Download or read book Redefining Indefinites written by Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the interpretation of indefinites and the constraints on their distribution by paying particular attention to key issues in the interface between syntax and semantics: the relation between the semantic properties of indefinite determiners and the denotation of indefinite DPs, their scope, and their behaviour in generic and conditional sentences. Examples come from French, other Romance languages and English. Central to the proposed analyses is a distinction between two types of entities, individualized entities and amounts. Weak indefinites are analyzed as existential generalized quantifiers over amounts and strong indefinites as either Skolem terms or generalized quantifiers over individualized entities. The up-to-date review of the literature and the new falsifiable proposals contained in this book will be of particular interest to linguistics students and scholars interested in the cross-linguistic semantics of indefinites.
Download or read book Countability in Natural Language written by Hana Filip and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together an international group of researchers, this innovative volume presents the state-of-the-art in research into countability.
Download or read book Functional Heads written by Laura Brugé and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cartographic project considers evidence for a functional head in one language as evidence for it in universal grammar. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self contained case studies.
Download or read book Genericity written by Alda Mari and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics. It gathers new work from senior and young researchers and is organized along three main areas of study: the generic and individuals; genericity and time; and the sources of genericity and types of judgment.
Download or read book Functional Heads Volume 7 written by Laura Brugé and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-20 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, functional heads have been one of the privileged objects of research in generative linguistics. However, within this line of inquiry, two alternative approaches have developed: while the cartographic project considers crosslinguistic evidence as crucial for a complete mapping of functional heads in universal grammar, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as literally involving a reduction in the number of available heads. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self-contained case studies. The contributions cover all the main layers of recently studied syntactic structure, including such major areas of empirical research as grammaticalization and language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects of syntactic structure according to the cartographic approach, and in doing so demonstrates that the differences between cartography and minimalism are perhaps more superficial than substantial.
Download or read book Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13 written by Janine Berns and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-07-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the three decades of its existence, the annual Going Romance conference has turned out to be the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current theoretical ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are exchanged. The twenty-ninth Going Romance conference was organized by the Radboud University and took place in December 2015 in Nijmegen. The present volume contains a selection of 18 peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages. They represent the wide range of topics at the conference and the variety of research carried out on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and in general linguistics.
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax 8 Volume Set written by Martin Everaert and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-12-26 with total page 5254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable reference tool for students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition has been updated to incorporate the last 10 years of syntactic research and expanded to include a wider array of important case studies in the syntax of a broad array of languages. A revised and expanded edition of this invaluable reference tool for students and researchers in linguistics, now incorporating the last 10 years of syntactic research Contains over 120 chapters that explain, analyze, and contextualize important empirical studies within syntax over the last 50 years Charts the development and historiography of syntactic theory with coverage of the most important subdomains of syntax Brings together cutting-edge contributions from a global group of linguists under the editorship of two esteemed syntacticians Provides an essential and unparalleled collection of research within the field of syntax, available both online and across 8 print volumes This work is also available as an online resource at www.companiontosyntax.com
Download or read book Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal.
Download or read book On Goodness written by David Conan Wolfsdorf and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Goodness attempts to answer the question "What is goodness?" It is natural to associate this question with ethics; but goodness is not confined to ethics. Water and wine, a strategy for streamlining maintenance operations, and an oil painting may all be good and in non-ethical ways. Goodness figures prominently in ethics; so the study serves ethics. But it serves other domains as well. On Goodness is a contribution to the foundations of value theory. It is also a metaphysical inquiry, for two reasons. As the examples indicate, the entity under investigation is extremely general. Goodness occurs in potables, plans, and paintings, among countless other kinds of things. Second, it is particularly obscure what sort of being the entity is. Besides the description "good," is there a single thing that good drinks, strategies, and artworks share? Is their goodness related in a more complex way? And regardless of these relations, in any instance, just what is that goodness? The question "What is goodness?" has been central to philosophy since Socrates and Plato made it their polestar. The distinctive contribution of On Goodness lies in its methodology. The method of pursuing the metaphysical question is linguistic. The basic proposal is that achieving the answer depends on clarifying the meaning and use of the words "good" and "goodness." Consequently, the study is pervasively informed by and critically engaged with contemporary linguistic theories and ideas.
Download or read book THE SEMANTICS OF ROMANIAN UNIVERSAL FREE CHOICE ITEM ORICE written by MARA PANAITESCU and published by Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended as an addition to the studies on the semantics of determiners, more precisely an analysis of the phenomenon of free choice in the framework of possible words semantics.
Download or read book Non prototypical Clefts in French written by Lena Karssenberg and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties. In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts, the strength of the study lies in the critical approach it develops to the common definition of clefts. Several commonly used criteria for clefts are applied to the corpus data, revealing that these criteria often lead to ambiguous results. The reasons for this ambiguity are explored, thus leading to a better understanding of what constitutes a cleft. In this sense, the analysis will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.
Download or read book Majority Quantification and Quantity Superlatives written by Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across languages. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Ion Giurgea draw on data from around 40 languages to demonstrate the existence of two distinct semantic types of most: a distributive type, which compares cardinalities of sets of atoms, and a cumulative type, which involves measuring plural and mass entities with respect to a whole. On the syntactic side, the most significant difference is between partitive and non-partitive configurations: certain majority quantifiers are specific to partitive constructions, while others are also allowed in non-partitives. The volume also explores complex expressions of the type the largest part and nominal quantifiers of the type the majority. The authors argue in favour of a quantificational analysis of most, in contrast to many recent studies, but adopt a bipartition-cum-superlative analysis for the largest part. The volume is a large-scale crosslinguistic investigation, offering typological insights as well as case studies from a range of languages, including German, Romanian, Hungarian, Hindi, and Syrian Arabic. The findings have implications for the study of number marking, partitivity, kind reference, (in)definiteness marking, and other crucial issues in linguistic theory.
Download or read book Definiteness Effects written by Susann Fischer and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores in detail the empirical and conceptual content of the definiteness effect in grammar. It brings together a variety of relevant observations from a typological, diachronic and a bilingual/second language acquisition perspective, and provides a general overview of different approaches concerned with the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the Definiteness Effect in a series of European and non-European languages.
Download or read book The Syntax and Semantics of Pseudo Incorporation written by Olga Borik and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together recent research on the semantics and syntax of pseudo-incorporation (PI), which is a construction of crucial significance for linguistic explorations as it brings together several fundamental areas of linguistic research, such as morphology, argument structure, modification, discourse and information structure. The main purpose of the book is to further improve our understanding of the phenomenon, expand the domain of inquiry by bringing into focus new empirical data from a wide array of languages, offer new formal analyses of PI, and strengthen the links with other related phenomena, such as bare nominals. Focusing on various properties of PI the articles in this volume set an excellent ground for further expansion of research in PI and related topics. Contributors are Michael Barrie, Olga Borik, Veneeta Dayal, Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, Werner Frey, Berit Gehrke, Ion Giurgea, Audrey Li, Fereshteh Modarresi, Olav Mueller-Reichau, Natalia Serdobolskaya, and Henriëtte de Swart.
Download or read book Partitive Determiners Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case written by Petra Sleeman and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to considerable advances in research, the fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive elements across European languages is far from being well-described, let alone well-understood. There are two main obstacles to this: on the one hand, theoretical linguistics and typological linguistics are fragmented in different methodological approaches that hinder the full sharing of cross-theoretic advances; on the other hand, partitive elements have been analyzed in restricted linguistic environments, which would benefit from a broader perspective. The aim of the PARTE project, from which this volume stems, is precisely to bring together linguists of different theoretical approaches using different methodologies to address this notion in its many facets. This volume focuses on Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case in European languages, their emergence and spread in diachrony, their acquisition by L2 speakers, and their syntax and interpretation. The volume is the first to provide such an encompassing insight into the notion of partitivity.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond written by Johannes Kabatek and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book envisions the study of bare noun phrases as a field of research in its own right rather than an accessory matter in the wider domain of nominal determination. Combining insights from different theoretical backgrounds and extending the empirical coverage of bare noun phenomena, the ten contributions provide new perspectives on long-standing but still actively debated problems as well as investigations into previously ignored issues. The volume focuses on the wide range of bare noun phenomena in Romance languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Italian and French; but also widens its inherently comparative perspective to languages such as Bulgarian and Modern Hebrew. The authors discuss the importance of cross-linguistic patterns in the modeling of the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and of common noun denotations, the role of information structure as well as that of discourse traditions and coordination.
Download or read book Symmetrizing Syntax written by Hiroki Narita and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Symmetrizing Syntax seeks to establish a minimal and natural characterization of the structure of human language (syntax), simplifying many facets of it that have been redundantly or asymmetrically formulated. Virtually all past theories of natural language syntax, from the traditional X-bar theory to the contemporary system of Merge and labeling, stipulate that every phrase structure is "asymmetrically" organized, so that one of its elements is always marked as primary/dominant over the others, or each and every phrase is labeled by a designated lexical element. The two authors call this traditional stipulation into question and hypothesize, instead, that linguistic derivations are essentially driven by the need to reduce asymmetry and generate symmetric structures. Various linguistic notions such as Merge, cyclic derivation by phase, feature-checking, morphological agreement, labeling, movement, and criterial freezing, as well as parametric differences among languages like English and Japanese, and so on, are all shown to follow from a particular notion of structural symmetry. These results constitute novel support for the contemporary thesis that human language is essentially an instance of a physical/biological object, and its design is governed by the laws of nature, at the core of which lies the fundamental principle of symmetry. Providing insights into new technical concepts in syntax, the volume is written for academics in linguistics but will also be accessible to linguistics students seeking an introduction to syntax.
