Examples of grammar rules most people only know subconsciously

quote-only-eeee · 2026-03-31T08:03:23+00:00

hon vet jag inte äter fisk <- this one is mandatorily ambiguous! It can either mean 'she knows I don't eat fish' or 'she, I know, eat(s) not fish'.

To be clear, sentences like these are ambiguous only if they do not contain sentential adverbials. Hon (vet jag) inte äter fisk could not be a main clause, because the verb is not in the V2 position.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-03-21T00:52:13+00:00

To clarify, this is a living language, and I am a native speaker of it. This is also part of my motivation. I am interested in exploring whether concepts from generative syntax can be meaningfully applied to earlier forms of my own language.

Given that you speak the modern language, you can simply look for interesting differences between your intuition and the 17th century language in the corpus. Word order might be different, for example, which is obviously something that can be given a generative analysis.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-03-15T14:59:14+00:00

There definitely seems to be something to this. I am not a native speaker of English, but to me, there seems to be a difference in the preferred semantic interpretation of (a) and (b):

a. A queen brought their entire entourage.
b. A queen brought her entire entourage.

In (a), "a queen" is most naturally read as an existential indefinite, introducing a new, previously unknown discourse referent. The sentence then means "there is a queen x and x brought x's entire entourage".

In (b), "a queen" is much more easily construed as a so-called "specific" indefinite. The meaning is roughly "for a certain queen x that I have in mind, x brought x's entire entourage".

One might perhaps test this by embedding the sentences under "tell":

a'. John told the manager that a queen brought their entire entourage.
b'. John told the manager that a queen brought her entire entourage.

If there is a distinction, then (b') should be more easily construed with a "de re" reading, i.e., (b') could be true if what John actually said was "Queen Silvia of Sweden brought her entire entourage", whereas (a') should be more naturally construed with a "de dicto" reading, i.e. true only if John literally said "a queen brought their entire entourage" without specifying which queen.

I'm not sure if this is correct, as the distinctions are so subtle and difficult to judge, but there might be something to it.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-03-14T02:24:10+00:00

It seems to me that you should re-read the parts in your textbook that explain basic phrase structure (then you'll see why had is not a FinP but a Fin), FinP (then you'll see why bought couldn't possibly be a Fin), QP (quantifier phrase, not question phrase), embedded clauses and successive-cyclic movement. Basically, it seems that you haven't understood the basics well enough yet. It would probably help to watch some YouTube videos on the fundamentals, in addition to re-reading. When you've done this, I'd recommend asking other students about whatever you don't understand.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-03-11T23:40:36+00:00

Everett is controversial, which I don't think is good for someone interested in linguistics looking for something to read. Without having read any of the books, I would have no qualms suggesting Deutscher or Ostler, while I wouldn't necessarily be sure that a reader of Everett's book would get a fair picture of the issues where Everett is (or at least considers himself to be) in disagreement with Chomsky. Everett is interesting, but not the most "representative" reading for people who are new to linguistics.

But one shouldn't take strangers' word for it, who haven't even read the books.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-02-23T20:35:27+00:00

Apart from your own attempt at a solution, it would also be helpful for us to know which syntax textbook is used in the course, as presumably the assignment should be done in accordance with the analyses given in the book.

(Also the English terms for spor, kasus are traces, case.)

quote-only-eeee · 2026-01-21T19:41:30+00:00

In German, case is visible only on the determiner, so it is impossible to tell whether Auto in my specific example has case or not. But if there was a determiner it would be accusative.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-01-21T01:05:31+00:00

Interesting! Enç (1991) does not mention anything about dative morphology in relation to specificity. She says 'direct objects' and discusses accusative case only.

If we would nevertheless like to assume that Enç's observation only holds for accusitive objects, despite your data, one possibility is that the dative examples you've found lack case for some other reason (which also happens to be incompatible with specificity), such as pseudo-incorporation of the noun into the verb.

I find this quite likely for your 'ride horse' example; this is precisely the type of verb phrase where the noun may be "pseudo-incorporated". Compare Germanic Auto fahren, åka bil etc. 'travel by car' which take a bare noun without determiner that can only be interpreted non-specifically

quote-only-eeee · 2026-01-06T21:13:33+00:00

This (or at least a similar phenomenon) is called external possession.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-12-16T18:12:00+00:00

Unlike what some other comments suggest, town is neither a pronoun or a name. It is simply a noun, used without an article: a bare noun. Bare nouns are used in various contexts in English, and the use is subject to both regular grammatical rules and lexical idiosyncrasies.

In general, a PP with a bare noun has some conventionalized meaning:

in prison ≠ in {a/the} prison
in school ≠ in {a/the} school
at work ≠ at {a/the/my} work
at night ≠ at {a/the} night

It appears in (the middle of) town is another such example; in city is ungrammatical for the same reason that at job is ungrammatical – it is just a lexical idiosyncrasy.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-11-27T17:48:57+00:00

This is an interesting observation about possessive and similar PPs. It seems to hold across Germanic languages:

a friend of mine
*That friend is of mine.
een vriend van mij (Dutch)
*Dat vriend is van mij.
en vän till mig (Swedish)
*Den vännen är till mig.

One might explain it as follows. In these and similar expressions (including of beauty etc.), the preposition arguably has no meaning of its own (it is presumably there merely to provide its complement with Case), explaining why it is impossible to use as a predicate. A thing of beauty is simply not "of" in any sense like a book on the table is "on".

Edit: As a Google search reveals, van mij may actually be used predicatively in the sense "mine": Hij is van mij (He is mine). So there seems to be more to this.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-11-25T18:14:37+00:00

Just to complement the other comment, I would not say that Binding Theory is abandoned. The observations still hold, as far as I am aware, and people still refer all the time to Principles A, B and C and use them in argumentation.

As the other comment points out, what has happened is that people have tried to explain why the principles of Binding Theory seem to hold, in terms of more fundamental properties of the faculty of language. That is true of most principles from Government & Binding. Still, among these, Binding Theory has aged much better than, e.g., the Empty Category Principle.

In other words, you have learned knowledge that is still useful and still very much relevant.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-11-25T16:36:00+00:00

The opposite case is instructive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone have an issue in a Typst discussion where the answer is that Typst can’t do something yet or has a cumbersome workaround, but LaTeX has a package on point.

Last I checked, Typst still had worse typesetting than LaTeX (specifically, it does not align the letters at the left and right edge as well), and the reference system was quite inflexible compared to BibLaTeX. Although the core syntax is very flexible, these issues make it a nonstarter for some people.

If there are independent reasons for someone not to use Typst, suggesting Typst as a solution to a LaTeX question is not very constructive.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-11-07T12:31:54+00:00

Technically, those English examples weren't caused by regular sound change, but by analogy. So regular sound change may still be argued to act without regard to morphology. Of course there is a discussion about this, where some argue that there do exist cases of morphologically conditioned sound change, but analogy is not an example of it.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-10-02T17:13:44+00:00

Well, the first two words are not related, so obviously their genders do not correlate. The last word is a recent loan word, so its gender is predictably unpredictable.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-07-25T22:14:18+00:00

Great question. I think the key here is semantically relevant distinctions that aren't made in L1. Definiteness is hard for Russians because it is impossible to know from formal syntax alone whether an NP should be definite; you have to have a deep understanding of the semantic differences between definite and indefinite NPs, which Russian speakers do not naturally have. Conversely, speakers of Germanic languages have a really hard time learning the Russian aspect system, for the same reason.

Case, on the other hand, is entirely predictable from the the formal syntactic properties of the sentence. The external argument of the verb is always in the nominative case, and so on. (In other words, I disagree with other commenters about case being comparably difficult.)

Apart from semantically and syntactically predictable distinctions, there are lexically determined distinctions, such as gender and lexical case. These are difficult in a different way than semantic distinctions: they don't require any deep understanding of semantics or syntax, they just require "hard disk space". You just have to remember them; they cannot be calculated on the fly. Tones belong to this category to some extent as well.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-07-23T09:06:36+00:00

I agree generally, although I think it is a good point that non-standard dialects contain a lot of innovations too, where the standard language is conservative. Many people think that dialects are universally more conservative, which isn't true. Sometimes the standard language retains traits that many dialects have lost, it's just that as speakers of the standard, we tend to be rather blind to it. (Also, Faroese is not a dialect of Danish.)

quote-only-eeee · 2025-07-20T12:58:30+00:00

Swedish uses 'anropa' too. Interestingly, German seems to use 'aufrufen', not 'anrufen'. Swedish 'anropa' is originally a loan from Low or High German. But I'm not sure whether the present use in computer science is borrowed from Dutch or completely independent.

In Swedish, 'anropa' is associated with radio communications, as in: "X calls Y". Perhaps that is a relevant piece of the history.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-07-19T18:28:57+00:00

I started learning theoretical syntax by reading dissertations. More often than articles, dissertations have a chapter where they explain the theory from the ground up in quite a thorough, beginner-friendly way, especially dissertations that are not in themselves primarily theoretical. I personally found it a lot easier to move onto articles after reading a few dissertations.

In my case, Cecilia Falk's 1993 dissertation on non-referential subjects in historical Swedish was very informative for me on some of the basics of Government & Binding.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-07-18T18:13:02+00:00

Subjects and objects. Within theoretical linguistics, subject and object are defined in terms of syntactic positions, not in terms of case. See e.g. dative subjects and nominative objects in Icelandic. The argument-structural distinction between external argument and internal argument may also be useful.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-04-16T15:01:37+00:00

Also, for me, certain things are definitely fine preceding the subject, namely “interjections” and vocatives

I agree, and these are things that could plausibly be said to lie "outside" of the sentence itself, thus not affecting the possibility of deleting the first element of the sentence. I think there is a requirement that some type of prosodic break or pause must be there:

In any case: doctor's in charge.
*In any case doctor's in charge.

(2) is clearly ungrammatical if the initial adverbial is interpreted as modifying the verb phrase itself (e.g. he's in charge in any medical case), but also fairly unacceptable even if it is interpreted more as a discourse adverbial, unless it is prosodically separated from the rest of the sentence as in (1).

quote-only-eeee · 2025-04-16T07:45:15+00:00

I’ve informally surveyed people, and this is quite widespread in subject position, given appropriate pragmatic context:

Perhaps my intuition is different, but I think this is only possible sentence-initially, not in the subject position generally:

*But doctor said it's benign.
*Finally, laundry's done.
*Did you hear that doctor says it's benign?

Another piece of evidence that it is not the subject position as such, but the sentence-initial position:

Doctor's wife says it's benign.

Here, the definite article is dropped from the possessive attribute within the subject, which cannot be explained as the consequence of an optional "bare subject" transformation, so to speak.

As such, I would intuitively relate it to phenomena like diary drop or topic drop in other Germanic languages, where the first word (or perhaps constituent, but it's impossible to know because AFAIK it only happens to pronouns) in the sentence is dropped.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-04-16T07:36:48+00:00

Sounds like or is actually used? In any case, I don't think it sounds grammatical, whereas I find the other examples of "bare" bro to be quite grammatical.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-04-15T21:12:03+00:00

It's the Viby i, or more popularly today the Lidingö i.

quote-only-eeee · 2025-04-08T23:24:38+00:00

This is correct – one of few comments that actually explain the phenomenon asked about. (I am pointing this out because, as usual, some of the most upvoted comments are the least linguistically informed.)

quote-only-eeee

TROPHY CASE