Is there any appropriate English terminology for changing the part of speech (of a word) without applying any modification? This is a concept including verbing (where the verb verb means “to use a word that is not conventionally used as a verb, typically a noun, as a verb”). Korean has a term Yeongbyeonhwa (零變化, “zero-derivation”) … Read more
Not all verbs work with all nouns. It is better to say “fix errors” than “solve errors”, for example. In linguistics, is there a name for semantic compatibilities between nouns and verbs that go before them like this? Answer I think you are looking for collocation: [ U ] the regular use of some words … Read more
In Chinese and Vietnamese sometimes a word is made up by listing its examples. For example, “table-chair” means furniture, “month-year” means time, “land-water” means country, “spring-summer-fall-winter” means the cycle of time, “birth-old-sickness-death” means the cycle of life. Of course words for “furniture” or “time” exist, but by using “table-chair” or “month-year”, the alluded concepts are … Read more
In English, there is no generally acceptable verb for someone to say the equivalent of “to sex.” All our equivalents are either too vulgar (“to fuck”, “to bang”, “to smash”) or too formal (“to copulate”, “to reproduce”) for use in everyday speech. The most general term, “to have sex,” separates the subject from the act … Read more
Is ‘during’ one morpheme or is it something like DURATION+ continuity? Answer I found an article here that seems to be particularly relevant: A variety of historical developments in meaning can obscure our perceptions of morphemic status. Often the only way to recognise the presence of some morphemes is through the study of the history … Read more
What is the speaker referring to when, talking about two phrasal verbs, they say They may be equivalent as far as the DMV is concerned, but they’re not equivalent from the point of view of language. I looked up DMV and I think it is an initialisation of the Dependency Model with Valence, I found … Read more
For our linguistics course we are supposed to analyse the following sentence by breaking it down into its constituent parts. We need to analyse it in terms of Function (FU) and Form (Fo), that is, clause constituents, phrase constituents and word classes. So how would you analyse the follwing sentence? His attitude made him very … Read more
I was studying for my exam and I came across something called elision. So my question is… Can “often” be considered an elision? Because of the silent t? Or am I just not getting the concept of elision? Answer It depends on the context. "often" is an example of the diachronic elision of "t" Historically, … Read more
Not sure if this would be more suited to the linguistics site, but wondering what the antonym would be. Example sentence would be: We find that grammars are consistently structure-dependent and not [word-here]. ‘Linear’ or something might work but not sure what the technical term would be. Answer I think “syntactic” would be a single … Read more
I am trying to understand how some noun phrases can sometimes be sentences such as: A box filled to the brim. (NP) A child covered in glue. (NP) vs: A child walked in the street. (S or NP) A child asked to leave. (S or NP) The first class is clearly ONLY a noun-phrase, yet … Read more
