Download or read book Dynamic Two place Indirect Verbs in French written by Michelle Ann Troberg and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation provides an account of an often-noted change in the history of French: the shift in the expression of the internal argument of a small class of dynamic two-place verbs best represented by aider 'to help' from "dative", i.e., as an indirect object with the preposition a, to "accusative", i.e., as a direct object with no preposition. The change does not appear to be correlated with a change in the meaning of the verbs. Traditional commentators have viewed it as random, affecting only a few lexical items, rather than systematic. One of the central results of this thesis is that the valency change affects a class of some twenty verbs at approximately the same period and that it follows the same time course. Moreover, three properties distinguish this class of verbs from all others taking indirect objects in French: following current ideas about the syntactic manifestation of verbs and their arguments, they have a non relational argument structure, they do not possess lexical directionality, and they select for first or third order entities. These facts suggest that a structural change underlies the change in the realization of the internal argument. Adopting Lightfoot's (1999, 2006) "cue-based" approach to language change, it is proposed that the valency change is a result of the loss of a functional item encoding directionality. Directionality is a derived property in Medieval French, available in particular to prepositions. It is demonstrated that when a was able to encode direction, first and third order indirect objects were licensed in a broader range of contexts, namely, with aider-type verbs. The loss of this functional item is also correlated with several other structural changes that occurred in the 16th and 17th century.

Download or read book Dynamic Two place Indirect Verbs in French written by Michelle Troberg and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Determinants of Diachronic Stability written by Anne Breitbarth and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change, the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability, mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles, both empirical and theoretical. Empirically, the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it, uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated, and, inversely, superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically, the questions of whether stable variation is possible, and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change, and to scholars working on the history of Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic languages.

Download or read book Linguistic Variation in the Minimalist Framework written by M. Carme Picallo and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, leading scholars consider the ways in which syntactic variation can be accounted for in a minimalist framework. They explore the theoretical significance, content, and role of parameters; whether or not variation should be strongly or weakly accounted for by syntactic factors; and the explicitness - or lack thereof - should be assumed with respect to the conditions imposed by narrow syntax. The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains chapters that consider the term 'parameter' to be a relevant theoretical notion under minimalist tenets. In the second part, on the other hand, chapters either argue that the term parameter amounts to no more than a label to describe variation, or assign it a less prominent role. Instead, language variation is attributed to sociolinguistic factors, language contact, frequency of use, or simply to options in the externalization of abstract syntactic relations. The book offers a valuable overview of the different approaches adopted in the study of language variation phenomena, and will appeal to theoretical linguists of all persuasions from graduate level upwards.

Download or read book Dative constructions in Romance and beyond written by Anna Pineda and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive account of dative structures across languages –with an important, though not exclusive, focus on the Romance family. As is well-known, datives play a central role in a variety of structures, ranging from ditransitive constructions to cliticization of indirect objects and differentially marked direct objects, and including also psychological predicates, possessor or causative constructions, among many others. As interest in all these topics has increased significantly over the past three decades, this volume provides an overdue update on the state of the art. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume account for both widely discussed patterns of dative constructions as well as those that are relatively unknown.

Download or read book Historical Linguistics 2009 written by Ans van Kemenade and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Conference on Historical Linguistics has always been a forum that reflects the general state of the art in the field, and the 2009 edition, held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, fully allows the conclusion that the field has been thriving over the years. The studies presented in this volume are an expression of ongoing theoretical discussions as well as new analytical approaches to the study of issues concerning language change. Taken together, they reflect some of the current challenges in the field, as well as the opportunities offered by judicious use of theoretical models and careful corpus-based work. The volume's contributions are organized under the following headings: I. General and Specific Issues of Language Change, II. Linguistic Variation and Change in Germanic, III. Linguistic Variation and Change in Greek, and IV. Linguistic Change in Romance.

Download or read book Historical Linguistics 2017 written by Bridget Drinka and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collected articles in this volume address an array of cutting-edge issues in the field of historical linguistics, including new theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies for studying language through a diachronic lens. The articles focus on the following themes: I. Case & Argument Structure, II. Alignment & Diathesis, III. Patterns, Paradigms, & Restructuring, IV. Grammaticalization & Construction Grammar, V. Corpus Linguistics & Morphosyntax, VI. Languages in Contact. Papers reflect a wide range of perspectives, and focus on issues and data from an array of languages and language families, from new analyses of case and argument structure in Ancient Greek to phonological evidence for language contact in Vietnamese, from patterns of convergence in Neo-Aramaic to the development of the ergative in Basque. The volume contributes substantially to the debate surrounding core issues of language change: the role of the individual speaker, the nature of paths of grammaticalization, the role of contact, the interface of diachrony and synchrony, and many other issues. It should be useful to any reader hoping to gain insight into the nature of language change.

Download or read book The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French written by Michel Aurnague and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on the semantics of spatial markers in French is known mainly through Vandeloise’s (1986, 1991) work on static prepositions. However, interest in the expression of space in French goes back to the mid-1970s and focused first on verbs denoting changes in space, whose syntactic properties were related to specific semantic distinctions, such as the opposition between “movement” and “displacement”. This volume provides an overview of recent studies on the semantics of dynamic space in French and addresses important questions about motion expression, among which “goal bias” and asymmetry of motion, the status of locative PPs, the expression of manner, fictive or non-actual motion. Descriptive, experimental and formal or computational analyses are presented, providing complementary perspectives on the main issue. The volume is intended for researchers and advanced students wishing to learn about both spatial semantics in French and recent debates on the representation of motion events in language and cognition.

Download or read book Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2011 written by Sergio Baauw and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2011, the annual conference series Going Romance celebrated its 25th edition in Utrecht, the founder city of the enterprise. Since its inception in the eighties of the last century, the local initiative has developed into the major European discussion forum for research focussing on the contribution of (one of the) Romance languages to general linguistic theorizing as well as on the working out of in-depth analyses of Romance data within linguistic frameworks. The annual meeting took place on December, 8-10.The present volume is the 5th of the series Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory published by John Benjamins. We publish here a selected set of peer-reviewed articles bearing on topics in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, that represent both issues of theoretical nature as well as developments in the field of acquisition. The articles are of great interest for specialists of Romance and for general linguists appreciating parameters and/or language acquisition. Among the contributions are three papers presented by invited speakers (Andrea Calabrese, Ricardo Etxepare and Jason Rothman), while two other very prominent Romance linguists figure as co-authors (Aafke Hulk, Luigi Rizzi).

Download or read book Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2012 written by Karen Lahousse and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a selective collection of peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the 26th Going Romance conference, organized at the KU Leuven (Belgium) from 6-8 December 2012. The annual Going Romance conference has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. The present volume testifies to the significance of the analysis of Romance languages for the field of linguistics in general, and theoretical linguistics in particular. It contains eleven articles dealing with issues related to all core linguistic domains and interfaces, and representing different empirical phenomena. The articles provide data from a significant range of Romance languages and language varieties (French, standard Italian and Italian dialects, Spanish, Catalan, Catalan Contact Spanish, standard and non-standard European Portuguese, Galician), as well as from Latin, English and German.

Download or read book Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition written by Christine Dimroth and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-09-18 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume focus on the impact of information structure on language acquisition, thereby taking different linguistic approaches into account. They start from an empirical point of view, and examine data from natural first and second language acquisition, which cover a wide range of varieties, from early learner language to native speaker production and from gesture to Creole prototypes. The central theme is the interplay between principles of information structure and linguistic structure and its impact on the functioning and development of the learner's system. The papers examine language-internal explanatory factors and in particular the communicative and structural forces that push and shape the acquisition process, and its outcome. On the theoretical level, the approach adopted appeals both to formal and communicative constraints on a learner’s language in use. Two empirical domains provide a 'testing ground' for the respective weight of grammatical versus functional determinants in the acquisition process: (1) the expression of finiteness and scope relations at the utterance level and (2) the expression of anaphoric relations at the discourse level.

Download or read book Cassell s lessons in French From the Popular educator 2pt revised by prof de Lolme corrected by E Roubaud 2pt With Key written by Louis Fasquelle and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Social Dynamics of Pronominal Systems written by Paul Bouissac and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal pronouns have a special status in languages. As indexical tools they are the means by which languages and persons intimately interface with each other within a particular social structure. Pronouns involve more than mere grammatical functions in live communication acts. They variously signal the gender of speakers as parts of utterances or in their anaphoric roles. They also prominently indicate with a range of degrees the kind of social relationships that hold between speakers from intimacy to indifference, from dominance to submission, and from solidarity to hostility. Languages greatly vary in the number of pronouns and other address terms they offer to their users with a distinct range of social values. Children learn their relative position in their family and in their society through the “correct” use of pronouns. When languages come into contact because of population migrations or through the process of translation, pronouns are the most sensitive zone of tension both psychologically and politically. This volume endeavours to probe the comparative pragmatics of pronominal systems as social processes in a representative set from different language families and cultural areas.

Download or read book French Syntax and Exercises for the Systematic Practical and Gradual Acquirement of the French Language written by Paul Baume and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Middle Voice written by Suzanne Kemmer and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993-10-05 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book approaches the middle voice from the perspective of typology and language universals research. The principal aim is to provide a typologically valid characterization of the category of middle voice in terms of which it can be incorporated in a cognitively-based theory of human language. The term “middle voice” has had a wide range of applications in the linguistic literature of this century. The main thesis in this volume is that there is a coherent, though complex, semantic category of middle voice in human language, which receives grammatical instantiation in many languages. The author claims there is a semantic property crucial to the nature of the middle, which she terms “relative elaboration of events”, that serves as a parameter along which the reflexive and the middle can be situated as semantic categories intermediate in transitivity between one-participant and two-participant events, and which differentiates reflexive and middle from one another. In this area, most analyses deal with one language and/or are limited to Indo-European languages. This work deals with a subset of middle-marking languages that was chosen so as to observe the highest possible number of different middle systems showing significant independent diachronic development.

Download or read book French syntax and exercises With Key written by Paul Baume and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Grammar Network written by Holger Diessel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a dynamic network model of grammar that explains how linguistic structure is shaped by language use.