3 ms·

I'm not sure what you mean by strict. If by "regular and consistent" then, yes. There are a handful of irregular verbs. Everything else is completely regular

• oceanhaiyang 2y ago
  I think what they mean is can you form sentences that are not textbook and still make sense. In that case as long as you understand the particles and grammar you can make highly backwards sentences still work.
  • GolDDranks 2y ago
    Every human language works this way...? This is why we have systems called "grammars" in the first place: they capture regularity in the structure of a language. Human languages are, in a sense, "infinitary", so that they aren't simply a set of fixed phrases. However there are, depenging on the language, also patterns they don't allow. (And some patterns _any_ human languages don't allow.) This logically necessities language to have regularities. We capture these regularities as "generative grammars".
    • makeitdouble 2y ago
      While you're right, I think parent/OP's discussion is on how composable a language is with low semantic knowledge of the components, just going with the grammatical rules. For instance in English you'll need to know if a subject is a third person singular or not to adjust the verb. Or even just singular vs plural for the adjectives and pronouns. And you'll need the gender in gendered languages (French, Italian etc) In general, Japanese doesn't require that kind of care: the verb doesn't change, adjectives don't either, most of the words are unaffected if you swap semantically different parts.
      • gizmo686 2y ago
        > For instance in English you'll need to know if a subject is a third person singular or not to adjust the verb. There is a suprising amount of subtlety here. What you need to known is if the subject is syntactically singular or not. Once you have that, it does not matter is the subject is actually singular. For instance, if you are talking to a single person, you say still say "you are" instead of "you is", because "you" is syntactically plural, regardless of its actual meaning. This is very useful for generating grammatically correct sentences (or testing the grammar of existing sentences). The set of features that cause this type of inter-word agreement are called phi features (typically count, gender, person, and case). Since phi features are purely syntactic, you tag words with them just like you tag words with their part of speach. In real speach, this can get weird, as it is possible for the same realized word to have different phi features depending on its sementic meaning. However, if all you care about is determining if a sentence is gramatical, you do not care if it means what was intended. As an aside regarding Japanese, there have been some attempts to model Japanese politeness markers as a form of agreement; however, I have never found those arguements to be convincing.
        • makeitdouble 2y ago
          > What you need to known is if the subject is syntactically singular or not. It's a bit broader IMHO. For instance, plurals are handled as singular based on the semantics, even in written language. I liked how different authors handled the Olympics in wikipedia for instance > The Summer Olympic Games, also known as the Summer Olympics or the Games of the Olympiad, is a major international multi-sport event vs > The modern Olympic Games (Olympics; French: Jeux olympiques)[a][1] are the world's leading international sporting events. Same way a singular nouns will be handled as plurar if the speaker recognizes them as such ("The UN are planning a meeting") There will be arguments on whether these sentences are grammatically correct, but I'd be more for the descriptive approach than the prescriptive one, as at the end of the day usage wins. > attempts to model Japanese politeness markers I kinda feel for them as it's the most evolving part of the language IMO. As people get used to a level of politeness, it loses it's status and a stronger form becomes needed. Basically there's a politeness inflation happening through the years, and it's all based on how people perceive it, so logic is also not an element of it.
• thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > That is probably the most common structure for a language. Swahili verbs are entirely regular and can have a long sequence of prefixes which follow a strict order. This seems a little confused. If a language's verbs are entirely regular, the normal point of view would be that that language doesn't inflect verbs at all. For example, an English verb can include up to four prefixes, which occur in an order that never changes and which do not depend on the verb. In this sense, that part of the grammar is "fully regular". (Note that all of these prefixes are verbs, and with the exception of the first set, they inflect like verbs. The first set inflect only for past tense.) [Those prefixes, in order, indicate: modality (there are many verbs that can occupy this space, but they're all mutually exclusive with each other), perfect aspect (exactly one verb can occur here), continuous aspect (again, exactly one verb can occur here), passive voice (two verbs, mutually exclusive). Any of the sixteen theoretical combinations of these is allowed.] But that's all periphrasis. English verbal inflection is a different phenomenon: each verb has five forms (except be, which is special and has more): plain (take), past (took), third-person present singular (takes), active participle (taking), and passive participle (taken). This is where a verb might be irregular or not. A regular verb's past form adds the suffix /d/ to the plain form, the active participle adds /ɪŋ/, the third-person present singular form adds /z/, and the passive participle is identical with the past form. All verbs are regular in their active participle and only be is irregular in the third-person present singular.† But verbs might have arbitrary past forms (go / went) and while the passive participles are never arbitrary, there is a set of irregular forms following a common pattern that descends from an earlier stage of the language. (taken / been / gone / known / gotten / ...). There is a double standard over what counts as irregularity in verbs. By the standard we use for Latin, English has a total of one irregular verb. A Latin verb may have a perfective stem that is arbitrarily different from its imperfective stem (compare ferre with tulisse), but this "doesn't count" - we say that it's necessary to memorize four forms of any Latin verb, and with English verbs having only five forms and two of them being always regular, it's a real stretch to find verbs that require you to memorize more than four forms. † edit: this was wrong; have is also irregular in the present third-person singular.
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