Download or read book Topic Antitopic and Verb Agreement in Non standard French written by Knud Lambrecht and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous, ces Romains, which, in spite of their frequent occurrence, have so far received little attention among linguists and grammarians. He argues that far from having the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly, the cooccurrence in the same clause of coreferential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an important functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. The pronouns in sentences such as the ones mentioned are interpreted as agreement markers. The syntactic and semantic differences between topics and anti-topics are analyzed.

Download or read book Comparison Between It clefts and WH Clefts Similarities and Differences written by Gabriela Bara and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-03 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Technical University of Braunschweig (Englisches Seminar), course: Introduction to Information Structure, language: English, abstract: From language to language, there are different alternatives in which a speaker can structure information. Information structure deals with the highlighting of pieces of information in sentences. Even though there are a variety of ways in which the same basic informational content can be conveyed, the preference for a particular way reveals how the speaker's semantic representation is transposed into syntactical data. Moreover, the speaker's choice for structuring information into a particular linguistic form shows the coherent way in which utterances are connected in sequences, revealing thus the importance of discourse. There are several syntactic devices that are able to encode the pragmatic information of a preferred alternative. One type of such devices used to mark information structure is cleft constructions. There are two major types of clefts: it-clefts and WH-clefts, also called pseudo-clefts. There has been claimed in the literature for a long time that cleft constructions are interchangeable. Clefts present a series of syntactic similarities, but they behave differently in discourse. The purpose of this paper is to prove that it-clefts and WH-clefts are not interchangeable. In doing so, data will be analyzed by comparing clefts as far as form, structure, and discourse functions are concerned, and eventually, in the light of given and known information, I will show the essential differences between them. Although the grammatical forms are in direct relation and determine to some degree the information structure in a cleft, apart from the syntactical level, of significant importance is the analysis of cleft constructions as integrated components of a discourse. One should take into account the natural flow of la

Download or read book Cleft Structures written by Katharina Hartmann and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of clefts is beyond doubt a golden oldie. It has captivated linguists of different disciplines for decades. The fascination arises from the unique syntax of clefts in interaction with their pragmatic and semantic interpretation. Clefts structure sentences according to the information state of the constituents contained in them. They are special as they exhibit a rather uncommon syntactic form to achieve the separation of the prominent part, either focal or topical, from the background of the clause. Despite the long-lasting interest in clefts, linguists have not yet come to an agreement on many basic questions. The articles contained in this volume address these issues from new theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on data from about 50 languages from all over the world, this volume presents new arguments for the proper derivation of clefts, and contributes to the ongoing debate on the information-structural impact of cleft structures. Theoretically, it combines modern syntactic theorizing with investigations at the interface between grammar and information-structure.

Download or read book Frequency Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and Germanic written by Anna-Maria De Cesare and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).

Download or read book Cleft and Pseudo Cleft Constructions in English written by Peter C. Collins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1991, this book examines the communicative properties of ‘cleft’ and ‘pseudo-cleft’ constructions in contemporary English. The book argues that these properties cannot be ignored in any attempt to provide an adequate grammatical description of the constructions. Furthermore, they provide a source of explanations for the patterns of stylistic variation displayed by clefts and pseudo-clefts. The book reports findings from a corpus-based study of clefts and pseudo-clefts in modern British English.

Download or read book Topic Continuity in Discourse written by T. Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.

Download or read book Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse written by John Haiman and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally the study of syntax is restricted to the study of what goes on within the boundaries of the prosodic sentence. Although the nature of clause combining within a prosodic sentence has always been a central concern of traditional syntax (in GG, e.g. it underlies important research on deletion and anaphora), work within a discourse analysis framework has hardly been done. Analyses like this are given in the present volume.

Download or read book Discourse Function Syntactic Form in Natural Language Generation written by Cassandre Creswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-12-24 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in statistical natural language generation is rapidly increasing. This work sheds important light from theoretical linguistics on the type of information crucial to statistical NLG algorithms.

Download or read book Studies on Copular Sentences Clefts and Pseudo Clefts written by Renaat Declerck and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts.

Download or read book Cambridge Advanced Learner s Dictionary written by Kate Woodford and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 1550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary is the ideal dictionary for advanced EFL/ESL learners. Easy to use and with a great CD-ROM - the perfect learner's dictionary for exam success. First published as the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, this new edition has been completely updated and redesigned. - References to over 170,000 words, phrases and examples explained in clear and natural English - All the important new words that have come into the language (e.g. dirty bomb, lairy, 9/11, clickable) - Over 200 'Common Learner Error' notes, based on the Cambridge Learner Corpus from Cambridge ESOL exams Plus, on the CD-ROM: - SMART thesaurus - lets you find all the words with the same meaning - QUICKfind - automatically looks up words while you are working on-screen - SUPERwrite - tools for advanced writing, giving help with grammar and collocation - Hear and practise all the words.

Download or read book The Presupposition and Discourse Functions of the Japanese Particle Mo written by Sachiko Shudo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series. This study focuses on the Japanese particle mo. The particle is probably best described as roughly equivalent to the English too or also, although the difference between the Japanese particle and the English counterparts will be soon revealed as an important part of this study. This study has two goals, which are related to one another. The first goal is to prescribe a monosemous account for what is presupposed by the usage of mo by investigating its constraints on the context. The second goal is to develop a model in which the discourse-level contribution of a linguistic form is explained by its instruction on the hearer's processing the sentence at the propositional level.

Download or read book A Comparative Typology of English and German written by John A. Hawkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986, this book draws together analyses of English and German. It defines the contrasts and similarities between the two languages and, in particular, looks at the question of whether contrasts in one area of the grammar is systematically related to contrasts in another, and whether there is any ‘directionality’ or unity to contrast throughout grammar as a whole. It is suggested that there is, and that English and German can serve as a case study for a more general typology of languages than we now have. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, including students of Germanic languages; language typologists; generative grammarians attempting to ‘fix the parameters’ on language variation;’ historical linguists; and applied linguists.

Download or read book Introduction to the Grammar of English written by Rodney Huddleston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-09-27 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for students without knowledge of linguistics and unfamiliar with "traditional" grammar, this text concentrates on providing a much needed foundation in Standard English in preparation for more advanced work in theoretical linguistics.

Download or read book Information Structuring in Discourse written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents current work on discourse structuring from a theoretical as well as a processing perspective. The main objectives are the investigation of appropriate levels of analysis for discourse segmentation and criteria for the identification of basic discourse units.

Download or read book The Grammar Pragmatics Interface written by Nancy Hedberg and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel, who has contributed to the field of the grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions, as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax, pragmatics and reference, and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface, with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, construction grammar, and genre theory to formal semantics, as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.

Download or read book Analytic Syntax written by Otto Jespersen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1984-10-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen puts forward his views on grammatical structure in a kind of shorthand formalism, devising symbols that represent various grammatical elements and then analyzing numerous sentences in terms of these symbols. The contemporaneity of these analyses is remarkable, for they allude to concepts that were uncongenial to linguists in 1937 when the book was first published, but which have come to be generally accepted in the linguistics community during the past twenty-five years.

Download or read book Electronic Discourse written by Boyd H. Davis and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the new world of computer conferencing and details how writers use language when their social interaction is exclusively enacted through text on screens.