Download or read book Communicative Organization in Natural Language written by Igor? Aleksandrovi? Mel??uk and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book defines the concept of Semantic-Communicative Structure [= Sem-CommS]-a formal object that is imposed on the starting Semantic Structure [= SemS] of a sentence (under text synthesis) in order to turn the selected meaning into a linguistic message. The Sem-CommS is a system of eight logically independent oppositions: 1. Thematicity (Rheme vs. Theme), 2. Givenness (Given vs. Old), 3. Focalization (Focalized vs. Non-Focalized), 4. Perspective (Foregrounded vs. Backgrounded), 5. Emphasis (Emphasized vs. Non-Emphasized), 6. Presupposedness (Presupposed vs. Non-Presupposed), 7. Unitariness (Unitary vs. Articulated), 8. Locutionality (Communicated vs. Signaled). The values of these oppositions mark particular subnetworks of the starting SemS and thus allow for the distinction between sentences such as (a) A man killed a dog vs. The dog was killed by a man, (b) John washed the window vs. It was John who washed the window or (c) It hurts! vs. Ouch! The proposed Sem-Comm-oppositions are conceived as an attempt at sharpening the well-known notions of Topic ~ Comment, Focus, etc. Possible linguistic strategies for expressing the values of the Sem-Comm-oppositions in different languages are discussed at some length, with linguistic illustrations.

Download or read book Communicative Organization in Natural Language The Semantic communicative Structure of Sentences written by Igor A. Uk and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book defines the concept of Semantic-Communicative Structure [= Sem-CommS]-a formal object that is imposed on the starting Semantic Structure [= SemS] of a sentence (under text synthesis) in order to turn the selected meaning into a linguistic message.

Download or read book Investigations of the Syntax semantics pragmatics Interface written by Robert D. Van Valin and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface presents on-going research in Role and Reference Grammar in a number of critical areas of linguistic theory: verb semantics and argument structure, the nature of syntactic categories and syntactic representation, prosody and syntax, information structure and syntax, and the syntax and semantics of complex sentences. In each of these areas there are important results which not only advance the development of the theory, but also contribute to the broader theoretical discussion. In particular, there are analyses of grammatical phenomena such as transitivity in Kabardian, the verb-less numeral quantifier construction in Japanese, and an unusual kind of complex sentence in Wari' (Chapakuran, Brazil) which not only illustrate the descriptive and explanatory power of the theory, but also present interesting challenges to other approaches. In addition, there are papers looking at the implications and applications of Role and Reference Grammar for neurolinguistic research, parsing and automated text analysis.

Download or read book Semantic and Lexical Universals written by Cliff Goddard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1994-05-04 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set of papers represents a unique collection; it is the first attempt ever to empirically test a hypothetical set of semantic and lexical universals across a number of genetically and typologically diverse languages. In fact the word 'collection' is not fully appropriate in this case, since the papers report research undertaken specifically for the present volume, and shaped by the same guidelines. They constitute parallel and strictly comparable answers to the same set of questions, coordinated effort with a common aim, and a common methodology.The goal of identifying the universal human concepts found in all languages, is of fundamental importance, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view, since these concepts provide the basis of the “psychic unity of mankind”, underlying the clearly visible diversity of human cultures. They also allow us to better understand that diversity itself, because they provide a common measure, without which no precise and meaningful comparisons are possible at all. A set of truly universal (or even near-universal) concepts can provide us with an invaluable tool for interpreting, and explaining all the culture-specific meanings encoded in the language-and-culture systems of the world. It can also provide us with a tool for explaining meanings across cultures — in education, business, trade, international relations, and so on. The book contains 13 chapters on individual languages including Japanese (by Masayuki Onishi), Chinese (by Hilary Chappel), Thai (by Anthony Diller), Ewe (Africa, by Felix Ameka), Miskitu languages of South America (by Kenneth Hall), Australian Aboriginal languages Aranda, Yankunytjatjara and Kayardild (by Jean Harkins & David Wilkins, Cliff Goddard, and Nicholas Evans), the Austronesian languages Samoan, Longgu, Acehnese and Mangap-Mbula (by Ulrike Mosel, Deborah Hill, Mark Durie and Robert Bugenhagen), the Papuan language Kalam (by Andrew Pawley), and, last but not least French (by Bert Peters).In addition to the chapters on individual languages the book includes three theoretical chapters; “Semantic theory and semantic universals” (by Goddard), “Introducing lexical primitives” (by Goddard and Wierzbicka), and “Semantic primitives across languages: a critical review” (by Wierzbicka).

Download or read book The Role of Semantic Pragmatic and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case written by Jóhanna Barðdal and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-11 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this volume is to bring non-syntactic factors in the development of case into the eye of the research field, by illustrating the integral role of pragmatics, semantics, and discourse structure in the historical development of morphologically marked case systems. The articles represent fifteen typologically diverse languages from four different language families: (i) Indo-European: Vedic Sanskrit, Russian, Greek, Latin, Latvian, Gothic, French, German, Icelandic, and Faroese; (ii) Tibeto-Burman, especially the Bodic languages and Meithei; (iii) Japanese; and (iv) the Pama-Nyungan mixed language Gurindji Kriol. The data also show considerable diversity and include elicited, archival, corpus-based, and naturally occurring data. Discussions of mechanisms where change is obtained include semantically and aspectually motivated synchronic case variation, discourse motivated subject marking, reduction or expansion of case marker distribution, case syncretism motivated by semantics, syntax, or language contact, and case splits motivated by pragmatics, metonymy, and subjectification.

Download or read book The Semantics of Grammar written by Anna Wierzbicka and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The semantics of grammar" presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither "autonomous" nor "arbitrary," but that it follows from "semantics." It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be compared in a precise and illuminating way, within one language and across language boundaries. The author develops a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals or near-universals (and, ultimately, on a system of universal semantic primitives), and shows that the same semantic metalanguage can be used for explicating lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language and thus offers a method for an integrated linguistic description based on semantic foundations. Analyzing data from a number of different languages (including English, Russian and Japanese) the author explores the notion of ethnosyntax and, via semantics, links syntax and morphology with culture. She attemps to demonstrate that the use of a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals makes it possible to rephrase the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in such a way that it can be tested and treated as a program for empirical research.

Download or read book Crosslinguistic Views on Tense Aspect and Modality written by Bart Hollebrandse and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Cahiers Chronos volume reports on new and ongoing research on tense, aspect and modality in which a variety of languages has been gathered. The languages discussed by the authors include (in alphabetical order): Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Spanish. The articles form a selection of the papers presented at the 5th Chronos Conference that took place at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, in June 2002. We have categorized the papers into three sections: Tense, Aspect and Modality. Obviously, this ordering is somewhat arbitrary given that some of the papers cross these rather rigid boundaries, as they discuss the interplay of tense and aspect or tense and modality. This book is of interest for scholars in the field of semantics, logic, syntax, and comparative linguistics.

Download or read book Mental States Language and cognitive structure written by Andrea C. Schalley and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to this volume focus on what language and language use reveals about cognitive structure and underlying cognitive categories. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking essays from linguists and psychologists within this volume investigate the insights conceptual categorization can give into the organization and structure of the mind and specific mental states. Topics and linguistic phenomena discussed include narratives and story telling, language development, figurative language, linguistic categorization, linguistic relativity, and the linguistic coding of mental states such as perceptions and beliefs. With contributions at the forefront of current debate, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in language and the cognitive structures that support it.

Download or read book Semantics written by Igor Mel’čuk and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, starting from the idea that language can be described as a mechanism for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms, or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, the present volume closes the publication of the three volume series. It discusses in detail several linguistic notions crucial to the development of Meaning-Text models of natural languages: semantic and syntactic actants, government pattern, lexical functions, linguistic connotations, phrasemes, the meaning of grammatical cases, and linguistic dependencies. The notions under analysis are illustrated from a variety of languages. Reflecting the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences, whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.

Download or read book Aspects of the Theory of Morphology written by Igorʹ Aleksandrovič Melʹčuk and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2006 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main description: The book is aimed at constructing a system of concepts for linguistic morphology. In a rigorously deductive way, these concepts are applied to the description of morphological phenomena of about 100 languages. The chapters are dedicated to such issues as grammatical case, voice, morph vs. morpheme, morphological processes, agreement and government, phonemization. Being metalinguistically oriented, the book is strongly anchored in typological studies and offers a number of descriptive case studies.

Download or read book Ten Studies in Dependency Syntax written by Igor Mel'cuk and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monograph presents the Meaning-Text approach applied to the domain of syntax from a typological angle; it deals with several long-standing syntactic problems on the basis of a dependency description. Its content can be presented in five parts + an Introduction: The Introduction explains the architecture of the book and sketches the Meaning-Text linguis-tic model, underlying the subsequent discussion. I. Surface-syntactic relations in the languages of the world, with special studies of subjects and objects. II. Grammatical voice in the dependency framework: the “passive” construction in Chinese. III. The relative clause: a calculus and analysis of possible types; the pseudo-relative (“headless”) clause. IV. Binary conjunctions (such as IF ..., THEN ...), free indefinite pronouns ([He went] nobody knows where), and syntactic idioms. V. Word order: linearization of dependency structures. The monograph offers a new perspective in syntactic studies. It is strongly typology-oriented (using the data from typologically diverse languages: English, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Basque, Georgian, etc.) and based on a system of rigorous definitions of the notions involved, which ensures a link with computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing

Download or read book Modality in Japanese written by Heiko Narrog and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hierarchical clause structure is an important feature of most theories of grammar. While it has been an indispensable part of formal syntactic theories, functional theories have more recently discovered for themselves a ‘layered structure of the clause’. A major focus of the current discussion on semanto-syntactic clause structure is the hierarchical ordering of grammatical categories such as tense, aspect and modality. However, there are very few empirical studies yet to provide systematic evidence for presumably universal hierarchical structures. This book presents a systematic corpus-based study of the semantic and morphosyntactic interaction of modality with tense, aspect, negation, and modal markers embedded in subordinate clauses. The results are critically compared with extant theories of hierarchies of grammatical categories, including those in Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, and the Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Also provided is an extensive description of the expression of modality and related categories in Modern Japanese.

Download or read book Dependency in Linguistic Description written by Alain Polguère and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-18 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book covers three major topics crucial for contemporary syntactic research. Firstly, it offers a sketch of a general theory of dependency in natural language. Different types of linguistic dependencies are distinguished (semantic, syntactic, and morphological), the criteria for their recognition are formulated, and all possible combinations are discussed in some detail. Secondly, it demonstrates the application of the general theory in two specific domains: establishing the system of Surface-Syntactic Relations in French and linear positioning of clitics in Serbian. Thirdly, it presents a formal sketch of Head-Driven Phrase-Structure Grammar modelled in terms of syntactic dependencies.

Download or read book Russian Language Studies in North America written by Veronika Makarova and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides a comprehensive overview of Russian language research in Canada and Russia, with a focus on elements of structure, as well as on language dynamics and change.

Download or read book Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages written by Ilana Mushin and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages is the first major survey to address the issue of the effects of information packaging on Australian languages, widely known for nonconfigurationality. The papers are based on individual fieldwork and describe a wide range of Australian languages of different types, ranging from the polysynthetic languages of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley to the classical types represented by Walpiri. Topics covered include the pragmatics of information exchange, the interaction of noun class marking with polarity and referentiality, the effects of specificity on argument indexing, the discourse uses of the ergative case, the contribution of pronouns to NP reference, the interaction of tense and aspect clitics with information structure, clause-initial position, and discourse and grammar in Australian languages. The volume will appeal to scholars interested in discourse, typology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Download or read book Mental States written by Andrea C. Schalley and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-12-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting the work of linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, archaeologists, artificial intelligence researchers and philosophers this volume presents a richly varied picture of the nature and function of mental states. Starting from questions about the cognitive capacities of the early hominin homo floresiensis, the essays proceed to the role mental representations play in guiding the behaviour of simple organisms and robots, thence to the question of which features of its environment the human brain represents and the extent to which complex cognitive skills such as language acquisition and comprehension are impaired when the brain lacks certain important neural structures. Other papers explore topics ranging from nativism to the presumed constancy of categorization across signed and spoken languages, from the formal representation of metaphor, actions and vague language to philosophical questions about conceptual schemes and colours. Anyone interested in mental states will find much to reward them in this fine volume.

Download or read book Structure and Function Approaches to the simplex clause written by Christopher Butler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume one of a two volume set outlining and comparing three approaches to the study of language labelled 'structural-functionalist': functional grammar (FG); role and reference grammar (RRG); and systemic functional grammar (SFG).