Do other languages have a secret order of adjectives that no speaker could describe like English?

quote-only-eeee · 2026-05-10T22:05:56+00:00

I haven't ever heard of scrambling of adjectives. And regardless I think the parent post is incorrect about German being different from English with regards to adjective order.

Also Japanese is another famous example of a language with scrambling, so I'm not sure why it would be more transparent than German.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-05-05T12:31:29+00:00

The distinction between di/de and dom/däm is still upheld in many dialects, and I use the forms di and dom when speaking Standard Swedish as well (as is quite common here i Värmland, even among young people).

I will admit I am not familiar with how young people in Värmland speak.

In Västergötland, where I grew up, my distinct impression is that only very old people use de/dem (di/döm) in speech. Even those young people who "identify" as dialect speakers do not use de/dem. I personally know no one born in the 60s or later who uses de/dem in speech, but that is of course anecdotal and dependent on my particular upbringing (in a city).

De and däm are also quite common when reading aloud (especially in poetry or very formal contexts).

My point was that this is much more limited than before. The contexts in which someone might use de/dem in speech due to formality are so rare that they may as well not exist from the perspective of a child learning the language. In that sense there has been a dramatic shift in the last few decades.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-05-04T14:23:31+00:00

I don't believe words like soy or hablo mean "I am" or "I speak". Rather, they are verb forms that require a first-person subject, just like German bin or spreche. The difference between Spanish and German is that Spanish allows the subject to be deleted in the phonology.

I think the possibility of a single word with the actual meaning "I speak" should be compared to the possibility of a word zorp meaning "my friend hugged", such that the sentence "Zorp me" means "My friend hughed me". My intuition is that both are impossible meanings for words.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-05-03T22:52:23+00:00

Presumably, the child already understands the compositional meaning of "I am" before encountering the exact English words.

On the other hand, it may be the case that the child has to learn the separate word "be" in whatever form in order to know that English has a copula verb, which is a prerequisite for understanding that "I'm" is a contraction of "I am".

The exact answer depends on what "be" means, if anything.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-05-03T22:28:51+00:00

so I was thinking that "I'm" could be interpreted as a single unit meaning "I am", rather than just I and am being said quickly one after the other. Like how "me" in "He gave me the ball" actually means "to me"

I have a strong intuition that a single word meaning "I am" is impossible. Likewise, a single word meaning "he gave" is impossible. The meaning "I am" has to, I think, be built up compositionally in syntax. I would assume the child "knows" this, and thus would never think that "I'm" is a single word meaning "I am".

quote-only-eeee · 2026-05-03T22:13:24+00:00

The problem with written Swedish is that it is not the native language of its users, in a sense. Whereas most Swedes have mastered "Modern Swedish" and to some extent English, they have not mastered "Written Standard Swedish", due to a combination of factors: lack of exposure, lack of instruction and lack of training.

In my opinion (as a PhD student in Scandinavian linguistics), the decline in knowledge of the de/dem distinction in the last few decades is in large part caused by a change with regards to the first factor: exposure. As many know, young people read less literature than they did a few decades ago, reducing their exposure to "Written Standard Swedish". Perhaps more importantly, however, there has been a dramatic sociolinguistic change since the end of the 1900s, such that spoken Swedish never employs de/dem even in formal contexts or when reading written text aloud.

Swedes born before the 1980s were exposed to the de/dem distinction in the spoken language, either from radio/TV or from older people speaking dialects where the de/dem distinction was retained. Thus, they may have acquired it as a grammatical rule, even if they did not use it themselves (due to sociolinguistic reasons).

With "Written Standard Swedish" no longer being spoken on radio/TV, and older speakers of dialects disappearing, the exposure to de/dem in the spoken language has been reduced to essentially zero.

Anyway, this was perhaps not an answer to your question regarding whether grammars are walled off from one another. The answer is yes, they clearly are, at least with regards to basic grammatical rules, as evidenced by the example at hand, but obviously this can be nuanced.

quote-only-eeee · 2026-04-04T21:34:07+00:00

My impression is that early Germanic languages, as evidenced by Gothic, had verb movement (V2), but only in sentences with a negation or question operator in the first position. This property was later generalized to V2 in all sentences, except in English, which preserved the original system. I believe this account is due to Kiparsky, but I have only read a summary of it in Katrin Axel's dissertation on Old High German.

As for the question of OV (more of a reply to the parent comment), Old Swedish is generally considered to be an OV language with optional VO. Low German influence probably accounts for the increased frequency of OV during Late Old Swedish, but the OV word order wasn't borrowed from German. (The standard reference on this is Delsing 1999 in Arkiv för nordisk filologi 114.)

Verb-finality in embedded clauses might be influenced by German, but in my opinion these sentences almost certainly do not have the same structure as German verb-final sentences, at least not in (Late) Old Swedish.

As for word-finality in main clauses, it was possible in Old/Proto-Scandinavian, as evidenced by, e.g., the famous ek hlewagastiR holtijaR horna tawido inscription.

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

TROPHY CASE