Re: me and my languages

Jesse Bangs wrote:

>Yet in none of these can you (apparently) separate the definitely article
>'az' from the noun 'ember.'  This would be possible in a language with
>*true* free word order and no adjacency constraints, but I'll bet a
>fairly large sum of money that no natural language is like that.
>(Syntactically, I think this has to do with the no-crossing-branches
>constraint and some other stuff, if anyone cares.)
I might be willing to take that bet. Off the top of my head, I can think of
languages that can separate nouns and quantifiers, adjectives,
demonstratives, and other modifiers. The only thing that I cannot
immediately think of is a language that allows separation of a definite
article from its noun.

Given that even in English, we have preposition stranding and quantifier
float, is there any principled reason we should not find determiner
stranding? Some recent proposals have even claimed that determiners and
nouns are not base generated in structurally adjacents positions. If they
are correct, then such separations should be found somewhere in the world.



Marcus Smith

Unfortunately, or luckily,
no language is tyrannically consistent.
All grammars leak.
                -- Edward Sapir

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