Download or read book Events Arguments and Aspects written by Klaus Robering and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The verb has often been considered the 'center' of the sentence and has hence always attracted the special attention of the linguist. The present volume collects novel approaches to two classical topics within verbal semantics, namely argument structure and the treatment of time and aspect. The linguistic material covered comes from a broad spectrum of languages including English, German, Danish, Ukrainian, and Australian aboriginal languages; and methods from both cognitive and formal semantics are applied in the analyses presented here. Some of the authors use a variety of event semantics in order to analyze argument structure and aspect whereas others employ ideas coming from object-oriented programming in order to achieve new insights into the way how verbs select their arguments and how events are classified into different types. Both kinds of methods are also used to give accounts of dynamical aspects of semantic interpretation such as coercion and type shifting.

Download or read book Events and Grammar written by Susan Rothstein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2001-11-30 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. It addresses event arguments and thematic argument structure, the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions, events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates, and the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations. It is of interest to scholars and students of theoretical linguistics, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists.

Download or read book Argument Realisation in Complex Predicates and Complex Events written by Brian Nolan and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of argument realisation in complex predicates and complex events at the syntax-semantic interface across a wide variety of the world’s languages, ranging over languages such as German, Irish, Sicilian and Italian, Lithuanian, Estonian and other Finno-Ugric languages, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra from Australia’s Western Desert region, Japanese, Tepehua (Totonacan, Mexico), Cheyenne, Mexican Spanish, Boharic Coptic, and Persian. This volume examines the syntactic variation of complex events, complex predicates and multi-verb constructions within a single clause where the clause is view as representing a single event, studying their semantics and syntax within functional, cognitive and constructional frameworks, to arrive at a better understanding of their cross linguistic behaviour and how they resonate in syntax. These constructions manifest considerable variability in cross-linguistic comparisons of complex predicate formation. In European languages, for example, typically one of the verbs in a verb-verb construction highlights a phase of an underspecified event while the matrix verb specifies the actual event. In contrast, serial verbs require each verb to provide a sub-event dimension within a complex event that is viewed holistically as unitary in syntax. This book contributes to an understanding of complex events, complex predicates and multi-verb constructions across languages, their syntactic constructional patterns and argument realisation.

Download or read book Event Arguments Foundations and Applications written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since entering the stage, Davidsonian event arguments have taken on a central role in linguistic theorizing. Recent years have seen a continuous extension of possible applications for them, not only in semantics but also in syntax. At the same time questions concerning the ontological status of events have received renewed attention. This collection of articles provides new evidence for the virtually ubiquitous presence of event arguments in linguistic structure and sheds new light on their nature. The volume is organized into four sections: Events - states - causation; Event nominals; Events in composition; Measuring events.

Download or read book Inner Aspect written by Lisa deMena Travis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finishing this book was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. It took far too long from original idea to page proofs and suffered from being relegated to small corners of my life. It was very rarely on the front burner. Since I started working on this topic in 1991, there has been a lot of interesting work done on the areas of the articulation of VP, phrase structure mirroring event structure, the use of functional categories to represent Aktionsart, and many other areas that the research presented here touches on. The hardest thing about doing a project of this size is to accept that not everyone’s ideas can be addressed and not all new research can be incorporated. The only way that I have found it possible to let this book go to press is to reread the Preface to Events in the Semantics of English by Terence Parsons where he writes, ‘‘The goal of this book is neither completeness nor complete accuracy; it is to get some interesting proposals into the public arena for others to criticize, develop, and build on. ’’ My aim in this book is to make connections between various accounts of various constructions in various languages at the risk of treating each of these too lightly. I am grateful to too many people to thank them individually.

Download or read book Tense Aspect written by Paul J. Hopper and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 1982-01-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The verbal categories of tense and aspect have been studied traditionally from the point of view of their reference to the timing and time-perspective of the speaker’s reported experience. They are universal categories both in terms of the semantic-functional domain they cover as well as in terms of their syntactic and morphological realization. Nevertheless, their treatment in contemporary linguistics is often restricted and narrow based, often involving mere recapitulatoin of traditional semantic and morphotactic studies. The present volume arises out of a symposium held at UCLA in May 1979, in which a group of linguists gathered to re-open the subject of tense-and-aspect from a variety of perspectives, including — in addition to the traditional semantics — also discourse-pragmatics, psycholinguistics, child language, Creolization and diachronic change. The languages discussed in this volume include Russian, Turkish, English, Indonesian, Ameslan, Eskimo, various Creoles, Mandari, Hebrew, Bantu and others. The emphasis throughout is not only on the description of language-specific tense-aspect phenomenon, but more on the search for universal categories and principles which underlie the cross-language variety of tense and aspect. In particular, many of the participants address themselves to the relationship between propositional-semantics and discourse-pragmatics, in so far as these two functional domains interact within tense-aspect systems.

Download or read book The Parameter of Aspect written by C.S. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-10-31 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smith (linguistics, U. of Texas) presents a unified theory of aspect within Universal Grammar. She provides an unusual combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches to a single domain; and gives detailed linguistic analyses of the very different aspect systems in English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo, and Russian. After presenting her evidence, she develops a formal semantic treatment in the framework of discourse representation theory with an explicit procedure for computing aspect meaning from syntactical surface structure. Among her innovations are a principled account of the interaction between viewpoint and situation type, a level of pragmatic analysis at which contrastive and inferred meanings are stated, and a default analysis of sentences that are neither perfective nor imperfective in viewpoint. No date is noted for the first edition, but the second incorporates further developments of the two-component theory such as new treatments of boundedness and dynamism, and a general account of aspect shifts. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Argument Culture written by Deborah Tannen and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her number one bestseller, You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen showed why talking to someone of the other sex can be like talking to someone from another world. Her bestseller Talking from 9 to 5 did for workplace communication what You Just Don't Understand did for personal relationships. Now Tannen is back with another groundbreaking book, this time widening her lens to examine the way we communicate in public--in the media, in politics, in our courtrooms and classrooms--once again letting us see in a new way forces that have been powerfully shaping our lives. The Argument Culture is about a pervasive warlike atmosphere that makes us approach anything we need to accomplish as a fight between two opposing sides. The argument culture urges us to regard the world--and the people in it--in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: The best way to explore an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover the news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as "both sides"; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to oppose someone; and the best way to show you're really thinking is to criticize and attack. Sometimes these approaches work well, but often they create more problems than they solve. Our public encounters have become more and more like having an argument with a spouse: You're not trying to understand what the other person is saying; you're just trying to win the argument. But just as spouses have to learn ways of settling differences without inflicting real damage on each other, so we, as a society, have to find constructive and creative ways of resolving disputes and differences. Public discussions require making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument--as in having a fight. The war on drugs, the war on cancer, the battle of the sexes, politicians' turf battles--in the argument culture, war metaphors pervade our talk and shape our thinking. Tannen shows how deeply entrenched this cultural tendency is, the forms it takes, and how it affects us every day--sometimes in useful ways, but often causing, rather than avoiding, damage. In the argument culture, the quality of information we receive is compromised, and our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention. Tannen explores the roots of the argument culture, the role played by gender, and how other cultures suggest alternative ways to negotiate disagreement and mediate conflicts--and make things better, in public and in private, wherever people are trying to resolve differences and get things done. The Argument Culture is a remarkable book that will change forever the way you perceive the world. You will listen to our public voices in a whole new way.

Download or read book Learning Indigenous Languages written by Barbara Blaha Pfeiler and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2007 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book includes six studies on the acquisition of single Mesoamerican indigenous languages, (Huichol, Zapotec, and the Mayan languages Ch'ol, Tzeltal, K'iche', and Yukatek); and a crosslinguistic study of five Mayan languages (K'anjob'al, K'iche', Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek). Three topics are theoretically and methodologically discussed and empirically demonstrated: with respect to ergativity, the ergative-absolutive cross-referencing pattern on the morphological level, noun-verb distinction and the acquisition of body-part locatives in the early lexicon, and the role of semantic properties and cultural context in language acquisition and socialization. This book makes important claims regarding the methodology of cross-linguistic studies as well as the results of these studies and the comparative method used in the book (structural and discursive factors in language acquisition, cross-linguistic relationships and variation).

Download or read book Brazilian Sign Language Studies written by Ronice Müller de Quadros and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a collection of studies on Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Research on Libras began in earnest 20 years ago, around the time that Libras was recognised as a national language of Brazil in 2002. Over the years, more and more deaf researchers have become sign language linguists, and the community of Libras scholars have documented this language and built robust resources for linguistic research. This book provides a selection of studies by these scholars, representing work in a variety of areas from phonology to creative literature.

Download or read book Structuring Sense Volume III Taking Form written by Hagit Borer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. Hagit Borer departs from language specific constructional approaches and from lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. Taking Form, the third and final volume of Structuring Sense, applies this radical approach to the construction of complex words. Integrating research in syntax and morphology, the author develops a new model of word formation, arguing that on the one hand the basic building blocks of language are rigid semantic and syntactic functions, while on the other hand they are roots, which in themselves are but packets of phonological information, and are devoid of both meaning and grammatical properties of any kind. Within such a model, syntactic category, syntactic selection and argument structure are all mediated through syntactic structures projected from rigid functions, or alternatively, constructed through general combinatorial principles of syntax, such as Chomsky's Merge. The meaning of 'words', in turn, does not involve the existence of lexemes, but rather the matching of a well-defined and phonologically articulated syntactic domain with conceptual Content, itself outside the domain of language as such. In a departure from most current models of syntax but in line with many philosophical traditions, then, the Exo-Skeletal model partitions 'meaning' into formal functions, on the one hand, and Content, on the other hand. While the former are read off syntactico-semantic structures as is usually assumed, Content is crucially read off syntactico-phonological structures.

Download or read book The Morphosyntax of Transitions written by Víctor Acedo-Matellán and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state, taking as a starting point Talmy's typological generalization that classifies languages as either 'satellite-framed' or 'verb-framed'. In verb-framed languages, such as those of the Romance family, the result state or location is encoded in the verb. In satellite-framed languages, such as English or Latin, the result state or location is encoded in a non-verbal element. These languages can be further subdivided into weak satellite-framed languages, in which the element expressing result must form a word with the verb, and strong satellite-framed languages, in which it is expressed by an independent element: an adjective, a prepositional phrase or a particle. In this volume, Víctor Acedo-Matellán explores the similarities between Latin and Slavic in their expression of events of transition: neither allows the expression of complex adjectival resultative constructions and both express the result state or location of a complex transition through prefixes. They are therefore analysed as weak satellite-framed languages, along with Ancient Greek and some varieties of Mandarin Chinese, and stand in contrast to strong satellite-framed languages such as English, the Germanic languages in general, and Finno-Ugric. This variation is expressed in terms of the morphological properties of the head that expresses transition, which is argued to be affixal in weak but not in strong satellite-framed languages. The author takes a neo-constructionist approach to argument structure, which accounts for the verbal elasticity shown by Latin, and a Distributed Morphology approach to the syntax-morphology interface.

Download or read book Interfaces with English Aspect written by Debra Ziegeler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of verbal aspect has been a focus for the derivation of a multiplicity of theoretical approaches ranging over decades of linguistic research. From the point of view of recent studies, though, there has been relatively little emphasis on the nature of the interaction of aspect with other categories, and the ways in which our knowledge of aspect acts as a primary semantic contributor to the creation of other basic verbal parameters such as tense and modality. This book aims to cross some of the categorial borders, using a collection of studies on the interfaces of English aspect with other grammatical domains. The studies in the book have been assembled in order to answer two central issues surrounding the nature of English aspect: the possibility of the historical co-existence of a perfective and imperfective grammatical distinction in English, and the derivation of modality as an inference arising out of specific conflicts and combinations of lexical and grammatical aspect. In answering these questions, a data-driven, rather than a theory-driven approach is favoured, and the general principles of Gricean pragmatics and grammaticalisation are applied to a wide range of empirical sources to propose alternative explanations to some long-established problems of English historical linguistics and semantics.

Download or read book Emotion and Narrative written by Tilmann Habermas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotions have a life beyond the immediate eliciting situation, as they tend to be shared with others by putting the experience in narrative form. Narrating emotions helps us to express, understand, and share them: the way we tell stories influences how others react to our emotions, and impacts how we cope with emotions ourselves. In Emotion and Narrative, Habermas introduces the forms of oral narratives of personal experiences, and highlights a narrative's capacity to integrate various personal and temporal perspectives. Via theoretical proposals richly illustrated with oral narratives from clinical and non-clinical samples, he demonstrates how the form and variety of perspectives represented in stories strongly, yet unnoticeably, influence the emotional reactions of listeners. For instance, narrators defend themselves against negativity and undesired views of themselves by excluding perspectives from narratives. Habermas shows how parents can help children, and psychotherapists can assist patients, to enrich their narratives with additional perspectives.

Download or read book Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As climate has warmed over recent years, a new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events has unfolded across the globe. Climate models simulate such changes in extreme events, and some of the reasons for the changes are well understood. Warming increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and nights, favors increased atmospheric moisture that may result in more frequent heavy rainfall and snowfall, and leads to evaporation that can exacerbate droughts. Even with evidence of these broad trends, scientists cautioned in the past that individual weather events couldn't be attributed to climate change. Now, with advances in understanding the climate science behind extreme events and the science of extreme event attribution, such blanket statements may not be accurate. The relatively young science of extreme event attribution seeks to tease out the influence of human-cause climate change from other factors, such as natural sources of variability like El Niño, as contributors to individual extreme events. Event attribution can answer questions about how much climate change influenced the probability or intensity of a specific type of weather event. As event attribution capabilities improve, they could help inform choices about assessing and managing risk, and in guiding climate adaptation strategies. This report examines the current state of science of extreme weather attribution, and identifies ways to move the science forward to improve attribution capabilities.

Download or read book Aspect Situation Types and Nominal Reference written by Hana Filip and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Greek Science in the Long Run written by Paula Olmos and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greek traditions relating to both the arts and sciences of life and health and those regarding the systematic development of theories of measurement and quantification enjoyed an incredibly long reputation and showed a kind of versatility that challenges any simplistic, dogmatic or a priori viewpoint about the meaning and social function of systematic knowledge. In this sense, they allow us to focus on very specific traits of the multiple processes of production, textual arrangement and transmission of the sciences. Greek Science in the Long Run: Essays on the Greek Scientific Tradition (4th c. BCE–17th c. CE) offers a collection of essays in which renowned international experts in ancient, medieval and early modern history and culture and the history of science, together with young researchers in these same fields, reflect upon different aspects of this long-standing prominence of Greek models and traditions in the changing configuration of the sciences. The main aim of the volume is to revisit the different processes by which such doctrinal traditions originated, were transmitted and received within diverse socio-cultural contexts and frameworks. The specialized scholars and academics contributing to the volume embrace advanced standpoints regarding these issues and ensure a successful and substantial contribution to one of the lines of research that has recently attracted the most attention within the field of humanities: the interdisciplinary project of a historical epistemology seriously informed by an advanced history of epistemology or the sciences.