What are some of the biggest mysteries in linguistics?

Why does Chinese allow two subjects at the start of a sentence?

Chinese has a sentence type that researchers treat as a distinct simple-sentence pattern, in which two noun phrases sit at the front before the rest of the clause [1]. The puzzle is what each noun phrase is doing there. Classical syntactic analysis and the idea of splitting a sentence into topic and comment have both been tried, but the paper argues neither is sufficient for Chinese, given its particular typological traits [1].

The proposed answer is that the construction is a referential structure: the first noun phrase works as a reference point, and the second is the subject of an inner clause [1]. The authors also trace the pattern historically to a relationship of inalienable possession, and suggest the link between the two noun phrases could be one of identical signifier [1]. These are hypotheses rather than settled findings, and the paper's novelty lies in stepping away from the traditional view that the two noun phrases belong either to the subject or to the topic category [1].

Is linguistics a science, and what is its object?

A second open question is more foundational: what kind of enterprise linguistics is. One discussion weighs notions of competence and performance, the framing of language as a mystery, and the push to make linguistics a science, treating these as controversial points rather than settled doctrine [3].

Related to this is where languages actually live. One paper examines the unresolved relationship between language and the individual within linguistic theory, framing it as a basic but still open issue [5]. In other words, before linguists can agree on answers, they have to agree on what they are studying and at what level.

What can a single old word tell us?

Not every linguistic mystery is abstract. In medieval Europe, the variety of names for ship types in the 12th and 13th centuries is greater than the archaeological evidence from the period, which leaves a gap between what people called things and what survives in the ground [4]. One study tries to narrow that gap by tracing a single word used in both northern and southern Europe at the time, as a contribution to the wider study of ship types [4].

The same word can also carry interpretive weight in the history of ideas. A study of Ludmila Gogotishvili's work reconstructs how she read the linguistic mechanisms of myth and symbol in Ivanov and the dialogism of Bakhtin, including a predicative interpretation of Ivanov's formula of myth and Bakhtin's two-voiced word [2]. The paper describes these as linguistic mysteries that Gogotishvili set out to solve, and it presents her reconstruction as hypothetical in places [2].

So what makes a linguistic mystery?

Taken together, the evidence points to mysteries that are local and technical: the roles of two noun phrases in a Chinese sentence [1], the boundary between language as a science and language as a mystery [3], where language sits relative to the individual speaker [5], and what a single medieval word can reveal about ships [4]. The supplied papers do not offer a ranked list of the field's biggest mysteries, and none claims to have solved one outright; they describe unresolved problems and propose interpretations [1][3][5].

That is a useful correction to the question's framing. The interesting unknowns in linguistics are often not exotic, but ordinary-looking structures and definitions that turn out to be surprisingly hard to pin down [1][5].

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