Download or read book Syntactic Change in Germanic written by Kate Burridge and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines certain features of Dutch syntax between approximately 1300 and 1650. Of central importance are the overall developments in the word order patterning and the various changes they entail elsewhere in the grammar, such as in the negative construction. After an introductory chapter providing goals and background for the study, the quantitative analysis of the data is presented in Chapter 2. Considerable attention is paid to contextual considerations and the pragmatic aspect of word order. Chapter 3 deals specifically with the question of exbraciation; Chapter 4 returns to the functional aspect of word order and discusses the importance of the notion 'topic'. Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of the development of negation supported by comparative data from related Germanic languages and in a wider context of overall typological change. The concluding chapter discusses possible explanations of the findings. Two Appendices are added to the book, one providing a sketch grammar of Dutch, the other an annotated list of the corpus used. This study is purposefully eclectic in its approach, drawing upon many different traditions and areas in linguistics. This multifaceted approach is a major strength of the book, which moreover makes an important contribution to theoretical issues by presenting a vast descriptive data base for Dutch.

Download or read book Connectivity in Grammar and Discourse written by Jochen Rehbein and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-06-05 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of carefully selected papers connectivity is looked at from the vantage points of language contact, language change, language acquisition, multilingual communication and related domains based on various European and Non-European languages. From typological and multilingual perspectives the focus of investigation is on the grammatical architecture of a number of linguistic devices that interconnect units of text and discourse. The volume is organized along central concepts: A general section deals with connectivity in language change and language acquisition, subdivisions are devoted to pronouns, topics and subjects, the role of finiteness in text and discourse, coordination and subordination and particles, adverbials and constructions. The editors’ preface introduces connectivity as an object of linguistic research.

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 167 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 Co and subordination in German and other languages written by Augustin Speyer and published by Helmut Buske Verlag. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fragen der Koordination und der Subordination stehen seit langer Zeit im Fokus sprachwissenschaftlicher Forschung. Während in den 70er und auch noch in den 80er Jahren die Analyse der als kanonisch zu bezeichnenden Fälle im Vordergrund stand, drängten sich in den letzten 30 Jahren vor allem Grenzfälle wie weil-V2-Sätze, abhängige V2-Sätze, selbständige und weiterführende VL-Sätze etc. in das Zentrum des Interesses. Die Beiträge zum vorliegenden Band bauen auf den Erkenntnissen dieser Arbeiten auf, ergänzen sie aber systematisch um eine breit angelegte Diskussion typologischer, diachroner und erwerbstheoretischer Aspekte. Ein weiteres zentrales Anliegen der Arbeiten besteht darin,die theoretischen Konzepte zur Modellierung relevanter Strukturbedeutungen (z.B. V2) zu präzisieren. Linguistic research has focussed on issues related to coordination and subordination for a long time. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, the main concern was the analysis of canonical clause structure, the interest shifted towards non-canonical phenomena such as weil-verb-second-clauses, dependent verb-second-clauses, independent and continuative verb-final clauses etc. The contributions to this issue build on findings of these studies, at the same time systematically adding a broad discussion of typological, diachronic and acquisition-related aspects. A further central concern of the studies is to make precise theoretical concepts of modelling the semantics of relevant structural configurations, such as verb-second.

Download or read book Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse written by Joan L. Bybee and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-06-20 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume in honor of Sandra Annear Thompson deal with complex sentences, an important topic in Thompson’s career. The focus of the contributions is on the ways in which the grammatical properties of complex sentences are shaped by the communicative context in which they are produced, an approach to grammatical analysis that Thompson pioneered and developed in the course of her distinguished career.

Download or read book Syntax over Time written by Theresa Biberauer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and the factors that influence it. Converging empirical and theoretical considerations have suggested that apparent instances of syntactic change may be attributable to factors outside syntax proper, such as morphology or information structure. Some even go so far as to propose that there is no such thing as syntactic change, and that all such change in fact takes place in the lexicon or in the phonological component. In this volume, international scholars examine these proposals, drawing on detailed case studies from Germanic, Romance, Chinese, Egyptian, Finnic, Hungarian, and Sámi. They aim to answer such questions as: Can syntactic change arise without an external impetus? How can we tell whether a given change is caused by information-structural or morphological factors? What can 'microsyntactic' investigations of changes in individual lexical items tell us about the bigger picture? How universal are the clausal and nominal templates ('cartography'), and to what extent is syntactic structure more generally subject to universal constraints? The book will be of interest to all linguists working on syntactic variation and change, and especially those who believe that historical linguistics and linguistic theory can, and should, inform one another.

Download or read book On Understanding Grammar written by Talmy Givón and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Understanding Grammar covers the interdependencies among the various aspects of linguistics and the human language. This eight-chapter text considers some pertinent topics in linguistics, such as discourse-pragmatics, diachronic syntax, topology, creology, method, and ontology. Chapter 1 describes the notions of fact, theory, and explanation, particularly about how these notions manifest themselves in actual practice. Chapter 2 redefines syntax in terms of communicative function and discourse-pragmatics, and about the relation between the function of grammatical devices and their formal properties. Chapter 3 deals with discourse-pragmatics and how it transcends the narrow bounds of deductive logic, as well as the function and ontology of negation in language, and how those relate to the fundamental information-theoretic principle of figure versus ground. Chapter 4 explores the two major aspects of case systems, namely, the semantic role and pragmatic function, and how the two interact in determining the typological characteristics of grammars. Chapter 5 examines the relation between discourse and syntax based on diachronic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic viewpoints. Chapter 6 tackles the relation between synchronic grammar and diachronic change, while Chapter 7 describes the relationship between human language and its phylogenetic evolution. Chapter 8 is about language and ontology, as well as the relation between cognition and the universe. This book will prove useful to linguistics and language researchers.

Download or read book English Linguistics written by Bernd Kortmann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the completely revised, updated and enlarged 2nd edition of a classic textbook used in many English and linguistics departments in Germany for more than 20 years. It serves both as an introduction for beginners and as a companion for more advanced undergraduate and graduate students, familiarizing its readers with the major and distinctive properties of English (Standard English as well major national, regional and social varieties), including an in-depth structural comparison with German. Written in an accessible style and with many reader-friendly features (including checklists with key terms and concepts, basic and advanced exercises with solutions), the book offers a state-of-the-art-survey of the core terminology and issues of the central branches of linguistics, including an account of the major current research traditions and methodologies.

Download or read book The World Atlas of Language Structures written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-21 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps - all in colour - display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals, tense, word order, and body part terminology. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description ofthe structural feature in question.The CD provides an interactive electronic version of the database which allows the reader to zoom in on or customize the maps, to display bibliographical sources, and to establish correlations between features. The book and the CD together provide an indispensable source of information for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages.The Atlas will be especially valuable for linguistic typologists, grammatical theorists, historical and comparative linguists, and for those studying a region such as Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe. It will also interest anthropologists and geographers. More than fifty authors from many different countries have collaborated to produce a work that sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to bewithout it.

Download or read book The Contrastive Grammar of English and German written by Walter F. W. Lohnes and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Adverbials in Use written by Laure Sarda and published by Presses universitaires de Louvain. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions in this volume will lead to a better understanding of the complex interplay of competing motivations affecting the use of adverbials in...

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 The Carthaginian North Semitic influence on early Germanic written by Robert Mailhammer and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in the history of Germanic with critical implications for cultural history: the origin of the Germanic writing system (the Runic alphabet), the genesis of the Germanic strong verbs, the development of the Germanic word order, and etymologies for key elements of the Germanic lexicon. The book proposes that all four problems can be solved if it is hypothesized that over 2,000 years ago the ancestor of all Germanic languages, Proto-Germanic, was in intensive contact with Punic, a Semitic language from the Mediterranean. This scenario is explored by focusing on linguistic data, supported by an interdisciplinary mosaic of evidence. This book is of interest to anyone working on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic languages.

Download or read book Request Sequences written by Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph provides a micro-analytic description of instances of requests in everyday German conversation. Using the framework of CA, the study systematically analyzes the grammatical and syntactical structure of the request-turn and its response and of the conversational exchanges before and within the request base sequence, and the placement of the request sequence within the larger social interaction. Through an empirical analysis of individual cases of request sequences in German, the monograph describes in detail: (a) how speakers employ grammar and syntax as resources to construct turns at talk and accomplish the social action of request; (b) how speakers use grammatical and syntactical forms of the language to coordinate the production of the social action of requests; (c) how speakers use grammar and syntax as interactional resources to manage affiliative and remedial work (i.e., face work) when performing delicate social actions such as requests; and (d) how the context of the request activity impacts the grammatical and syntactical constructions of speakers' utterances. Additionally, the monograph demonstrates that both the grammatical construction of turns and their placement within the talk are oriented to the sequential context of the interaction.

Download or read book Word Grammar written by Kensei Sugayama and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an introduction to Word Grammar, a theory of language structure founded and developed by Dick Hudson. In this theory, language is a cognitive network - a network of concepts, words and meanings containing all the elements of a linguistic analysis. The theory of language is therefore embedded in a theory of knowledge, in which there are no boundaries between one form of knowledge and any other. The most controversial idea in Word Grammar syntax is that phrase structure is redundant, because all its work can be done by means of dependencies between individual words. Word-word dependency is therefore a key concept in Word Grammar, and the syntax and semantics of a sentence is built upon this foundation. Contributors to this volume are primarily Word Grammar grammarians from across the world. All the chapters here manifest theoretical potentialities of Word Grammar, exploring how powerful Word Grammar is to offer analysis for linguistic phenomena in various languages. The chapters come from varying perspectives and include work on a number of languages, including English, German, Japanese, Swahili, Turkish and Ancient Greek. Phenomena studied include verbal inflection, case agreement, extraction, construction and code-mixing. This collection will be of interest to academics encountering Word Grammar for the first time, or for those who are already familiar with this theory and are interested in reading how it has evolved and what its future may hold.

Download or read book Tense Mood and Aspect written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of articles dealing with theoretical issues in the study of tense, mood and aspect, as well as with specific semantic and syntactic problems raised by linguistic expressions dedicated to these domains across a variety of languages. Through these papers, strong variations are explored, but also crosslinguistic convergences are investigated. Numerous phenomena so far often left aside in linguistics are described and enlightened by different scientific standpoints, which they serve to illustrate. The languages investigated in this volume include Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German), Romance (French, Catalan, Italian), Slavic (Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Russian), Greek, and non-indoeuropean languages such as Thai, Digo and Kikuyu. Related topics such as grammaticalization, presuppositions, questions in dialogue, illocutionary acts and acquisition are incidentally called upon in order to shed light from the outside onto tense, mood (and modality) and aspect. This volume is of great interest for all scholars engaged in contemporary research on the linguistic expression of tense, mood and aspect. The papers gathered in this volume are a tight selection of the ones that were presented at the 6th Chronos colloquium.

Download or read book The Architecture of Focus written by Valéria Molnár and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus in the architecture of grammar, linguists investigate the architecture of focus itself. The central underlying idea of this collection is to document this change in perspective with the aim of isolating essential keystones and research areas in both the theoretical and empirical domain. The book is structured accordingly. Following the introduction, there are four main sections: The general section discusses the theoretical foundations of focus within grammar. The second section hosts papers which investigate the representation of focus and topic at the syntax-pragmatics interface. The third section discusses the phonological representation of focus and its relation to meaning. The papers of the final section investigate different types of focus constructions in a variety languages. The collection of papers on the architecture of focus, its interpretation and representation mirror the establishment of the focus research field.