Download or read book Focus on Germanic Typology written by Werner Abraham and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aus dem Inhalt: Werner Abraham und Gert Webelhuth Words of dedication for Hartmut Czepluch Werner Abraham Introduction John H. McWhorter What happened to English? Halldór Ármann Sigurdsson Agree and Agreement - Evidence from Germanic Jóhanna Barddal The semantics of the impersonal construction in Icelandic, German and Faroese: beyond thematic roles Cedric Boeckx und Kleanthes K. Grohmann Left dislocation in Germanic Jac C. Conradie Verb sequence and placement: Afrikaans and Dutch compared Hartmut Czepluch ((Sterbezeichen)) Reflections on the form and function of passives in English and German Molly Diesing The upper functional domain in Yiddish Bridget Drinka Präteritumschwund: evidence for areal difussion Werner Abraham The European demise of the simple past and the emergence of the periphrastic perfect: Areal diffusion or natural, autonomous evolution under parsing facilitation? László Molnárfi Some remarks on the formal typology of pronouns in West Germanic Rolf Thieroff The subjunctive mood in German and in the Germanic languages

Download or read book Focus on Germanic Typology written by Werner Abraham and published by De Gruyter Akademie Forschung. This book was released on 2004 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aus dem Inhalt: Werner Abraham und Gert Webelhuth Words of dedication for Hartmut Czepluch Werner Abraham Introduction John H. McWhorter What happened to English? Halldór Ármann Sigurdsson Agree and Agreement - Evidence from Germanic Jóhanna Barddal The semantics of the impersonal construction in Icelandic, German and Faroese: beyond thematic roles Cedric Boeckx und Kleanthes K. Grohmann Left dislocation in Germanic Jac C. Conradie Verb sequence and placement: Afrikaans and Dutch compared Hartmut Czepluch ((Sterbezeichen)) Reflections on the form and function of passives in English and German Molly Diesing The upper functional domain in Yiddish Bridget Drinka Präteritumschwund: evidence for areal difussion Werner Abraham The European demise of the simple past and the emergence of the periphrastic perfect: Areal diffusion or natural, autonomous evolution under parsing facilitation? László Molnárfi Some remarks on the formal typology of pronouns in West Germanic Rolf Thieroff The subjunctive mood in German and in the Germanic languages

Download or read book On Comitatives and Related Categories written by Thomas Stolz and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length functional-typologically inspired crosslinguistic study of comitatives and related categories such as the instrumental. On the basis of data drawn from 400 languages world-wide (covering all major phyla and areas), the authors test and revise a variety of general linguistic hypotheses about the grammar and cognitive foundations of comitatives. Three types of languages are identified according to the morphological treatment of the comitative and its syncretistic association with other concepts. It is shown that the structural behaviour of comitatives is areally biassed and that the languages of Europe tend to diverge from the majority of the world's languages. This has important repercussions for a language-independent definition of the comitative. The supposed conceptual closeness of comitative and instrumental is discussed in some detail and a semantic map of the comitative is put forward. Markedness is the crucial concept for the evaluation of the relation that ties comitatives and instrumentals to each other. In a separate chapter, the diachrony of comitatives is looked into from the perspective of grammaticalisation research. Throughout the book, the argumentation is richly documented by empirical data. The book contains three case-studies of the comitative in Icelandic, Latvian and Maltese - each of which represents one of the three language types identified earlier in the text. For the purpose of comparing the languages of Europe, a chapter is devoted to the analysis of a large parallel literary corpus (covering 64 languages) which reveals that the parameters of genetic affiliation, areal location and typological classification interact in intricate ways when it comes to predicting whether or not two languages of the sample behave similarly as to the use to which they put their comitative morphemes. With a view to determining the degree of similarity between the languages of the European sub-sample, methods of quantitative typology are employed. General linguists with an interest in case, functional typologists, grammaticalisation researchers and experts of markedness issues will value this book as an important contribution to their respective fields of interest. We regret that, due to a PDF problem, the figure on page 111 is partly shown in black. Please find the correct table here.

Download or read book Issues in Formal German ic Typology written by Werner Abraham and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-04-22 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes up a variety of general syntactic topics, which either yield different solutions in German, in particular, or which lead to different conclusions for theory formation. One of the main topics is the fact that languages that allow for extensive scrambling between the two verbal poles, V-2 and V-last, need to integrate discourse functions like thema and rhema into the grammatical description. This is attempted, in terms of Minimalism, thus extending the functional domain. Special attention is given to the asymmetrical scrambling behavior of indefinites vs. definites and their semantic interpretation. Related topics are: Transitive expletive sentences, types of existential sentences with either BE or HAVE, the that-trace phenomenon and its semantics, negative polarity items, ellipsis and gapping, passivization, double negation — all of which have extensive effects both on distributional behavior and semantic disambiguation, reaching far beyond effects observable in English with its rigid, ‘un-scrambable’ word order.

Download or read book Recent Developments in Germanic Linguistics written by Rosina Lippi-Green and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are selected papers from the Second Annual Michigan/Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable held in April of 1991 at Ann Arbor. Topics include the evolution of the gender system, the delineation of the relative clause in historical texts, and language as a political tool in the new Europe.

Download or read book Comparative Studies in Early Germanic Languages written by Gabriele Diewald and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they descended from a common ancestor language, the contributions present in-depth, empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments, thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change, grammaticalisation, and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.

Download or read book Information Structure and Language Change written by Roland Hinterhölzl and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Download or read book The Grammar of Identity written by Volker Gast and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-01-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original treatment of an extremely complex and interesting subject matter within Germanic languages and theoretical linguistics, investigates why intensifiers and reflexives are formally indistinguishable in so many languages around the world.

Download or read book Type Noun Constructions in Slavic Germanic and Romance Languages written by Wiltrud Mihatsch and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-04-27 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.

Download or read book Linguistic Typology written by Paolo Ramat and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

Download or read book Insubordination in Germanic written by Sarah D’Hertefelt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies insubordination using Germanic data. On a descriptive level, it distinguishes a wide number of (previously undescribed) types of complement and conditional insubordination in English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. On a theoretical level, these data are used to investigate the boundaries of insubordination, and the degree to which insubordination is a constructionally and semantically unified phenomenon.

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 Modality in Germanic Languages written by Toril Swan and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Download or read book The Verbal Complex in Subordinate Clauses from Medieval to Modern German written by Christopher D. Sapp and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research monograph is an empirical and theoretical study of clause-final verbal complexes in the history of German. The book presents corpus studies of Middle High German and Early New High German and surveys of contemporary varieties of German. These investigations of the verbal complex address not only the frequencies of the word orders, but also the linguistic factors that influence them. On that empirical basis, the analysis adopted is the classic verb-final approach, with alternative orders derived by Verb (Projection) Raising. Verb Raising in these historical and modern varieties is subject to morphological, prosodic, and sociolinguistic restrictions, suggesting that the orders in question are not driven by narrow syntax but by their effects at the interface with phonology. This study will be of interest to students and scholars studying the diachronic syntax of German, West Germanic dialect syntax, and the relationship between prosody and word order.

Download or read book Comparative Germanic Syntax written by Peter Ackema and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 23rd and 24th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of Edinburgh and the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussels. The contributions provide new perspectives on several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wide range of Germanic languages. Among the theoretical and empirical issues explored are various ellipsis phenomena, the internal structure of the DP, the syntax-morphology interface, the syntax-semantics interface, Binding Theory, various diachronic developments, and ‘do-support’-type phenomena. This book is of interest to syntacticians with an interest in theoretical, comparative and/or diachronic work, as well as to morphologists and semanticists interested in the connections their fields have with syntax. It will also be of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in linguistic disciplines.

Download or read book Language Contact and the Origins of the Germanic Languages written by Peter Schrijver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History, archaeology, and human evolutionary genetics provide us with an increasingly detailed view of the origins and development of the peoples that live in Northwestern Europe. This book aims to restore the key position of historical linguistics in this debate by treating the history of the Germanic languages as a history of its speakers. It focuses on the role that language contact has played in creating the Germanic languages, between the first millennium BC and the crucially important early medieval period. Chapters on the origins of English, German, Dutch, and the Germanic language family as a whole illustrate how the history of the sounds of these languages provide a key that unlocks the secret of their genesis: speakers of Latin, Celtic and Balto-Finnic switched to speaking Germanic and in the process introduced a 'foreign accent' that caught on and spread at the expense of types of Germanic that were not affected by foreign influence. The book is aimed at linguists, historians, archaeologists and anyone who is interested in what languages can tell us about the origins of their speakers.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics written by Michael T. Putnam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 1176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive overview of the structure of modern Germanic languages. Written by a team of internationally-renowned experts, it is a vital resource for students and researchers investigating the Germanic family of languages and dialects, covering key topics such as phonology, morphology, syntax, heritage and minority languages.