Download or read book Demonstratives in Interaction written by Ritva Laury and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997-07-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns one of the paradigm examples of grammaticalization, the development of a definite article from a demonstrative determiner. Although standard written Finnish has no articles, the demonstrative se is currently emerging as a definite article in spoken Finnish. This book describes and explains the developing use of se based on a database consisting of spoken narratives from three different periods spanning the last one hundred years. The author proposes that the development from demonstrative to article has its roots in the way that speakers ordinarily use demonstratives in conversation, and provides an analysis of the use of se and the two other Finnish demonstratives, tämä and tuo in a corpus of multi-party conversations, showing that speakers of Finnish use demonstratives to focus attention on important referents and to express and negotiate access to them in the interactive context of ongoing talk, and not primarily to talk about how near or far referents are. The development of se into a general marker of identifiability is shown to be connected with both the focusing function of demonstratives as well as its use for referents which the speaker considers accessible to the addressee.
Download or read book Demonstratives in Interaction written by Ritva Laury and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns one of the paradigm examples of grammaticalization, the development of a definite article from a demonstrative determiner. Although standard written Finnish has no articles, the demonstrative se is currently emerging as a definite article in spoken Finnish. This book describes and explains the developing use of se based on a database consisting of spoken narratives from three different periods spanning the last one hundred years. The author proposes that the development from demonstrative to article has its roots in the way that speakers ordinarily use demonstratives in conversation, and provides an analysis of the use of se and the two other Finnish demonstratives, tämä and tuo in a corpus of multi-party conversations, showing that speakers of Finnish use demonstratives to focus attention on important referents and to express and negotiate access to them in the interactive context of ongoing talk, and not primarily to talk about how near or far referents are. The development of se into a general marker of identifiability is shown to be connected with both the focusing function of demonstratives as well as its use for referents which the speaker considers accessible to the addressee.
Download or read book Demonstratives in Cross Linguistic Perspective written by Stephen C. Levinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive guide to demonstratives, which play a key role in language acquisition and use.
Download or read book Demonstratives in discourse written by Åshild Næss and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.
Download or read book Demonstratives written by Holger Diessel and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.
Download or read book Demonstratives in Cross Linguistic Perspective written by Stephen C. Levinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge.
Download or read book Studies in Anaphora written by Barbara A. Fox and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last 15 years has seen an explosion of research on the topic of anaphora. Studies of anaphora have been important to our understanding of cognitive processes, the relationships between social interaction and grammar, and of directionality in diachronic change. The contributions to this volume represent the next generation of studies in anaphora defined broadly as those morpho-syntactic forms available to speakers for formulating reference taking as their starting point the foundation of research done in the 1980s. These studies examine in detail, and with a richness of methods and theories, what patterns of anaphoric usage can reveal to us about cognition, social interaction, and language change.
Download or read book A Grammar of Darma written by Christina Willis Oko and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Grammar of Darma provides the first comprehensive description of this Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Uttarakhand, India. The analysis is informed by a functional-typological framework and draws on a corpus of data gathered through elicitation, observation and recordings of natural discourse. Every effort has been made to describe day-to-day language, so whenever possible, illustrative examples are taken from extemporaneous speech and contextualized. Sections of the grammar should appeal widely to scholars interested in South Asia’s languages and cultures, including discussions of the socio-cultural setting, the sound system, morphosyntactic, clause and discourse structure. The grammar’s interlinearized texts and glossary provide a trove of useful information for comparative linguists working on Tibeto-Burman languages and anyone interested in the world’s less-commonly spoken languages.
Download or read book Complex Demonstratives written by Jeffrey C. King and published by Bradford Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1970s, the orthodox view of complex 'that' phrases (e.g., 'that woman eating a granola bar') has been that they are contextually sensitive devices of direct reference. In Complex Demonstratives, Jeffrey King challenges that orthodoxy, showing that quantificational accounts not only are as effective as direct reference accounts but also handle a wider range of data. After providing arguments against direct reference accounts of 'that' phrases and developing a quantificational theory of them, King looks at the interaction of 'that' phrases with modal operators, negation, and verbs of propositional attitude. He argues for evidence of scope interaction between 'that' phrases and other scoped elements. King also addresses semantic properties of 'that' and other determiners, and the possibility of extending the semantics of 'that' phrases to 'that' as a syntactically simple demonstrative. Finally, he argues against what he calls ambiguity approaches, theories that hold that the various uses of 'that' phrases cannot be treated by a single semantical theory.
Download or read book Fillers Pauses and Placeholders written by Nino Amiridze and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fillers are items that speakers insert in spontaneous speech as a repair strategy. Types of fillers include hesitation markers and placeholders. Both are used to fill pauses that arise during planning problems or in lexical retrieval failure. However, while hesitation markers may not bear any resemblance to lexical items they replace, placeholders typically share some morphosyntactic properties with the target form. Additionally, fillers can function as a pragmatic tool, in order to replace lexical items that the speaker wants to avoid mentioning for some reason. The present volume is the first collection on the topic of fillers and will be a useful reference work for future investigations on the topic. It consists of typological surveys and in-depth studies exploring the form and use of fillers across languages and sections of different populations, including cognitively impaired speakers. The volume will be interesting to typologists and linguists working in discourse studies.
Download or read book Nominal Determination written by Elisabeth Stark 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 following theoretical-empirical points on the DP are discussed: Article and its referential-anaphoric properties by Abraham (Determiners in Centering Theory); Bartra (On bare NPs in Old Spanish and Catalan); identification of all functional nominal categories by Stvan (Bare singular count nouns); Kupisch & Koops (Specificity and negation); Jäger (History of German indefinite determiners); typological comparison of the interaction of nominal and verbal determination by Abraham (Discourse-functional crystallization of the original demonstrative); Leiss (Covert (in)definiteness and aspect in Old Icelandic, Gothic, Old High German); Lohndal (Double definiteness during Old Norse); emergence of DP in ontogeny/phylogeny by Osawa (DP, TP and aspect in Old English and L1 acquisition); Bittner (Early functions of definites in L1 acquisition); Wood (Demonstratives and possessives emergent from Old English); Bauer ((in)definite articles in Indo-European) and Stark (Variation in nominal indefiniteness in Romance).
Download or read book Diachrony of Personal Pronouns in Japanese written by Osamu Ishiyama and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal pronouns in Japanese form a heterogeneous category. This book investigates their historical development from a functional perspective. It shows that while nouns give rise to personal pronouns through semanticization of pragmatic inferences, the use of non-nominal forms such as demonstratives and reflexives for person referents can be resolved within their original functions, offering little reason to treat them as personal pronouns. The cross-linguistic investigation into the common sources of personal pronouns reveals that the development of personal pronouns from nouns is largely consistent with grammaticalization, but that of forms of non-nominal origins requires separate mechanisms such as spatial/empathetic perspectives and displacement of semantic features for politeness, showing that a one-size-fits-all approach to diachrony of personal pronouns is not sufficient. This book will be of special interest to researchers and students in historical linguistics, pragmatics, and Japanese linguistics, who take a functional view of language.
Download or read book Definiteness written by Christopher Lyons and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-13 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1999 textbook investigates definiteness both from a comparative and a theoretical point of view, showing how languages express definiteness and what definiteness is. It surveys a large number of languages to discover the range of variation in relation to definiteness and related grammatical phenomena, such as demonstratives, possessives and personal pronouns. It outlines work done on the nature of definiteness in semantics, pragmatics and syntax, and develops an account on which definiteness is a grammatical category represented in syntax as a functional head (the widely discussed D). Consideration is also given to the origins and evolution of definite articles in the light of the comparative and theoretical findings. Among the claims advanced are that definiteness does not occur in all languages, though the pragmatic concept which it grammaticalizes probably does.
Download or read book Language Patterns in Spanish and Beyond written by Juan J. Colomina-Almiñana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scholarly articles included in this volume represent significant contributions to the fields of formal and descriptive syntax, conversational analysis and speech act theory, as well as language development and bilingualism. Taken together, these studies adopt a variety of methodological techniques—ranging from grammaticality judgments to corpus-based analysis to experimental approaches—to offer rich insights into different aspects of Ibero-Romance grammar. The volume consists of three parts, organized in accordance with the topics treated in the chapters they comprise. Part I focuses on structural patterns, Part II analyzes pragmatic ones, and Part III investigates the acquisition of linguistic aspects found in the speech of L1, L2 and heritage speakers. The authors address these issues by relying on empirically rooted linguistic approaches to data collection, which are coupled with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of sentence structure, discourse dynamics and language acquisition. The volume will be of interest to anyone researching or studying Hispanic and Ibero-Romance linguistics.
Download or read book A grammar of Yakkha written by Diana Schackow and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This grammar provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Yakkha, a Sino-Tibetan language of the Kiranti branch. Yakkha is spoken by about 14,000 speakers in eastern Nepal, in the Sankhuwa Sabha and Dhankuta districts. The grammar is based on original fieldwork in the Yakkha community. Its primary source of data is a corpus of 13,000 clauses from narratives and naturally-occurring social interaction which the author recorded and transcribed between 2009 and 2012. Corpus analyses were complemented by targeted elicitation. The grammar is written in a functional-typological framework. It focusses on morphosyntactic and semantic issues, as these present highly complex and comparatively under-researched fields in Kiranti languages. The sequence of the chapters follows the well-established order of phonological, morphological, syntactic and discourse-structural descriptions. These are supplemented by a historical and sociolinguistic introduction as well as an analysis of the complex kinship terminology. Topics such as verbal person marking, argument structure, transitivity, complex predication, grammatical relations, clause linkage, nominalization, and the topography-based orientation system have received in-depth treatment. Wherever possible, the structures found were explained in a historical-comparative perspective in order to shed more light on how their particular properties have emerged.
Download or read book Demonstratives Deictic Pointing and the Conceptualization of Space written by Holger Diessel and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-05-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spatial Language written by Kenny R. Coventry and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People constantly talk to each other about experience or knowledge resulting from spatial perception; they describe the size, shape, orientation and position of objects using a wide range of spatial expressions. The semantic treatment of such expressions presents particular challenges for natural language processing. The meaning representation used must be capable of distinguishing between fine-grained sense differences and ambiguities grounded in our experience and perceptual structure. While there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial expressions, most computational characterisations have been restricted to particularly narrow problem domains. The chapters in the present volume reflect a commitment to the development of cognitively informed computational treatments of spatial language and spatial representation. Therefore the chapters present computational work, empirical work, or a combination of both. The book will appeal to all those interested in spatial language and spatial representation, whether they work in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive psychology or linguistics.
