Download or read book Lexical Perspectives on Transitivity and Ergativity written by Maarten Lemmens and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fusing insights from cognitive grammar, systemic-functional grammar and Government & Binding, the present work elaborates and refines Davidse’s view that the English grammar of lexical causatives is governed by the transitive and ergative paradigms, two distinct models of causation (Davidse 1991, 1992). However, on the basis of extensive synchronic and diachronic data on verbs of killing (e.g. kill, execute, choke or drown), it is shown that ‘transitivity’ and ‘ergativity’ are not absolute but prototypical characteristics of verbs which may be overruled by the semantics of the construal in which they occur. The variable transitive or ergative character of the verbs reveals the complex interaction between the semantics of the construction and that of the verb. The diachronic analyses further illustrate how in the course of time verbs may change their paradigmatic properties, either temporarily (e.g. the ergativization of strangle, throttle and smother) or permanently (e.g. the ‘causativization’ of starve or the partial transitivization of abort). The analyses show that these changes are semantically well-motivated and further illustrate the cognitive reality of the two causative models. The work explores the experiential basis of the prototypical paradigmatic behaviour of verbs (e.g. the ergative predilection of the SUFFOCATE verbs). In addition, it attempts to shed more light on the semantics and restrictions of certain constructions, such as the medio-passive, the derivation of adjectives in –able, or the derivation of agentive nominals in –er.

Download or read book Lexical Perspectives on Transitivity and Ergativity written by Maarten Lemmens and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fusing insights from cognitive grammar, systemic-functional grammar and Government & Binding, the present work elaborates and refines Davidse's view that the English grammar of lexical causatives is governed by the transitive and ergative paradigms, two distinct models of causation (Davidse 1991, 1992). However, on the basis of extensive synchronic and diachronic data on verbs of killing (e.g. kill, execute, choke or drown), it is shown that 'transitivity' and 'ergativity' are not absolute but prototypical characteristics of verbs which may be overruled by the semantics of the construal in which they occur. The variable transitive or ergative character of the verbs reveals the complex interaction between the semantics of the construction and that of the verb. The diachronic analyses further illustrate how in the course of time verbs may change their paradigmatic properties, either temporarily (e.g. the ergativization of strangle, throttle and smother) or permanently (e.g. the 'causativization' of starve or the partial transitivization of abort). The analyses show that these changes are semantically well-motivated and further illustrate the cognitive reality of the two causative models. The work explores the experiential basis of the prototypical paradigmatic behaviour of verbs (e.g. the ergative predilection of the SUFFOCATE verbs). In addition, it attempts to shed more light on the semantics and restrictions of certain constructions, such as the medio-passive, the derivation of adjectives in –able, or the derivation of agentive nominals in –er.

Download or read book Alignment and Ergativity in New Indo Aryan Languages written by Saartje Verbeke and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume investigates the different alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan and shows that the variation of alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan goes beyond the opposition between accusativity and ergativity. The book includes a thorough discussion of the concepts and terminology relating to alignment patterns. The study draws extensively on new language data from Indo-Aryan. It includes discussions of examples taken from Hindi, Sanskrit, Apabhramsa, Asamiya, Bangla, Oriya, the Bihari languages, Nepali, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Siraiki, Poguli, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marwari, Harauti, the Hindi varieties, and Shina. The volume offers a comprehensive overview of various alignment patterns in Indo-Aryan based on a wide range of data. By focusing on lesser known Indo-Aryan languages, the study questions the central position of Hindi-Urdu in the research on ergativity. Each language is treated in its own right, with a focus on language-specific data and analyses, rather than relying on a notional format that starts with pre-established linguistic concepts. In accordance with this methodology, much attention is paid to "indirect" connections between ergative constructions and other syntactic and semantic patterns in the various languages.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Romance Linguistics Phonetics phonology and dialectology written by Chiyo Nishida and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote addresses delivered by Prof. Jacques Durand on the Phonology of Contemporary French Project and Prof. John Charles Smith on skeuomorphy and refunctionalization. It also includes eleven contributions by reputed scholars on topics ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics and language variation. Formal phonology papers favor the model of Optimality Theory, while phonetic measurements serve as the basis for sociolinguistic and dialectometric studies. Many of these studies emphasize new comparative, typological approaches to Romance data (including many non-standard varieties of French, Italian and Spanish). This volume will be of interest to all Romance linguists.

Download or read book Chinese Lexical Semantics written by Xinchun Su and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-26 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15 Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2014, held in Macau, China, in June 2014. The 41 regular and 3 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 139 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: lexical semantics; applications on natural language processing; and lexical resources and corpus linguistics.

Download or read book Between Grammar and Lexicon written by Ellen Contini-Morava and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-04-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume has its origins in a theme session entitled: “Lexical and Grammatical Classification: Same or Different?” from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. It includes theme session presentations, additional papers from that conference, and several invited contributions. All the articles explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, both illustrating the close interaction, as well as questioning the strict dichotomy, between them. This volume promotes a holistic view of classification reflecting functional, cognitive, communication, and sign-oriented approaches to language which have been applied to both the grammar and the lexicon. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I, Number and Gender Systems Across Languages, is further subdivided into three sections: (1) Noun Classification; (2) Number Systems; and (3) Gender Systems. Part II, Verb Systems and Parts of Speech Across Languages, is divided into two sections: (1) Tense and Aspect and (2) Parts of Speech. The analyses represent a diverse range of languages and language families: Bantu (Swahili), Guaykuruan (Pilagá), Indo-European (English, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Spanish) and Semitic (Hebrew).

Download or read book Cognitive Linguistics Investigations written by June Luchjenbroers and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The total body of papers presented in this volume captures research across a variety of languages and language groups, to show how particular elements of linguistic description draw on otherwise separate aspects (or fields) of linguistic investigation. As such, this volume captures a diversity of research interest from the field of cognitive linguistics. These areas include: lexical semantics, cognitive grammar, metaphor, prototypes, pragmatics, narrative and discourse, computational and translation models; and are considered within the contexts of: language change, child language acquisition, language and culture, grammatical features and word order and gesture. Despite possible differences in philosophical approach to the role of language in cognitive tasks, these papers are similar in a fundamental way: they all share a commitment to the view that human categorization involves mental concepts that have fuzzy boundaries and are culturally and situation-based.

Download or read book Significance in Language written by Jim Feist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a unique perspective on meaning in language, broadening the scope of existing understanding of meaning by introducing a comprehensive and cohesive account of meaning that draws on a wide range of linguistic approaches. The volume seeks to build up a complete picture of what meaning is, different types of meaning, and different ways of structuring the same meaning across myriad forms and varieties of language across such domains, such as everyday speech, advertising, humour, and academic writing. Supported by data from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research, the book combines different approaches from scholarship in semantics, including formalist, structuralist, cognitive, functionalist, and semiotics to demonstrate the ways in which meaning is expressed in words but also in word order and intonation. The book argues for a revised conceptualisation of meaning toward presenting a new perspective on semantics and its wider study in language and linguistic research. This book will appeal to scholars interested in meaning in language in such fields as linguistics, semantics, and semiotics. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Download or read book English mediopassive constructions written by Marianne Hundt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first empirical study of the history and spread of mediopassive constructions. It investigates the productivity of the pattern, the spread of the construction in Modern English, and looks into text type-specific preferences for the construction. On a more abstract level, it combines the corpus-based description of mediopassive constructions with cognitive linguistic models, drawing largely on notions such as ‘prototype’, ‘family resemblances’, ‘patch’ and ‘construction’. The theoretical modelling is largely based on data from real texts. These come from publicly available machine-readable corpora, text-databases and a single-register ‘corpus’ (American mail-order catalogues). The study combines the corpus-based approach with cognitive theories and is therefore of interest to both empirical and theoretical linguists.

Download or read book Late Modern English Syntax written by Marianne Hundt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using increasingly sophisticated databases, this volume explores grammatical usage from the Late Modern period in a broad context.

Download or read book The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation written by Masayoshi Shibatani and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-05-31 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents fifteen original papers dealing with various aspects of causative constructions ranging from morphology to semantics with emphasis on language data from Central and South America. Informed by a better understanding of how different constructions are positioned both synchronically (e.g., on a semantic map) and diachronically (e.g., through grammaticalization processes), the volume affords a comprehensive up-to-date perspective on the perennial issues in the grammar of causation such as the distribution of competing causative morphemes, the meaning distinctions among them, and the overall form-meaning correlation. Morphosyntactic interactions of causatives with other phenomena such as incorporation and applicativization receive focused attention as such basic issues as the semantic distinction between direct and indirect causation and the typology of causative constructions.

Download or read book Morphology and Language History written by Claire Bowern and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-06-12 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian, Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this, reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.

Download or read book Language History written by Andrew L. Sihler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classroom-tested volume aspires to be a brief but technically and factually accurate exposition of linguistic description and history. Whether studied as prime subject or as background information, it should help students understand the assumptions and reasoning that underlie the contents of their handbooks and etymological dictionaries.This book should be a useful guide for anyone unfamiliar with (historical) linguistics who is studying the history of a language, and also for those who are enrolled in courses devoted to reading texts in old languages.

Download or read book Language written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 1018 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics written by and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2006 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume are a selection from papers presented at the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, held in Cambridge, UK, in 2002. They deal with a wide range of theoretical issues in varieties of Arabic.

Download or read book Indo Aryan Ergativity in Typological and Diachronic Perspective written by Eystein Dahl and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a state-of-the-art survey of synchronic and diachronic dimensions of Ergativity in the Indo-Aryan language family. It contains an introduction drawing on the most important recent typological and theoretical contributions to this field, plus seven papers about the origin, development and distribution of ergative alignment in ancient and modern Indo-Aryan languages written by well-established expert authors. The articles provide detailed explorations of language-specific synchronic systems or patterns of change, and large-scale studies of the distribution of ergative morphosyntax across the Indo-Aryan languages. The papers have a typological-functional approach and are based on thorough fieldwork experience and/or philological investigation. As the Indo-Aryan language family has played a paramount role in recent theories of Ergativity and of alignment typology and change, this volume is highly relevant to experts working on these languages and to scholars interested in grammatical relations and it will figure in all future debates in these fields