Download or read book Functional Structure in Morphology and the Case of Nonfinite Verbs written by Peter Juul Nielsen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Peter Juul Nielsen examines the foundations of morphological theory from a structural-functional perspective on language as a sign system. He offers a framework for the analysis of morpheme relations based on a thorough discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure, indexical relations, zero as meaningful absence and morphological relations across grammatical categories. It is argued that when paradigmatically related morphological structures have different syntactic functions, the semantics of the paradigmatic opposition consists in the specification of functional potential. The framework is applied in three detailed studies of Danish nonfinite verbs presenting new accounts of their morphological structure, semantic coding and paradigmatic organisation.

Download or read book Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change written by Lars Heltoft and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis, actualization, and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use, a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system, both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology, word order, and constructional syntax.

Download or read book Indexicality written by Peter Juul Nielsen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers the first full-scale focused treatment of linguistic indexicality as a tool for analysis and explanation of the organization of linguistic structures. The book demonstrates the application of the concept of indexicality in the description of a broad range of linguistic phenomena, from the internal workings of morphology via relations within syntactic constructions to lexical and grammatical elements designed to hook on to features outside the clause in the interactional context. The book presents studies of the role of indexicality in synchrony and diachrony with descriptive cases from a number of languages from diverse language families. Part I focuses on the general nature of linguistic indexicality in the larger perspective of the semiotics of language, including examinations of domain-straddling indexical functions. Part II focuses on the role of indexicality in diachrony and the way it enters into the mechanisms of change, including examinations of semiotic shifts from indexical to symbolic function and vice versa. The book is relevant for researchers and students in historical and synchronic linguistics from a variety of linguistic frameworks with an interest in the role of semiotics in linguistic analysis.

Download or read book Ditransitives in Germanic Languages written by Eva Zehentner and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family.

Download or read book Paradigms regained Theoretical and empirical arguments for the reassessment of the notion of paradigm written by Gabriele Diewald and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume discusses the breadth of applications for an extended notion of paradigm. Paradigms in this sense are not only tools of morphological description but constitute the inherent structure of grammar. Grammatical paradigms are structural sets forming holistic, semiotic structures with an informational value of their own. We argue that as such, paradigms are a part of speaker knowledge and provide necessary structuring for grammaticalization processes. The papers discuss theoretical as well as conceptual questions and explore different domains of grammatical phenomena, ranging from grammaticalization, morphology, and cognitive semantics to modality, aiming to illustrate what the concept of grammatical paradigms can and cannot (yet) explain.

Download or read book Semantic Syntax written by Pieter Seuren and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first and so far only formally precise machinery converting well-motivated semantic sentence representations into actual sentences of English, French, German and Dutch. It focuses on the auxiliary and complementation systems of the languages concerned.

Download or read book Functional Structure in Nominals written by Artemis Alexiadou and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph offers an in depth investigation of nominalization processes across languages e.g. Greek, Germanic, Romance, Hebrew, Slavic. Adopting and extending the view that category formation does not involve any lexical operation (recently put forth within the framework of Distributed Morphology), it shows how the behavior of nominals as opposed to that of verbs follows from general processes operating in specific syntactic structures, and is linked with the presence or absence of functional layers (T, D, Aspect, v). It further defines criteria on the basis of which the organization of nominal functional structure can be determined. Moreover, it demonstrates how nominals split into several types, across languages and within a language, depending on the number and the type of functional projections they include. Furthermore, it substantiates the hypothesis that aspects of the syntax of DPs of nominative-accusative languages are strikingly similar to aspects of the syntax of ergative languages and discusses aspects of the syntax of the perfect. The book targets researchers in theoretical linguistics, comparative syntax, morphology and typology. It can also be used as a foundation book on the morpho-syntax of nominals, argument structure and word formation.

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 Malayalam Verbs written by Amanda Swenson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-09-23 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, using Malayalam as a case study, provides an in-depth exploration of how inflectional suffixes should be separated from the verb and the implications this has for the syntax and semantics. Past work has proposed that Malayalam lacks a Tense Phrase and tense morphology, i.e. is ‘tenseless’. However, this book shows that Malayalam behaves differently from other tenseless languages and that it does have tense morphology. It also provides evidence that there is a Tense Phrase in the syntax. In addition, it examines what have been called the two 'imperfectives' and argues that one is a type of progressive, while the other is a pluractional marker and shows that Malayalam lacks perfect morphology and a Perfect Phrase in, minimally, Universal perfects. With respect to finiteness, among other things, it argues that Conjunctive Participles are best analyzed as a type of absolutive adjunct and that -athu ‘gerunds’ involve nominalization above the Tense Phrase-level. This book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in cross-linguistic variation in Tense-Aspect-Modality and/or the morphosyntax or morphosemantics of Dravidian languages.

Download or read book Cognitive Processes and Economic Behaviour written by Marcello Basili and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the understanding of the cognitive foundations of economic behavior has become increasingly important. This volume contains contributions from such leading scholars as Adam Brandenburger, Michael Bacharach and Patrick Suppes. It will be of great interest to academics and researchers involved in the field of economics and psychology as well as those interested in political economy more generally.

Download or read book The Structure of CP and IP written by Luigi Rizzi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this edited volume is to study the structure of the inflectional field and the left peripheral field of clauses, often described as the systems of IP (Inflection Phrase) and CP (Complementizer Phrase).

Download or read book Particle Verbs and Local Domains written by Jochen Zeller and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new account of particle verbs in German and Dutch by looking at the conditions under which a non-morphological structure may exhibit “word-like” properties. It shows that although particles are represented as phrasal complements of their verbs, they lack the functional structure which is usually associated with phrases. The author uses the concept of a “local domain”, which can be established by terminal nodes both in syntax and in morphology, to demonstrate why the impoverished syntactic structure of particle verbs shares important features of complex words derived in morphology. The analysis is substantiated through a detailed study of the syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of particle verbs. Special attention is given to the relevance of local domains for the association of lexical information about sound and meaning with terminal nodes in morphological and syntactic structures.

Download or read book Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change written by David Lightfoot and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussing the nature and causes of language change, the authors of this text consider how far changes in morphology cause changes in syntax, and examine such phenomena from the perspective of syntactic and psycholinguistic theory.

Download or read book Case and Other Functional Categories in Finnish Syntax written by Anders Holmberg and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Download or read book English Grammar written by Liliane Haegeman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1998-04-08 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended primarily for undergraduate students of English, though it will also be useful for undergraduates in linguistics focusing on English. It shows how a restricted set of principles can account for a wide range of the phenomena of English syntax. While the main focus of the book is empirical, it introduces important theoretical concepts: theta theory, X-bar theory, case theory, locality, binding theory, economy, full interpretation, functional projections. In doing so it prepares the student for more advanced theoretical work. The authors integrate many recent insights into the nature of syntactic structure into their discussion. They present information in a gradual way: hypotheses developed in early chapters are reviewed and modified in subsequent ones. The authors also pay attention to the relation between structure and interpretation and to language variation, and particularly to register variation. They include a wide range of diverse exercises, giving the student an opportunity for creative individual work on English.

Download or read book Morphology Driven Syntax written by Bernhard Wolfgang Rohrbacher and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-06-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that syntactic parameters are set in a principled fashion on the basis of overt functional morphology. The main focus of the book is on the different positions of the finite verb in the Germanic SVO languages. In addition, other syntactic phenomena (null subjects, transitive expletive constructions and object shift) and other language families (Romance, Semitic and Slavic) are discussed. A common explanation for all of the discussed phenomena is proposed: If and only if the features for “person” are distinctively marked by the agreement morphology, the agreement affixes are listed separately in the lexicon and project phrases of their own in syntax where they attract the verb to the head positions and allow the specifier positions to be filled by various phonologically (un)realized elements. Special attention is given to issues of historical development and child language acquisition.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics written by Jeffrey Lidz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and processing continuous speech. Part III moves on to the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives. In Part IV, chapters consider semantic aspects of language acquisition, including the expression of genericity, quantification, and scalar implicature. Finally, Parts V and VI look at theories of learning and aspects of atypical language development respectively.