Download or read book THE SEMANTICS OF ROMANIAN UNIVERSAL FREE CHOICE ITEM ORICE written by MARA PANAITESCU and published by Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended as an addition to the studies on the semantics of determiners, more precisely an analysis of the phenomenon of free choice in the framework of possible words semantics.

Download or read book The Grammar of Choice written by Paula Menendez-Benito and published by Booksurge Publishing. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates the semantics of universal Free Choice (FC) items i.e., items like FC 'any' or Spanish 'cualquiera'. This study is relevant for the theory of quantification. One of the core questions of this research is: what is the range of quantificational constructions used in natural language? Investigating the behavior of FC items will be instrumental in answering this question. While FC items seem to express quantification, they do not behave like 'textbook' quantifiers: They have a restricted distribution, and they seem to have a special relationship with modality.

Download or read book Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek written by Katerina Chatzopoulou and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek, based on extensive data from major stages of the language. It also provides a new semantic interpretation of Jespersen's cycle that explains the Greek developments and those in other languages.

Download or read book 11th Conference on British and American Studies written by Marinela Burada and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume includes a selection of twenty-nine papers by academics, and senior and junior researchers who came together within the framework of the 11th Conference on British and American Studies. Structured into three sections, the contributions included here display a wide array of topics and methodologies illustrating a variety of scholarly pursuits and approaches. These, in their turn, reflect the issues which constitute the complex nature of language and culture, and their mutual relationship. The authors’ interests encompass aspects related to the structural and rhetorical organization of languages approached both individually and cross-linguistically; first and second language acquisition; issues of translation and rendering considered from linguistic and cultural perspectives; and the cultural construction of meaning and identity as reflected in literature and art.

Download or read book From Grammar to Meaning written by Ivano Caponigro and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the study of formal semantics and formal pragmatics has grown tremendously, showing that core aspects of language meaning can be explained by a few principles. These principles are grounded in the logic that is behind - and tightly intertwined with - the grammar of human language. In this book, some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, including Noam Chomsky and Barbara H. Partee, offer new insights into the nature of linguistic meaning and pave the way for the further development of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. Each chapter investigates various dimensions in which the logical nature of human language manifests itself within a language and/or across languages. Phenomena like bare plurals, free choice items, scalar implicatures, intervention effects, and logical operators are investigated in depth and at times cross-linguistically and/or experimentally. This volume will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics.

Download or read book Alternatives in Semantics written by A. Falaus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a survey of the use of alternatives in semantics and pragmatics, and an overview of current approaches and applications of alternative-based semantics, from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.

Download or read book Interpreting Imperatives written by Magdalena Kaufmann and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-10-26 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperative clauses are recognized as one of the major clause types alongside those known as declarative and interrogative. Nevertheless, they are still an enigma in the study of meaning, which relies largely on either the concept of truth conditions or the concept of information growth—neither of which are easily applied to imperatives. This book puts forward a fresh perspective. It analyzes imperatives in terms of modalized propositions, and identifies an additional, presuppositional, meaning component that makes an assertive interpretation inappropriate. The author shows how these two elements can help explain the varied effects imperatives have, depending on their usage context. Imperatives have been viewed as elusive components of language because they have a range of functions that makes them difficult to unify theoretically. This fresh view of the semantics-pragmatics interface allows for a uniform semantic analysis while accounting for the pragmatic versatility of imperatives.

Download or read book Historical Linguistics 2009 written by Ans M.C. van Kemenade and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 428 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 The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean written by Anne Breitbarth and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The aim of both volumes is to set out an integrated framework for understanding the syntax of negation and how it changes. While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, this second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the patterns of historical change found in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean over the last millennium. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all. Language-internal factors such as the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the biases inherent in child language acquisition, are investigated alongside language-external factors such as imposition, convergence, and borrowing. The book proposes an explicit formal account of language-internal and contact-induced change for both the expression of sentential negation ('not') and negative indefinites ('anyone', 'nothing'). It sheds light on the major ways in which negative systems develop, on the nature of syntactic change, and indeed on linguistic change more generally, demonstrating the insights that large-scale comparison of linguistic histories can offer.

Download or read book Historical Linguistics 2011 written by Ritsuko Kikusawa and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of selected papers from the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Osaka, Japan, July 2011) presents a set of stimulating and ground-breaking studies on a wide range of languages and language families. As the scope of studies that can be characterized as ‘Historical Linguistics’ has expanded, ICHL conferences have likewise seen a broadening of topics presented, and this conference was no exception, reflected by the inclusion in this volume of a plenary presentation on the grammaticalization of expressions of negation and gendered kinship in American Sign Language. Three other papers propose new views of the role of grammaticalization in English, Chinese, and Niger-Congo languages. Four of the papers discuss specific problems that arise in the comparison and reconstruction of linguistic features in a range of languages from Asia, Europe and South America. The last six studies deal with innovative approaches to the historical development of suppletion in Romance languages, possessive classifiers in Austronesian, universal quantifiers in Germanic, adjectival sequences in English, exaptation in Celtic and Early English, and drift in Ancient Egyptian.

Download or read book Grammaticalization and Language Change written by Kristin Davidse and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective volume focuses on the latest developments in the study of grammaticalization and related processes of change such as degrammaticalization, constructionalization, lexicalization, and petrification. It addresses topical issues relating to the motivations, sources, defining features, and outcomes of these changes. New theoretical reflections are offered on the pragmatic motivation of grammaticalization paths, process-oriented differences between grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization, the question of gradualness and pace of grammaticalization, and deictics as a distinct source of grammaticalization. The articles describe various constructional and distributional changes affecting deictics, determiners, reflexives, clitics, nouns, affixes, adverbs and (auxiliary) verbs, mainly in the Germanic and Romance languages. The volume will be of great interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and related changes, and to all linguists working on the interface between morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.

Download or read book The size of things II written by Zheng Shen and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. This Volume II discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation while the contributions in Volume I focus on size and structure building. Part I of Volume II investigates how size interacts with head movement and various phrasal movement including left branch extraction, object shift, tough movement, and multiple wh movement. Part II of this volume discusses the role size plays in agreement and morphology-related matters like allomorphy. Contributions in Part III focus on semantic-oriented issues, in particular the size of reference domains and NPI licensing. The languages covered in this volume include American Sign Language, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and various other Slavic languages, German, Icelandic, dialects of Italian, Japanese, Nancowry, Panoan languages, and Tamil.

Download or read book The Syntax and Semantics of Yoruba Nominal Expressions written by Ajiboye, Oladiipo and published by M & J Grand Orbit Communications. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Landmarks Series is a research and publications outfit funded by the Landmarks Research Foundation to publish recent outstanding doctoral dissertations on any aspect of Nigerian linguistics, languages, literatures and cultures. This study is a departer from most previous work on Yorùbá Grammar in the sense that rather than being purely a descriptive grammar; it attempts to provide a theoretical analysis of the internal and external syntax of Yorùbá nominal expressions using the Chomskyan Principles and Parameters approach to syntax. This Generative theory attempts to characterize the grammar of all natural languages in terms of a set of universal principles that all languages share, and a set of parameters along which languages may vary. The book emphasizes the empirical motivation behind major theoretical proposals in that framework, and shows how views on the nature of universal grammar and cross-linguistic variation have developed over the years as a consequence of a massive increase in cross-linguistic syntactic research.

Download or read book The Precursors of Proto Indo European written by Alwin Kloekhorst and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European contains sixteen contributions that offer the newest insights into the prehistory of Proto-Indo-European, taking the Indo-Anatolian and the Indo-Uralic hypotheses as their point of departure.

Download or read book Wh exclamatives Imperatives and Wh questions written by Simone Guesser and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.

Download or read book Choix libre dans et hors contexte written by Evangelia Vlachou and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Polarity Sensitivity as non Veridical Dependency written by Anastasia Giannakidou and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polarity phenomena have been known to linguists since Klima's seminal work on English negation. In this monograph Giannakidou presents a novel theory of polarity which avoids the empirical and conceptual problems of previous approaches by introducing a notion wider than negation and downward entailment: (non)veridicality. The leading idea is that the various polarity phenomena observed in language are manifestations of the dependency of certain expessions, i.e. polarity items, to the (non)veridicality of the context of appearence. Dependencies to negation or downward entailment emerge as subcases of nonveridicality.The (non)veridical dependency may be positive (licensing), or negative (anti-licensing), and arises from the sensitivity semantics of polarity items. The book is also concerned with the syntactic mapping of the sensitivity dependency. It is argued that licensing does not necessarily correspond to a requirement that the licensee be in the scope of the licenser. In some cases, for instance for the interpretation of negative concord, the reverse is required: that the licensee takes the licenser in its scope. The theory is applied to an extended set of old and new data concerning affective, free-choice dependencies, and mood choice in relative clauses. The primary focus is on Greek, but data from Dutch, English, and to a lesser extend Romance and Slavic, are also considered.