Download or read book Morphosyntax and Semantics of Degree Constructions written by Sophie Sophie Moracchini (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis investigates the morphosyntax and the semantics of comparatives and related degree constructions through the prism of a phenomenon called evaluativity, a type of inference whereby gradable adjectives receive a context-dependent interpretation. Pursuing the view that evaluativity is contributed by an optional null operator (EVAL, Rett 2008), this dissertation achieves the following results. First, it integrates a compositional analysis of evaluativity within a non-lexical view of antonymy. Second, it argues that the observed restrictions on the distribution of these inferences follow from independently motivated conditions that regulate the presence of the EVAL operator at the interfaces. In particular, three interface conditions are identified and discussed in detail: ++ At Logical Form (LF), derivations are subject to a structural economy condition, Minimize APs!, which executes transderivational comparisons over semantically equivalent Adjectival Phrases (APs). The inclusion of EVAL in a parse licenses derivations that would otherwise be deemed deviant by this economy condition. ++ At Phonological Form (PF), the EVAL morpheme morphophonologically interacts with its surrounding environment. Specifically, EVAL is claimed to be a zero-morpheme subject to Myers Generalization, a PF-filter on syntactic derivations which prevents further morphological operations from applying to a zeroderived form. A consequence of this claim is that EVAL is licensed in derivations only where it does not disrupt post-syntactic operations that apply within the AP. ++ The distribution of EVAL is conditioned by aspects of Information Structure. In particular, in degree constructions that license contrastive adjectives, the distribution of focus is governed by (AvoIDF) which, in turn, interacts with conditions on deletion. Ultimately, the presence of EVAL can license a surface form which would otherwise get eliminated by PF-deletion. In essence, the grammatical account of evaluativity developed in this thesis offers a window into the word-internal structure of complex degree expressions and presents new insights into the semantic and morphosyntactic primitives of the degree domain.
Download or read book Interactions of Degree and Quantification written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interactions of Degree and Quantification examines connections and semantic parallels between individual and degree quantifiers in the expression of quantity and measurement in human language.
Download or read book Rich Descriptions and Simple Explanations in Morphosyntax and Language Acquisition written by Giuliano Bocci and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters explore the debate between Cartography and Minimalism: on the one hand, the need for detailed and articulated descriptions of the clausal architecture, and on the other, the endeavor to reduce the theoretical apparatus to fundamental computational mechanisms. The first part of the book begins with a reflection on the goals of modern linguistic theory, and investigates the principles of human language, in an effort to subsume the regularities of particular grammars under a small set of morphosyntactic and semantic primitives. The second part examines the clausal structure - both the CP-layer and the IP-layer - from a comparative perspective, which directly relates to the fundamental questions of universality, linguistic variation, and learnability addressed in the first part of the book. With chapters written by world-leading linguists who analyze a wide range of old and new phenomena, the volume will be a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in theoretical linguistics and language development.
Download or read book Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation written by Itamar Francez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical items. In this volume, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden contrast these views as applied to the empirical domain of property concept sentences - sentences expressing adjectival predication and their translational equivalents across languages. They demonstrate that property concept sentences vary systematically between possessive and predicative form, and propose a transparentist analysis of this variation that links it to the lexical denotations of basic property concept lexemes. At the heart of the analysis are qualities: mass-like model theoretic objects that closely resemble scales. The authors contrast their transparentist analysis with uniformitarian alternatives, demonstrating its theoretical and empirical advantages. They then show that the proposed theory of qualities can account for interesting and novel observations in two central domains of grammatical theory: the theory of syntactic categories, and the theory of mass nouns. The overall results highlight the importance of the lexicon as a locus of generalizations about the limits of crosslinguistic variation.
Download or read book Degree Modification in Natural Language written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Constructions in Use written by Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semantics is one of the core disciplines of philosophy of language. There are basically two strands of established theories: use-based and truth-conditional, with the latter being the dominant variety. This dominance has been questioned recently by linguists who embrace a research paradigm that is known as construction grammar. As construction grammar is use-based, it seems natural to suppose that its success is indirect support for use-based semantics in philosophy. This is true. But there's still a lot to do. Although there are use-based theories that fit quite well with current research in linguistics, they are far from being perfect. In particular, the most popular theory in that area is still tied to some of the main motivations behind truth-conditional semantics. 'Constructions in Use' offers an alternative by proposing to let this legacy go. Instead, it argues that philosophical semantics is best off if it goes for an entirely use-based theory. This series explores issues of mental representation, linguistic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center 'The structure of representations in language, cognition and science' (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts.
Download or read book One to many relations in morphology syntax and semantics written by Berthold Crysmann and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories.
Download or read book Morphosyntactic Change written by Olga Fischer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a critical comparison of the two leading theories of linguistic change. After introducing the aims and methods of historical linguistics, Olga Fischer provides an exposition of the main theories used to describe morphosyntactic change and a full account of the causes and mechanisms by which their leading exponents seek to explain it. She measures the effectiveness of rival theories and methods in different contexts and in the process throws fresh light on the balance of factors influencing linguistic change. Professor Fischer emphazises the unity of form and meaning in the linguistic sign and examines the role played by analogy. She looks at how changes in discourse, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, and sound interact with changes in morphosyntax, and explores the relationship between external and internal causes of change. She considers whether morphosyntactic change is gradual or abrupt and discusses how far rates of change reflect the degree to which grammar is innate or learned. She uses detailed case studies to illustrate different types of morphosyntactic change, and to show how each theory fares when put into practice. The author's clear style and her balanced approach to this fascinating and complex subject combine to make this a book that will be of central interest and value to scholars and students of linguistic change, at graduate level and above.
Download or read book Morphosyntax written by William Croft and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a functional approach, this book provides a thorough overview of Morphosyntax, and sets out a framework for syntactic constructions.
Download or read book Affectedness at the Morphosyntax Semantics Interface written by Semra Kızılkaya and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monograph explores the semantic and morphosyntactic representation of affectedness, i.e., the property of an event participant to undergo change, in transitive predicates. Specifically, it provides a first in-depth investigation of how affectedness, the notion of path, and resultativity determine Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Turkish. It argues that affectedness is the crucial event semantic characteristic enhancing DOM, and articulates a theoretical link between affectedness in the lexical syntactic structure and morphological accusative marking. The study addresses affectedness from a cross-linguistic perspective and makes a remarkable contribution to our understanding and modelling of the syntax-semantics interface.
Download or read book Nouns and the Morphosyntax Semantics Interface written by Laure Gardelle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Semantic Variability of Absolute Constructions written by G.T. Stump and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of this book is to investigate the semantics of absolute constructions in English; specifically, my object is to provide an explanation for the semantic variability of such constructions. As has been widely noted in traditional grammatical studies of English, free adjuncts and absolute phrases have the ability to playa number of specific logical roles in the sentences in which they appear; yet, paradoxically, they lack any overt indication of their logical connection to the clause which they modify. How, then, is the logical function of an absolute construction determined? In attempting to answer this question, one must inevitably address a number of more general issues: Is the meaning assigned to a linguistic expression necessarily determined by linguistic rules, or can the grammar of a language in some cases simply underdetermine the interpretation of expressions? Are the truthconditions of a sentence ever sensitive to the inferences of language users? If so, then is it possible to maintain the validity of any really substantive version of the Compositionality Principle? These are, of course, issues of great inherent interest to anyone concerned with the formal syntax and semantics of natural language, with the philosophy of language, or with language processing. The descriptive framework assumed throughout is the semantic theory developed by Richard Montague (1970a, 1970b, 1973) and his followers. (For a very thorough introduction to Montague semantics, the reader may refer to Dowty, Wall and Peters (1981 ).
Download or read book The Semantic Variability of Absolute Constructions written by Gregory Stump and published by Springer. This book was released on 1984-12-31 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of this book is to investigate the semantics of absolute constructions in English; specifically, my object is to provide an explanation for the semantic variability of such constructions. As has been widely noted in traditional grammatical studies of English, free adjuncts and absolute phrases have the ability to playa number of specific logical roles in the sentences in which they appear; yet, paradoxically, they lack any overt indication of their logical connection to the clause which they modify. How, then, is the logical function of an absolute construction determined? In attempting to answer this question, one must inevitably address a number of more general issues: Is the meaning assigned to a linguistic expression necessarily determined by linguistic rules, or can the grammar of a language in some cases simply underdetermine the interpretation of expressions? Are the truthconditions of a sentence ever sensitive to the inferences of language users? If so, then is it possible to maintain the validity of any really substantive version of the Compositionality Principle? These are, of course, issues of great inherent interest to anyone concerned with the formal syntax and semantics of natural language, with the philosophy of language, or with language processing. The descriptive framework assumed throughout is the semantic theory developed by Richard Montague (1970a, 1970b, 1973) and his followers. (For a very thorough introduction to Montague semantics, the reader may refer to Dowty, Wall and Peters (1981 ).
Download or read book Syntax and Morphology Multidimensional written by Andreas Nolda and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-08-29 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects papers that discuss theoretical or empirical problems from a multidimensional view of syntax and morphology, presupposing frameworks such as LFG, HPSG, the Parallel Architecture, or Integrational Linguistics, where syntactic and morphological objects are conceived as constructs with multiple, interrelated components.
Download or read book Boundaries Crossed at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax Phonology Pragmatics and Semantics written by Huba Bartos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a selection of interface studies in generative linguistics, a valuable “one-stop shopping” opportunity for readers interested in the ways in which the various modules of linguistic analysis intersect and interact. The boundaries between the lexicon and morphophonology, between morphology and syntax, between morphosyntax and meaning, and between morphosyntax and phonology are all being crossed in this volume. Though its focus is on theoretical approaches, experimental studies are also included. The empirical focus of many of the contributions is on Hungarian, and several chapters respond to work published by István Kenesei, to whom the volume is dedicated.
Download or read book Constructions in Use written by Alexander auf der Straße and published by Düsseldorf University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semantics is one of the core disciplines of philosophy of language. There are basically two strands of established theories: use-based and truth-conditional, with the latter being the dominant variety. This dominance has been questioned recently by linguists who embrace a research paradigm that is known as construction grammar. As construction grammar is use-based, it seems natural to suppose that its success is indirect support for use-based semantics in philosophy. This is true. But there's still a lot to do. Although there are use-based theories that fit quite well with current research in linguistics, they are far from being perfect. In particular, the most popular theory in that area is still tied to some of the main motivations behind truth-conditional semantics.?Constructions in Use? offers an alternative by proposing to let this legacy go. Instead, it argues that philosophical semantics is best off if it goes for an entirely use-based theory.0This series explores issues of mental representation, linguistic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center?The structure of representations in language, cognition and science? (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts.
Download or read book Defining Construction Insights into the Emergence and Generation of Linguistic Representations written by Mike Putnam and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
