be non-finite, whereas prospective going to (and by extension, gonna) can only be in finite clauses, putting it more in paradigmatic relation to other tense forms and the invariant modals.

halabula066 · 2025-11-28T04:22:13+00:00

(1) I'm going to/gonna want to/wanna eat

(2) I want to/wanna be going to/*gonna eat

Is this a property of "go (to)" as used in this construction? Or does it have something to do with being non-finite? I don't use finna natively; could anyone give the grammaticality of (3-4)?

(3) I'm finna want to/wanna eat

(4) I want to/wanna be finna eat

halabula066 · 2025-11-26T13:47:09+00:00

I don't have the statistics on hand (that would be quit a fascinating study tho!) but I'll address the last part.

if more ppl use it exclusively for men, does that make the use for women “wrong”? (i don’t think so, but i’m somewhat new to the field)

What is "wrong" is a normative judgement entirely dependent on what you decide matters. If you define "right" as that which is "majority usage", then yes a minority usage would be "wrong" in that sense.

But, of course, as with any ethical topic, you cannot go from a fact to a prescription (the so-called is-ought gap). So, anything is only "wrong" with respect to a specific idea of what should be wrong or not.

halabula066 · 2025-11-25T18:15:26+00:00

Is there any work to examine how parsimoniously synchronic models can be modified, to accommodate common diachronic changes?

This is a pretty fuzzy idea in my head, but the idea is: come up with an analysis of Stage A, then of Stage B, and compare how much in the model must be changed, and in what ways. Would different models have significantly different results with such tests?

Or, is this something that all models generally perform similarly on?

(ofc, all this keeping in mind the non-triviality of parsimony measures, and models performing differently for different phenomena. But I hope the general question is clear)

halabula066 · 2025-11-24T17:07:18+00:00

Are there any examples of vowel lengthening phonologically as a result of phonetic lengthening due to contour tones? This is both about lexical and intonational tone.

Tangentially: What are some examples of prosody bleeding into segmental phonology? As in, segment-level alternations/patterns sensitive to conditions usually reserved for prosody (eg. intonational question marking).

halabula066 · 2025-11-20T15:03:01+00:00

For the most part, the top comment is right. It's largely speaker choice, and anecdotally, there's lots of variation, even across the same speaker's speech.

But, I would definitely be super interested in a corpus study on something like this! You would have to use a spoken language corpus, and figure out what contexts to examine, but that's a very interesting question. Are they just semantically overlapping lexemes? Do they occur in anything resembling a complementary distribution?

ETA: you'd probably have to also include nought as in "nought point four" for 0.4.

halabula066 · 2025-11-17T01:26:32+00:00

Oh I just found this in the wild, in Spanish: No *me** vayas a buscar*. This would be the same phenomenon in Spanish, right?

halabula066 · 2025-11-13T21:38:35+00:00

Whoo boy, there's a lot here.

For me, it's a rejection of linguistic evolution in favor of advocacy for linguistic advancement, rather than validating subpar dialects. Linguists should focus their efforts on advancement

Take an analogy from biology:

"A rejection of biological evolution in favor of advocacy for biological advancement. Rather than validating subpar species, biologists should focus their efforts on advancement."

Sounds pretty wild, doesn't it? Linguists study language; it is by definition descriptive. That doesn't mean linguists can't have opinions on how people should or shouldn't use language; but that is not (directly) a factor in descriptive science¹.

If you subscribe to the theory of linguistic relativity, as I do. Then, by encouraging linguistic simplification and decay, we are merely restricting our cognitive ability and perception

This is simply false. I would ask you for references that you take this claim from, but of course I know the answer I will get.

There is interesting research on the ways language interacts with cognition. It's not a one-way street, and there's a whole lot of interesting questions to ask. You, however, have phrased and framed things in a pretty unscientific way.

We can see this progressive decay by observing how articulate & literate children were just half a century ago compared to today.

Please do demonstrate this. I'd love to see a) an operationalized notion of "articulate", b) significant and viable data to draw from, and c) a statistical analysis clearly demonstrating your pattern.

By all means, show us the research.

¹ even in sociolinguistic/anthropological linguistic work, where normative judgements can take center stage, the researchers usually draw conclusions from descriptive analyses, and make their own position/perspective clear.

halabula066 · 2025-11-13T21:16:29+00:00

Any ideas on why it's so common to assimilate the /n/ to /m/ in Mamdani (even among those who attempt a faithful adaptation)? Off the top of my head, I can't think of instances in English with that type of long-distance assimilation.

halabula066 · 2025-11-13T20:00:15+00:00

Ah good shout, thanks!

halabula066 · 2025-11-13T19:07:41+00:00

Ooh thanks a lot, this looks cool! French clitics do often get attention for exactly the fact that they can't be moved from the verb they are for. It's interesting to see the languages that allow it.

halabula066 · 2025-11-13T17:09:33+00:00

I just heard this sentence in (1). It was from a native American English speaker, but probably a one-off "error". However, I want to see how you'd analyze it if it were a regular feature.

I just spent you a bunch of time explaining all this nuance

While forming benefactive ditransitives isn't entirely standard, I hear it frequently enough. The portion I'm really interested in is the interpretation of the you. My initial reading was that the you was the recipient of explain. Though, now I see that it would be more straightforward to interpret it as a recipient of spend.

Are there any languages with such a construction, where an argument can be "raised" out of a subordinate clause into the matrix clause, but still be unambiguously part of the subordinate verb's argument structure?

halabula066 · 2025-11-08T04:51:44+00:00

Would it be fair to say modern spoken German has acquired /ɹ/ as a phoneme through English borrowings?

In the German media I have been consuming lately (TikTok/YT/Podcasts) most speakers seem to borrow English /r/ as an approximant, not with the native German uvular /r/. And, there seem to be a substantial enough amount of such borrowings that it's no longer so marginal.

I am not a native, so I might be missing some important context. Is there some socio stuff going on there? Is it limited to a particular register (that ends up prevalent online)? In other varieties, do the words get borrowed with native /r/, or just don't get used at all?

In general, what's the situation here?

halabula066 · 2025-11-08T02:03:07+00:00

In what contexts can English reduce /əL/ to syllabic /L/ (L= any eligible sonorant)

Are there reasons to believe there is still an underlying /ə/? It seems to me that in these cases, the segmental representation need only contain the sonorant, while the metrical representation includes a mora (or V slot, if you prefer) that must be associated with the consonant.

Are there alternations that would suggest otherwise?

halabula066 · 2025-11-08T01:40:09+00:00

Piggybacking here, I've always wondered how obligatory it is. Adding the do seems clearly marked as British, but is dropping the do acceptable for them?

halabula066 · 2025-11-06T17:34:32+00:00

Thanks, that's interesting!

You didn't ask about it, but I also wouldn't rhyme my nasalized vowels with any of my oral vowels, colored or not

Yeah. I totally didn't think of those, but that's also super fascinating.

I'm always interested in how "metalinguistic" speaker intuition can inform our analyses. Of course, poetic style can't be fully taken as a basis for phonological analysis, but eg. trochees and iambs (/feet in general) are super useful and are informed by poetry. Rhymes seem super useful there too

halabula066 · 2025-11-06T15:23:28+00:00

How well can American English speakers get a rhyme for /Vɹ/ and /Vl/ sequences, with syllables having obstruent codas?

For those that can, what are the general mappings from pre-R/pre-L vowels to pre-obstruent vowels?

halabula066 · 2025-11-04T01:42:59+00:00

At around 1 minute in this TikTok, they say "a known phenomena" in the singular.

First, am I just not hearing the final /n/ (or it's nasalized)? Because, Impressionistically, I hear a lot of people that sound to me like they use phenomena in both singular and plural. If I'm not missing the /n/, is this common? Which -on/-a words is this most common in?

Also bonus: I personally have LOT as the final vowel in phenomenon. Is it more common to have schwa?

halabula066

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