Download or read book German Word Order Set Against English SVO Structure written by Barbara Groß-Langenhoff and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-07 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: Introduction: In comparison to English, the German language does not seem to have a specific word order. The distinction between grammatical functions like subjects or objects is mainly due to case-inflection and prepositions. For that reason, word order in German sentences can vary to some extent without a fundamental change in meaning. In the following analysis of German syntax, we are going to consider a possibility of finding the basic German word order. On the basis of the Government and Binding Theory, a widely accepted approach to syntactic analysis, we are going to argue that the structure of a subordinate clause underlies every German sentence. In doing so, we will find that the position of the verb will play a pivotal role. With the help of a clear characterisation, it becomes easier to understand German syntax and to contrast it with other languages such as English. Although the two languages are closely related in historical terms, German sentence structure differs from English SVO (subject-verb-object) word order, which we will examine in chapter III. But before we can embark on the study of English and German syntax, we need to introduce a considerable amount of terminology and syntactic principles, which will form the necessary set of rules in our subsequent analysis. Kurzer Überblick auf Deutsch: Diese Arbeit sucht auf der Grundlage der Government and Binding Theory nach der Basisstruktur eines jeden deutschen Satzes. Während in der englischen Sprache die Subjekt-Verb-Objekt-Struktur vorliegt, und man mit Blick auf deutsche Hauptsätze Gleiches im Deutschen vermuten könnte, so bringt diese Arbeit eine Vielzahl von Argumenten, die eine Subjekt-Objekt-Verb-Struktur in der deutschen Sprache nahe legen. Ungläubig? Eine kurze Übersetzung von "to sing a song" oder "to watch a movie" ver
Download or read book The World Atlas of Language Structures written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-21 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps - all in colour - display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals, tense, word order, and body part terminology. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description ofthe structural feature in question.The CD provides an interactive electronic version of the database which allows the reader to zoom in on or customize the maps, to display bibliographical sources, and to establish correlations between features. The book and the CD together provide an indispensable source of information for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages.The Atlas will be especially valuable for linguistic typologists, grammatical theorists, historical and comparative linguists, and for those studying a region such as Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe. It will also interest anthropologists and geographers. More than fifty authors from many different countries have collaborated to produce a work that sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to bewithout it.
Download or read book Deriving Syntactic Relations written by John S. Bowers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the fundamental building blocks of syntax are relations between words rather than constituents formed from words.
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 The Awful German Language written by Mark Twain and published by BVK. This book was released on 1880-05-15 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Awful German Language” is a humorous examination of the German language and the frustrations a native English speaker may have when learning it. The essay was published as Appendix D of “A Tramp Abroad” by Mark Twain in 1880.
Download or read book The Acquisition of German written by Anne Vainikka and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Acquisition of German: Introducing Organic Grammar brings together work on the acquisition of German from over four decades of child L1 and immigrant L2 learner studies. The book’s major feature is new longitudinal data from three secondary school students who began an exchange year in Germany with no German knowledge and attained fluency. Their naturalistic acquisition process — with a succession of stages described for the first time in L2 acquisition — is highly similar to that of younger learners. This has important implications for German teaching and for the theory of Universal Grammar and acquisition. Organic Grammar, a variant of generative syntax, is offered as a practical alternative to Chomsky’s Minimalism. The analysis focuses on extensive monthly samples of the three students’ German development in an input-rich environment. Similar to previous studies, the teenagers build syntactic structure from the bottom up. Two acquired correct word order by the end of the year, the third, who had greater conscious awareness of German grammar, had a divergent route of development, suggesting that language awareness can alter a natural developmental path. The results are addressed in light of recent debates in child-adult differences.
Download or read book Word Order Change written by Ana Maria Martins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax and offers new insights into word order, syntactic movement, and related phenomena. It draws on data from a wide range of languages including Sanskrit, Tocharian, Portuguese, Irish, Hungarian and Coptic Egyptian.
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 167 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 Poetry and Language written by Michael Ferber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible introduction to poetry's unusual uses of language that tackles a wide range of poetic features from a linguistic point of view. Equally appealing to the non-expert and more experienced student of linguistics, this book delivers an engaging and often witty summary of how we define what poetry is.
Download or read book The Role of Processing Complexity in Word Order Variation and Change written by Harry Joel Tily and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2010 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All normal humans have the same basic cognitive capacity for language. Nevertheless, the world's languages differ in the kind and number of grammatical options they give their speakers to express themselves with. Sometimes, a language's grammatical constructions may differ in how easy they are for comprehenders to process or how readily speakers will choose them. It has been observed that languages which allow more difficult constructions also tend to allow easier ones, and when a language only allows one option, it tends to allow the easiest to process. This correlation is intuitive: languages tend to give their speakers options that they find easy to use. However, the causal process that underlies it is not well understood. How did the world's languages come to have this convenient property? In this dissertation, I discuss a family of evolutionary models of language change in which processing-efficient variants tend to be selected more frequently, and hence over time have the potential to displace less efficient variants, pushing them out of the language. I begin by showing that a psycholinguistic theory, dependency length minimization, accounts for word ordering preferences in data taken from Old and Middle English just as it does in Present Day English. I then discuss computer simulations of a model of language change which implements this bias, predicting observed word order changes in English. Finally, I present experimental studies of online comprehension in Japanese which not only display evidence for the dependency length bias, but also suggest that comprehenders encode it as part of their knowledge about language, using it to help understand the sentences they receive from their peers.
Download or read book Morphosyntactic Change written by Bettelou Los and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax written by Marcel den Dikken and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 1412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.
Download or read book Phrase Structures in Competition written by Susan Pintzuk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates variation and change in Old English word order, with special emphasis on the position of the verb.
Download or read book Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages written by Sten Vikner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the study of two different kinds of variation across the Germanic languages. One involves the position of the finite verb, and the other the possible positions of the "logical" subject in constructions with expletive (or "dummy") subjects. The book applies the theory of Principles-and-Parameters to the study of comparative syntax. Several languages are considered, including less frequently discussed ones like Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Yiddish.
Download or read book Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German written by Agnes Jäger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.
Download or read book Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact written by Bettelou Los and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead, speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input, either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition, fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English, as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles, and in Romance.
Download or read book Word Order Universals written by John A Hawkins and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-05-19 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Word Order Universals
