Download or read book Grammaticalization Paths of English and High German Existential Constructions written by Simone E. Pfenninger and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existential constructions are a fundamental feature of many Indo-European languages, and constructions with non-referential subjects have developed in all of the latter, albeit at different stages in their histories. High German does not feature a prototypical existential construction that is equivalent in syntactic and pragmatic function and semantic meaning to the English existential there-construction. How did a prototypical existential structure originate in English? Why is it that High German has never developed such a construction? Has it ever shown a tendency towards developing one? How did two closely related languages such as English and High German come to differ so much with respect to these constructions? By means of investigating a variety of historical and contemporary data this study shows that not only semantic, pragmatic and syntactic factors are involved, which decide the choice of a certain construction, but also very much the more general different linguistic development that the two languages underwent in the course of time.
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 Crossing Linguistic Boundaries written by Paloma Núñez-Pertejo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking away from previously rigid descriptions of the linguistic system of the English language, Crossing Linguistic Boundaries explores fascinating case studies which refuse to fall neatly within the traditional definitions of linguistic domains and boundaries. Bringing together leading international scholars in English linguistics, this volume focusses on these controversies in relation to seeking to overcome the temporal and geographical limits of the English language. Approaching tensions in the areas of English phonology and phonetics, pragmatics, semantics, morphology and syntax, chapters discuss not only British and American English but also a wide variety of geographical variants. Containing synchronic and diachronic studies covering different periods in the history of English, Crossing Linguistic Boundaries will appeal to anyone interested in linguistic variation in English.
Download or read book Linguistic Perspectives on a Variable English Morpheme written by Laura Rupp and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates –s marking in English verbs, specifically its manifestations in main verbs, in the past tense of BE, and in existential constructions. It embraces the many ways in which –s marking varies across the English speaking world, and considers both how it arose in these places historically and the ways in which it has since developed. The authors propose a story which holistically accounts for these different manifestations of –s, drawing upon evidence from a wide range of subdisciplines in linguistics, including sociolinguistics, generative syntax, historical linguistics, dialectology, and discourse-pragmatics. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in these and related fields.
Download or read book Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics written by Ole Schützler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By contrasting different approaches and datasets, this book highlights critical developments in latest corpus-linguistic research.
Download or read book Long Story Short An Interactive Journey through the History of English written by Paula Rodríguez Abruñeiras and published by Universitat de València. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook intends to do a clear, informal review of the history of the English language. Although the main focus is not to provide a thorough social description of the different periods in which the history of English is divided, we want to make it clear that language has changed because it is used by society, and therefore one cannot be understood without the other.
Download or read book Impersonal Constructions written by Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.
Download or read book Germanic Future Constructions written by Martin Hilpert and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-08-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a Construction Grammar approach to the historical development and modern usage of future constructions in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. On the basis of corpus data, constructions such as English be going to or German werden are analyzed as symbolic units that convey a range of temporal and modal meanings. A special focus lies on the main verbs that occur with these constructions. Statistical co-occurrence patterns between constructions and lexical items guide the semantic analyses in this study: It is argued that a construction that conventionally occurs with main verbs such as write or speak differs functionally from a construction that typically occurs with verbs such as rain or increase. The same approach is also applied historically: If a construction co-occurs with different main verbs at subsequent stages in time, this is seen as a sign of semantic change.
Download or read book Walking on the Grammaticalization Path of the Definite Article written by Renata Szczepaniak and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the grammaticalization of the definite article in German. It contains eight empirically-based papers which examine individual stages of the grammaticalization path from its beginnings as a demonstrative to the definite article and beyond. Focusing on cognitive, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic factors, the contributions not only address the development from pragmatic to semantic definiteness, but also deal with functional and formal changes starting as soon as the linguistic unit has acquired the function of marking semantic definiteness. Based on corpora spanning the entire history of the German language, from Old High German (750-1050) to present-day German, the analyses challenge the traditional linear model of grammaticalization and provide alternative pathways. What all the contributions have in common is the idea that the main grammaticalization path is accompanied or crossed by several side roads which lead to different destinations such as preposition-article-clitics, generic usages or onymic articles.
Download or read book Historical Linguistics 2017 written by Bridget Drinka and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collected articles in this volume address an array of cutting-edge issues in the field of historical linguistics, including new theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies for studying language through a diachronic lens. The articles focus on the following themes: I. Case & Argument Structure, II. Alignment & Diathesis, III. Patterns, Paradigms, & Restructuring, IV. Grammaticalization & Construction Grammar, V. Corpus Linguistics & Morphosyntax, VI. Languages in Contact. Papers reflect a wide range of perspectives, and focus on issues and data from an array of languages and language families, from new analyses of case and argument structure in Ancient Greek to phonological evidence for language contact in Vietnamese, from patterns of convergence in Neo-Aramaic to the development of the ergative in Basque. The volume contributes substantially to the debate surrounding core issues of language change: the role of the individual speaker, the nature of paths of grammaticalization, the role of contact, the interface of diachrony and synchrony, and many other issues. It should be useful to any reader hoping to gain insight into the nature of language change.
Download or read book Grammar Discourse Context written by Kristin Bech and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collected volume brings together a wide array of international linguists working on diachronic language change with a specific focus on the history of English, who work within usage-based frameworks and investigate processes of grammatical change in context. Although usage-based linguistics emphasizes the centrality of the discourse context for language usage and cognition, this insight has not been fully integrated into the investigation of processes of grammatical variation and change. The structuralist heritage as well as corpus linguistic methodologies have favoured de-contextualized analytical perspectives on contemporary and historical language data and on the mechanisms and processes guiding grammatical variation and change. From a range of different perspectives, the contributions to this volume take up the challenge of contextualization in the investigation of grammatical variation and change in different stages of English language history and discuss central theoretical notions such as gradable grammaticality, motivation in hypervariation, and hypercharacterization. The book will be relevant to students and linguists working in the field of diachronic and variational linguistics and English language history.
Download or read book Beyond Age Effects in Instructional L2 Learning written by Simone E. Pfenninger and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes a holistic study of how and why late starters surpass early starters in comparable instructional settings. Combining advanced quantitative methods with individual-level qualitative data, it examines the role of age of onset in the context of the Swiss multilingual educational system and focuses on performance at the beginning and end of secondary school, thereby offering a long-term view of the teenage experience of foreign language learning. The study scrutinised factors that seem to prevent young starters from profiting from their extended learning period and investigated the mechanisms that enable late beginners to catch up with early beginners relatively quickly. Taking account of contextual factors, individual socio-affective factors and instructional factors within a single longitudinal study, the book makes a convincing case that age of onset is not only of minimal relevance for many aspects of instructed language acquisition, but that in this context, for a number of reasons, a later onset can be beneficial.
Download or read book The grammatical Structures of English and German written by Herbert Leopold Kufner and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Expletives in Existentials written by Jutta Hartmann and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thesis refutes the generally accepted claim within Generative Grammar that English there is an expletive (meaningless element) that is only present to satisfy a syntactic requirement. Instead it is argued that there is a proform that picks up a situation (or location) from the context. There is a part of the predication structure in existential sentences, which state about the situation that it contains an individual (or amount of a property) specified by the postverbal noun phrase. New data that are relevant for the definiteness effect are presented and it is demonstrated that we need to distinguish between two types of there-sentences: the results of a Magnitude Estimation Experiment for example show that these so-called there-BE and there-V sentences behave differently with respect to wh-movement (among other differences). Therefore, the two construction types are analysed differently: in there-BE sentences, there is proposed to function as the subject of predication, whereas it functions as the predicate in there-V sentences (just like in the locative inversion construction). The thesis concludes with applying the result of the investigation of English there to German da, and shows that also da is a proform that can pick up locations, times and complex situations in the context. The study offers new insights into the analysis of existential sentences and has implications for the analysis of potential subject positions, the EPP, and the classification of expletives in the Germanic languages. It is therefore interesting for scholars working in these fields and syntax in general."--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Syntactic Change in Germanic written by Kate Burridge and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines certain features of Dutch syntax between approximately 1300 and 1650. Of central importance are the overall developments in the word order patterning and the various changes they entail elsewhere in the grammar, such as in the negative construction. After an introductory chapter providing goals and background for the study, the quantitative analysis of the data is presented in Chapter 2. Considerable attention is paid to contextual considerations and the pragmatic aspect of word order. Chapter 3 deals specifically with the question of exbraciation; Chapter 4 returns to the functional aspect of word order and discusses the importance of the notion 'topic'. Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of the development of negation supported by comparative data from related Germanic languages and in a wider context of overall typological change. The concluding chapter discusses possible explanations of the findings. Two Appendices are added to the book, one providing a sketch grammar of Dutch, the other an annotated list of the corpus used. This study is purposefully eclectic in its approach, drawing upon many different traditions and areas in linguistics. This multifaceted approach is a major strength of the book, which moreover makes an important contribution to theoretical issues by presenting a vast descriptive data base for Dutch.
Download or read book The grammatical Structures of English and German written by Herbert Leopold Kufner and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Studies on Old High German Syntax written by Katrin Axel and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is the first book-length study on Old High German syntax from a generative perspective in twenty years. It provides an in-depth exploration of the Old High German pre-verb-second grammar by answering the following questions: To what extent did generalized verb movement exist in Old High German? Was there already obligatory XP-movement to the left periphery in declarative root clauses? What deviations from the linear verb-second restriction are attested and what do such phenomena reveal about the structure of the left sentence periphery? Did verb placement play the same role in sentence typing as in the modern verb-second languages? A further major topic is null subjects: It is claimed that Old High German was a partial pro-drop language. All these issues are addressed from a comparative-diachronic perspective by integrating research on other Old Germanic languages, in particular on Old English and Gothic. This book is of interest to all those working in the fields of comparative Germanic syntax and historical linguistics.
