Download or read book Essays on Nominal Determination written by Henrik Høeg Müller and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-07-09 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together scholars of diverse theoretical persuasions who all share an interest in capturing the role that nominal determination and reference assignment play in the complicated interplay between thought, language and communication. The articles can be divided roughly into five main areas of concern: the conceptual level of determination; the emergence and function of articles; their semantic contribution to nominal interpretation; the morphology and syntax of determiners; and the interplay and contrasts between articles, demonstratives and possessives. Thus, linguistic and philosophical issues in the subject field of nominal determination are addressed at all interface levels between morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. This volume shows that different theoretical frameworks may be brought fruitfully together in the effort to formulate new analyses of well-known problems, but also to raise new questions and point to new areas which may prove interesting topics for future research both in functional and formal paradigms.
Download or read book Language Complexity written by Matti Miestamo and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.
Download or read book A Phi Syntax for Nominal Concord written by Marco Benincasa and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book focusses on the grammatical feature definiteness in German, visible in the inflection of adjectives (ein schön-es Kind vs. das schön-e Kind). It argues for an analysis of this effect that draws a connection to the visible categories of number and gender on nouns and related words rather than an abstract property. This conclusion rests on the conflation of the established grammatical categories into a single one, number-gender, which explains a vast body of grammatical phenomena in German and principles of language in general.
Download or read book Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond written by Johannes Kabatek and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book envisions the study of bare noun phrases as a field of research in its own right rather than an accessory matter in the wider domain of nominal determination. Combining insights from different theoretical backgrounds and extending the empirical coverage of bare noun phenomena, the ten contributions provide new perspectives on long-standing but still actively debated problems as well as investigations into previously ignored issues. The volume focuses on the wide range of bare noun phenomena in Romance languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Italian and French; but also widens its inherently comparative perspective to languages such as Bulgarian and Modern Hebrew. The authors discuss the importance of cross-linguistic patterns in the modeling of the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and of common noun denotations, the role of information structure as well as that of discourse traditions and coordination.
Download or read book The Article in Post Classical Greek written by Daniel King and published by SIL International. This book was released on 2023-06-08 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For New Testament biblical scholars, this book constitutes a vital summary of contemporary, theoretically-sound interpretations of the linguistic functions of the Post-Classical (Koine) Greek article in a way that will inform exegesis of the text, especially in the field of larger discourse units. There is also significant payoff for the as-yet significantly under-researched field of Koine linguistics. The essays included in this volume are written by notable experts, offering contributions to the linguistic analysis of the Post-Classical Greek language. While there remains no comprehensive treatment of the grammar of the Post-Classical dialects, individual elements of that grammar continue to be fruitfully explored. The collection presented here offers interpretations of the functions and grammar of the Greek article (ὁ, ἡ, τό) from a variety of perspectives, including generative grammar and discourse analysis, along with studies that make use of text-critical and diachronic data. Together, these supply readers of Greek with a thorough understanding of the functions of the article and constitute a starting point for further research efforts.
Download or read book Procedural Meaning written by María Victoria Escandell Vidal and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of edited papers which were presented at the international conference 'Procedural Meaning'. It is suitable for those who are interested in or already working on procedural meaning from different points of view and to identify various challenges that can determine the directions for research.
Download or read book Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax written by Andreas Dufter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 977 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.
Download or read book Language Structure Variation and Change written by Ian E. Mackenzie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-09 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.
Download or read book Past Participle Agreement written by Jorge Vega Vilanova and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the traditional definition of ‘grammaticalization’ is challenged in the light of current developments in grammar theory. The main innovation of this approach is the focus on the feature composition of lexical items. From this perspective, the loss of past participle agreement in Catalan is analyzed on the basis of newly collected data as a consequence of the grammaticalization of formal features. The emergence of syntactic formal features through grammaticalization is understood as a last-resort repair mechanism for pragmatically costly derivations. Further far-reaching implications of this proposal under discussion are: the interplay between (re-)parametrization, economy, cyclicity, and grammaticalization; the characterization of free variation under a modified version of the Interface Hypothesis; and the precedence of syntactic over morphological change. This book is not only of interest to specialists in Romance languages but also to anyone working on diachronic linguistics.
Download or read book The Impact of Pronominal Form on Interpretation written by Patrick Grosz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interplay between the interpretation of pronouns (e.g. bound/referential) and their form (e.g. null/overt) is still ill-understood. This volume has a cross-linguistic orientation with in-depth investigations of more than 10 different languages. It unites researchers from the linguistic subfields of syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics, thus furthering dialogue with the goal of shedding new light on the form/interpretation connection.
Download or read book Recent Developments in Phase Theory written by Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The overarching goal of this volume is to explore a number of recent developments in Phase Theory (both theoretical and empirical), thus contributing to our overall understanding of the concept of phases. The volume is divided into three parts, of which the first focuses on the traditional role played by phases in defining successive cyclicity, while at the same time examining the interaction between that traditional role and Chomsky (2013)’s proposal about labeling. The second part focuses on the question of whether only the highest projection of the clausal and nominal domain, CP and DP, are phases or whether those domains also contain an internal phase: vP and NP/NumP/QP, while the third part contains two chapters that focus on the extent to which ellipsis can be used as a reliable diagnostic for phasehood. As a whole, the volume provides a detailed and in-depth view on a number of recent developments in Phase Theory, which will likely continue to dominate the debate for several years to come.
Download or read book From Linguistic Areas to Areal Linguistics written by Pieter Muysken and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-02-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From linguistic areas to areal linguistics explores language description and typology in terms of areal background, presenting case studies in areal linguistics. Some concern well-established linguistic areas such as the Balkan, other regions such as East Nusantara (Indonesia) and the Guapore-Mamore (Amazon) regions have never before been studied in an areal perspective, and yet other areas are involved in current debates. The insight has gained ground that languages owe many of their characteristics to the languages they are in contact with over time. Yet the nature of these areal influences remains a matter of debate. Furthermore, areas are often hard to define. Hence the title: a shift from linguistic areas as concrete and circumscribed objects to a new way of doing linguistics: areally. New findings include the observation that there may be many more language areas than previously recognized. The book is primarily directed at linguists working in descriptive, comparative, historical and typological linguistics. Since it covers linguistic areas from four continents, it will have a wide appeal.
Download or read book Nouns and the Morphosyntax Semantics Interface written by Laure Gardelle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Subordination Versus coordination in Sentence and Text written by Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers collected in this volume (including a comprehensive introduction) investigate semantic and discourse-related aspects of subordination and coordination, in particular the relationship between subordination/coordination at the sentence level and subordination/coordination - or hierarchical/non-hierarchical organization - at the discourse level. The contributions in part I are concerned with central theoretical questions; part II consists of corpus-based cross-linguistic studies of clause combining and discourse structure, involving at least two of the languages English, German, Dutch, French and Norwegian; part III contains papers addressing specific - predominantly semantic - topics relating to German, English or French; and the papers in part IV approach the topic of subordination, coordination and rhetorical relations from a diachronic (Old Indic and Early Germanic) perspective. The book aims to contribute to a better understanding of information packaging on the sentence and text level related, within a particular language as well as cross-linguistically.
Download or read book Aspect and Modality in Kwa Languages written by Felix K. Ameka and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the thesis that in the Kwa languages of West Africa, aspect and modality are more central to the grammar of the verb than tense. Where tense marking has emerged it is invariably in the expression of the future, and therefore concerned with the impending actualization or potentiality of an event, hence with modality, rather than the purely temporal sequencing associated with tense. The primary grammatical contrasts are perfective versus imperfective. The main languages discussed are Akan, Dangme, Ewe, Ga and Tuwuli while Nzema-Ahanta, Likpe and Eastern Gbe are also mentioned. Knowledge about these languages has deepened considerably during the past decade or so and ideas about their structure have changed. The volume therefore presents novel analyses of grammatical forms like the so-called S-Aux-O-V-Other or “future” constructions, and provides empirical data for theorizing about aspect and modality. It should be of considerable interest to Africanist linguists, typologists, and creolists interested in substrate issues.
Download or read book Interdependence of Diachronic and Synchronic Analyses written by Folke Josephson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this volume is the interdependence of diachrony and synchrony in the investigation of syntactic structure. A diverse set of modern and ancient languages is investigated from this perspective, including Hittite, the Classical languages, Old Norse, Coptic, Bantu languages, Australian languages and Creoles. A variety of topics are covered, including TAM, diathesis, valency, case marking, cliticization, and grammaticalization. This volume should be of interest tosyntacticians, typologists, and historical linguists with an interest in syntax and morphology.
