Download or read book Discourse Configurational Languages written by Katalin É Kiss and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.
Download or read book Discourse Configurational Languages written by Katalin 'E. Kiss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.
Download or read book Why Agree Why Move written by Shigeru Miyagawa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that not only do movement and agreement occur in every language, they also work in tandem to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power. An unusual property of human language is the existence of movement operations. Modern syntactic theory from its inception has dealt with the puzzle of why movement should occur. In this monograph, Shigeru Miyagawa combines this question with another, that of the occurrence of agreement systems. Using data from a wide range of languages, he argues that movement and agreement work in tandem to achieve a specific goal: to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power. Without movement and agreement, he contends, human language would be merely a shadow of itself, with severe limitation on what can be expressed. Miyagawa investigates a variety of languages, including English, Japanese, Bantu languages, Romance languages, Finnish, and Chinese. He finds that every language manifests some kind of agreement, some in the form of the familiar person/number/gender system and others in the form of what Katalin É. Kiss calls “discourse configurational” features such as topic and focus. A key proposal of his argument is that the computational system in syntax deals with the wide range of agreement types uniformly—as if there were just one system—and an integral part of this computation turns out to be movement. Why Agree? Why Move? is unique in proposing a unified system for movement and agreement across language groups that are vastly diverse—Bantu languages, East Asian languages, Indo-European languages, and others.
Download or read book Constituent Order in the Languages of Europe written by Anna Siewierska and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Functional Discourse Grammar written by Kees Hengeveld and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive presentation of Functional Discourse Grammar. The authors set out its nature and origins and show how it relates to contemporary linguistic theory. They demonstrate and test its explanatory power and descriptive utility against linguistic facts from over 150 languages across a full range of linguistic families.
Download or read book Language Typology and Language Universals written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2001 with total page 873 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series will aim for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end will strive for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The languages of publication are English, German, and French. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will be imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume will be a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editor of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editor only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume.
Download or read book Agreement Beyond Phi written by Shigeru Miyagawa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features. Much attention in theoretical linguistics in the generative and Minimalist traditions is concerned with issues directly or indirectly related to movement. The EPP (extended projection principle), introduced by Chomsky in 1981, appeared to coincide with morphological agreement, and agreement came to play a central role as the driver of movement and other narrow-syntax operations. In this book, Shigeru Miyagawa continues his investigation into a computational equivalent for agreement in agreementless languages such as Japanese. Miyagawa extends his theory of Strong Uniformity, introduced in his earlier book, Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-Based and Discourse-Configurational Languages (MIT Press). He argues that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and discourse configurational features of topic and focus. He looks at various combinations of these two grammatical features across a number of languages and phenomena, including allocutive agreement, root phenomena, topicalization, “why” questions, and case alternation.
Download or read book The Grammar of Discourse written by Robert E. Longacre and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1996-06-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers monologue discourse, intersentential relations, surface structure of clauses, and a framework for discourse analysis. This second edition offers expanded coverage of paragraph and clause structure, and solves the problem of how holistic concerns of structure relate to the constituent structure of discourse. Can be used as a text for first-year graduate courses in linguistics, and as a reference for linguistics researchers and graduate students interested in discourse analysis and text linguistics. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book A Phase based Approach to Russian Free Word Order written by Marina Dyakonova and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure written by Caroline Féry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields"--Del editor.
Download or read book Language Typology and Language Universals 2 Teilband written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-07-14 with total page 1013 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of our current insights into the diversity and unity found across the 6000 languages of this planet. The 125 articles include inter alia chapters on the patterns and limits of variation manifested by analogous structures, constructions and linguistic devices across languages (e.g. word order, tense and aspect, inflection, color terms and syllable structure). Other chapters cover the history, methodology and the theory of typology, as well as the relationship between language typology and other disciplines. The authors of the individual sections and chapters are for the most part internationally known experts on the relevant topics. The vast majority of the articles are written in English, some in French or German. The handbook is not only intended for the expert in the fields of typology and language universals, but for all of those interested in linguistics. It is specifically addressed to all those who specialize in individual languages, providing basic orientation for their analysis and placing each language within the space of what is possible and common in the languages of the world.
Download or read book Configuring Topic and Focus in Russian written by Tracy Holloway King and published by Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications. This book was released on 1995-05-26 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines word order. More accurately, it is the ordering of constituents that is discussed since prepositional phrases and most noun phrases form syntactic constituents and the encoding of topic and focus in Russian. As has long been observed, word order in Russian encodes specific discourse information: with neutral intonation, topics precede discourse-neutral constituents which precede foci. King extends this idea to show that word order encodes different types of topic and focus in a principled manner.
Download or read book The Syntax of Tuki written by Edmond Biloa and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph conducts a syntactic study of Tuki, a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, from a cartographic perspective. The following domains are meticulously explored: The Complementizer Domain, the Inflectional Domain and the Verbal Domain. This study reveals that there is a relative phrase (RelP) located between ForceP and FocP. Moreover, a detailed analysis of an articulated IP provides the order of clausal functional heads that manifest aspectual morphology, which is theoretically closely related to issues in adverbial syntax. Additionally, the language under study unveils a very rich structural make up of DP and the surface word orders attested in this phrase can be accounted for in terms of snowballing movement operations along the lines previously sketched in the format of the Split DP Hypothesis. Overall, this cartographic analysis is bound to enrich our morphosyntactic knowledge of UG clausal architecture by demonstrating that its rich underlying structural skeleton is correlated by a wealthy surface structural and functional map. Edmond Biloa is professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon (Africa).
Download or read book The Syntax of Information Structural Agreement written by Johannes Mursell and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.
Download or read book Structures of Focus and Grammatical Relations written by Jorunn Hetland and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-02-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seven articles of this volume take up crucial aspects of information structure and grammatical form. Special attention is paid to the definition of topic, focus and contrast, to the language specific devices for expressing different types of these information structural notions, and to the typological characterisation of languages as to discourse configurationality. The investigation of grammatical relations includes the interplay between syntactic functions, morphological case and thematic structure, and the study of the functional and formal complexity of passive in Germanic languages.
Download or read book A Discourse Analysis of Galatians and the New Perspective on Paul written by David I. Yoon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study utilizes SFL discourse analysis in relation to the concepts of register and context of situation in order to address whether Paul’s letter to the Galatians is characterized by a New Perspective on Paul or a more traditional view.
Download or read book Discourse Related Features and Functional Projections written by Silvio Cruschina and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume Silvio Cruschina uses a comparative analysis to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with discourse-related features, and to account for the marked word orders found in Romance - particularly in the fronting phenomena. Several language-specific analyses of discourse-related phenomena have been proposed in the literature, including studies on the notions of topic and focus in Romance, but the lack of a uniform definition of these notions, together with different assumptions in relation to the triggering features, has led to the perception that the Romance languages show many distinct and heterogeneous properties with respect to dislocation and fronting constructions. This volume is intended to complement the existing literature by integrating recent work on the topic and by emphasizing original and unifying reflections that combine and coordinate diverse elements. Cruschina's investigations clarify fundamental notions such as topic, focus, and contrast, drawing on new data from Sicilian, Sardinian, and other Romance varieties.
