Download or read book On Relativization and Clefting written by Chiara Branchini and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a contribution to our understanding of relativization strategies and clefting in Italian Sign Language, and more broadly, to our understanding of these constructions in world languages by setting the discussion on the theories that have been proposed in the literature of spoken languages to derive the syntactic phenomena object of investigation.

Download or read book On Relativization and Clefting written by Chiara Branchini and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a contribution to our understanding of relativization strategies and clefting in Italian Sign Language, and more broadly, to our understanding of these constructions in world languages by setting the discussion on the theories that have been proposed in the literature of spoken languages to derive the syntactic phenomena object of investigation.

Download or read book A Matter of Complexity written by Roland Pfau and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since natural languages exist in two different modalities – the visual-gestural modality of sign languages and the auditory-oral modality of spoken languages – it is obvious that all fields of research in modern linguistics will benefit from research on sign languages. Although previous studies have provided important insights into a wide range of phenomena of sign languages, there are still many aspects of sign languages that have not yet been investigated thoroughly. The structure of subordinated clauses is a case in point. The study of these complex syntactic structures in the visual-gestural modality adds to our understanding of linguistic variation in the domain of subordination. Moreover, it offers new empirical and theoretical evidence concerning possible structures and functions of subordination in natural languages. And last but not least, it answers the question to what extent the corresponding morphosyntactic and prosodic strategies depend on the modality of articulation and perception. This volume represents the first collection of papers by leading experts in the field investigating topics that go beyond the analysis of simple clauses. It thus contributes in innovative ways to recent debates about syntax, prosody, semantics, discourse structure, and information structure and their complex interrelation.

Download or read book Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian written by Sandra Chung and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian makes an outstanding contribution to both Polynesian and historical linguistics. It is at once a reference work describing Polynesian syntax, an investigation of the role of grammatical relations in syntax, and a discussion of ergativity, case marking, and other areas of syntactic diversity in Polynesian. In its treatment of the history of case marking in Polynesian, it attempts to specify what counts as evidence in syntactic reconstruction and how syntactic reanalysis progresses. It therefore represents a first step toward a general theory of syntactic change. Chung first describes the basic syntax of the Polynesian languages, discussing Maori, Tongan, Samoan, Kapingamarangi, and Pukapukan in depth. She then presents an investigation of the grammatical relations of these languages and their relevance to syntax and shows that the syntax of all these languages—even those with ergative case marking—revolves around the familiar grammatical relations subject and direct object. Finally the book traces the historical development of the different case systems from their origins in Proto-Polynesian.

Download or read book It Clefts written by Caterina Bonan and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed. The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume. Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more. The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles. Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.

Download or read book Checking Theory and Grammatical Functions in Universal Grammar written by Hiroyuki Ura and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ura demonstrates that his theory of multiple feature-checking, an extension of Chomsky's Agr-less checking theory, gives a natural explanation for a wide range of data drawn from a variety of languages in a very consistent way with a limited set of parameters.

Download or read book Dravidian Syntax and Universal Grammar written by K.A. Jayaseelan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises twenty eight papers selected from the widely known work of K.A. Jayaseelan and R. Amritavalli on Dravidian. Collectively, these papers cover the entire area of Dravidian syntax: they range from broad questions such as sentence structure and word order to more particular questions such as the morphological basis of anaphora, the genesis of lexical categories, the morpho-syntax of quantifiers, and the syntax and semantics of questions. Important universalist claims are embedded in these essays; for this reason, this volume will be of interest also to a student of the general theory of syntax. No future discussion of Dravidian (or South Asian) languages is possible without taking into account the insightful analyses set forth in these pages.

Download or read book On the Typology of Wh questions written by Lisa Lai Shen Cheng and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1997 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an explanation for a long-standing question in the typological distinction among languages with respect to formation of interrogatives which use questions words such as "who" and "what." Proposes that the availability of question particles and the properties of question words contribute to the typological distinctions found, and argues that the availability of question particles correlates with the lack of fronting of question words. Of interest to scholars working on interrogatives, syntactic theory, comparative syntax, Chinese syntax, and typology. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Approaches to Grammaticalization written by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of grammaticalization raises a number of fundamental theoretical issues pertaining to the relation of langue and parole, creativity and automatic coding, synchrony and diachrony, categoriality and continua, typological characteristics and language-specific forms, etc., and therefore challenges some of the basic tenets of twentieth century linguistics.This two-volume work presents a number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on grammaticalization and gives insights into the genesis, development, and organization of grammatical categories in a number of language world-wide, with particular attention to morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic issues. The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.

Download or read book Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African Context written by Magnus Huber and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first published full-scale study of the Ghanaian variety of West African Pidgin English (GhaPE) makes extensive use of hitherto neglected historical material and provides a synchronic account of GhaPE’s structure and sociolinguistics. Special focus is on the differences between GhaPE and other West African Pidgins, in particular the development of, and interrelations between, the different varieties of restructured English in West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Cameroon. This monograph further includes an overview of the history of Afro-European contact languages in Lower Guinea with special emphasis on the Gold Coast; an outline of the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone, with a description of how and when the transplantation of Sierra Leonean Krio to other West African countries took place; an analysis of the linguistic evidence for the origin, development, and spread of restructured Englishes on the Lower Guinea Coast; an account of the different varieties of GhaPE and their sociolinguistic status in the contemporary linguistic ecology of Ghana; as well as a comprehensive structural description of the “uneducated” variety of GhaPE. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM which contains illustrative material such as spoken GhaPE and photographs.

Download or read book The Free Word Order Phenomenon written by Joachim Sabel and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the syntax of the free word order phenomenon (scrambling) in a wide range of languages - in particular, German, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Tongan, and Turkish - in some of which the phenomenon was previously unstudied. In the past, the syntax of free word order phenomena has been studied intensively with respect to its A- and A'-movement properties and in connection with its semantic (undoing) effects. The different articles in this volume offer new ways of analyzing free word order under (i) minimalist assumptions, (ii) concerning the typology of scrambling languages, (iii) with respect to the question of how it is acquired by children, (iv) in connection with its relatedness to information structural factors, and (v) with respect to its consequences for a highly elaborated sentence structure of the IP/VP domain. The articles that focus mainly on the emprical aspects of free word order phenomena deal with the properties and proper analysis of rightwards scrambling in Turkish, with the A-/A'-nature and triggers for VSO-VOS alternations in Tongan, as well as with left-branch extractions and NP-Split in Slavic and its consequences for a typology of scrambling languages. The articles that focus on theoretical aspects of scrambling deal with questions concerning the motivatation of a derivation with scrambling in a free word order language, such as whether scrambling has to be analyzed as topicalization or focus movement. Or assuming that scrambling is feature-driven, how the technical details of this analysis are implemented in the grammar to avoid unwarranted derivations, for example, derivations with string-vacuous scrambling. A further important question that is addressed is when scrambling is acquired in the development of the grammar, and what the consequences are for the timing of the acquisition of A- and A'-movement properties. This volume will be most relevant to researchers and advanced students interested in generative syntax, as well as typologists working on German, Japanese, Slavic, Turkish, Dravidian and Austronesian languages. We regret that due to a layout error the title of Miyagawa's article on "EPP and semantically vacuous scrambling" is misrepresented in the printed version of the book. You can download the article with the corrected title here.

Download or read book Discourse and Syntax written by Talmy Givon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Relational Grammar of Kinyarwanda written by Alexandre Kimenyi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Voice Form and Function written by Barbara A. Fox and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1994-04-06 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume's central concern is grammatical voice, traditionally known as diathesis, and its classical manifestations as Active, Middle, and Passive. While numerous problems in the meaning, syntax, and morphology of these categories in Indo-European remain unsolved, their counterparts in more exotic languages have raised still further questions. What discourse functions and diachronic events unite 'voice' as a recognizable phenomenon across languages? How are they typically grammaticalized? What stages do children go through in learning them? How does 'voice' link up with ergativity and with other categories and constructions such as the Inverse and the Antipassive? The authors in this volume have different perspectives on these problems: they discuss voice, e.g., from a typological-universal view, in relation to language acquisition and to ergativity, and from diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives.

Download or read book SignGram Blueprint written by Josep Quer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 1009 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. Current grammatical knowledge about particular sign languages is fragmentary and of varying reliability, and it appears scattered in scientific publications where the description is often intertwined with the analysis. In general, comprehensive grammars are a rarity. The SignGram Blueprint is an innovative tool for the grammar writer: a full-fledged guide to describing all components of the grammars of sign languages in a thorough and systematic way, and with the highest scientific standards. The work builds on the existing knowledge in Descriptive Linguistics, but also on the insights from Theoretical Linguistics. It consists of two main parts running in parallel: the Checklist with all the grammatical features and phenomena the grammar writer can address, and the accompanying Manual with the relevant background information (definitions, methodological caveats, representative examples, tests, pointers to elicitation materials and bibliographical references). The areas covered are Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon, Syntax and Meaning. The Manual is endowed with hyperlinks that connect information across the work and with a pop-up glossary. The SignGram Blueprint will be a landmark for the description of sign language grammars in terms of quality and quantity.

Download or read book Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics written by Kunio Nishiyama and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dedicated to John B. Whitman, this collection of seventeen articles provides a forum for cutting-edge theoretical research on a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a wide variety of Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Austronesian, Indo-Aryan, and Thai. Ranging from syntax and morphology to semantics, acquisition, processing and phonology, from synchronic and/or diachronic perspectives, this collection reflects the breadth of the honoree’s research interests, which span multiple research subfields in numerous Asian languages.

Download or read book Themes in Arabic and Hebrew Syntax written by J. Ouhalla and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002-04-30 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection spans diverse themes in the syntax of Arabic, Modern Arabic dialects and Hebrew. The original contributors are written by specialists with an eye to both broad theoretical and conceptual issues as well as empirical detail. The editors' introduction sets in Generative Grammar. Among the topics discussed in this collection are VSO and SVO, cliticization and agreement, questions and the syntax of wh-movement, cognate objects, adjectival Construct State , Though construction, Gapping, causatives, the syntax of negation and the semantics of the Nominal sentence. It is the only collection of its kind targeting theoretical linguists and specialists in Semitic language alike.