Zompist Bboard Again

But we don't have an example of negative grammatical number to look at! Negatives are weird-- McCawley, to give an old example, wanted to always handle them at the S level. We don't need to look above the NP if we don't look at negatives , but extrapolating from that to a hypothetical negative gram...

Eeek, this ended up really really long—sorry about that! Good luck to anyone trying to make it through 😅 As (I hope) a minor point, I'm not sure why you're saying your analysis is not an analysis. If you want to call it an "intuition", fine; to me that just means an analysis you're not ver...

But if I say "yesterday I saw zero cats, and the zero cats I saw slept here" then indeed I appear to be making a claim about elements of the empty set (and priscianic is right that this makes it vacuously true). I believe it is this latter type of usage, however strained it may sound in E...

Sorry, I feel like I misunderstood something? I'm not really understanding where your reply is coming from—some explanation of my confusion below. (Maybe I was misleading/confusing in my post?) So back to the original question: when would a sentence like the cat-ZERO slept be true? It would be true ...

Corbett (2000) Number doesn't provide any examples of languages with a "zero number". And I think the general consensus is that such languages do not exist. I think it's worth noting that the standard kinds of semantics for grammatical number (e.g. Link 1983 , Schwarzschild 1996 , Winter 2...

Anyway, though I’d still like to resolve this dispute, I have an (unrelated) question which I’d like to ask here: are there any attested cases of tone spreading outside the phonological word? (Including clitics, though I realise that many languages place clitics outside the ‘phonological word’ sens...

I'm confused why people seem to be assuming that Spanish que is a relative pronoun. Is the idea that there's a relative pronoun que that just so happens to be homophonous with complementizer que ? OTOH, is it that clear what's a pronoun and what's not? E.g. in English we have This is the key which/...

I'm confused why people seem to be assuming that Spanish que is a relative pronoun. Is the idea that there's a relative pronoun que that just so happens to be homophonous with complementizer que ? Is there a principled reason why people are assuming that there are two different que s? The most parsi...

I'm not sure about this, but I think "and" has the same meaning, it's a matter of what exactly we're conjoining. "I like cats and dogs" = "I like cats" ^ "I like dogs" This is true for this particular case, but it fails for other cases, especially those where...

When you think about it, conjunctions in (for example) English are not quite logical. If you say "I like cats and dogs ", this is in terms of set theory a union of sets. The set of things being liked is the combination of the set of cats and the set of dogs. But if you say "I like ca...

In we would like [you to stay] , you have what's known as "exceptional case marking" (ECM), where the embedded subject (which really does start out its life in the embedded clause) gets "exceptionally" marked as accusative (e.g. we would like him to stay ) across a clause bounda...

While investigating control constructions for my next ergativity post, I found what appears to be a contradiction. In Andrew Radford’s book Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English , the subordinate clause in sentences such as ‘We would like [you to stay]’ is analysed as an infinitive ...

Wikipedia didn't have a link to Hyslop's grammar, but I found it on the website of the Australian National University, so I just added the link to the Wikipedia article now. An example of something syntactic (in the usual definition) that is unrelated to word order in that grammar would be the choi...

For instance, what exactly are you ordering? When people say things like SVO, what is S, what is V, and what is O? Those aren't theoretically-innocent letters: they're syntactic notions that people take to be in some sense "fundamental" to how languages are structured. That's syntax too! ...

Another puzzle about epistemic contradictions is that, as Beddor and Goldstein (2018) point out, it's perfectly reasonable to personally hold a belief in p , while also acknowledging that that belief might be mistaken and that it might be the case that not p . But asserting both of these things at ...

E.g. the Wikipedia article on " Syntax " ideally wouldn't begin with "syntax [...] is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences (sentence structure) in a given language, usually including word order ", having a dedicated section to S-V-O ...

The relevant data would be a speaker trying to assent to not p while at the same time committing themselves to must p . Frr instance, von Fintel and Gillies' example (19): (19) a. Alex: It must be raining. b. Billy: [Opens curtains] No it isn’t. You were wrong. c. Alex: #I was not! Look, I didn’t s...

That's interesting! It would also be worthwhile to compare those sentences to corresponding examples with indicative: Me alegra que ha llegado Juan, aunque no creo totalmente que lo haya hecho. 'I'm glad that Juan arrived, although I don't completely believe he did so.' Lamento que María est á enfe...

So although I don't accept these two sentences, I do perfectly accept: Me alegra que haya llegado Juan, aunque no creo totalmente que lo haya hecho. 'I'm glad that Juan arrived, although I don't completely believe he did so.' Lamento que María esté enferma, si lo que me dices es verdad. 'I feel sad...

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 ...