A grammatical problem that has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC has finally been solved by an Indian Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge. Rishi Rajpopat made the breakthrough by decoding a rule ...
Archaeology
Dec 14, 2022
5
9130
Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use ...
Social Sciences
Aug 16, 2023
1
1181
The 'myth' of language history: languages do not share a single history but different components evolve along different trajectories and at different rates.A large-scale study of Pacific languages reveals that forces driving ...
Social Sciences
Oct 2, 2017
4
1586
Eric DeGiuli, a physicist at École Normale Supérieure, has proposed that a human language grammar can be viewed as if it were a physical object, allowing theories such as those in statistical mechanics to explain how a ...
Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have ...
Social Sciences
Jan 29, 2018
4
1321
A new research project examining a linguistic construction called the verb second constraint could, academics believe, help to explain how people acquire language.
Social Sciences
Dec 16, 2015
0
718
(PhysOrg.com) -- "I'm going to lay down and take a nap," the man said to his wife.
Other
Jan 12, 2011
6
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using advanced computer modeling and statistical analysis, a University of Texas at Austin linguistics professor has found that toddlers develop their own individual structures for using language that are ...
Other
Oct 5, 2009
3
0
Discovering new materials and drugs typically involves a manual, trial-and-error process that can take decades and cost millions of dollars. To streamline this process, scientists often use machine learning to predict molecular ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jul 7, 2023
0
1589
A new study of how compound word formation is influenced by subtle forms of linguistic pressure demonstrates that words which "sound better" to the speakers of a language have a higher chance of being created, suggesting ...
Social Sciences
Dec 9, 2011
3
0
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. Linguists do not normally use the term to refer to orthographical rules, although usage books and style guides that call themselves grammars may also refer to spelling and punctuation.
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