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 Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages written by Elliott Lash and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book showcases the state of the art in the corpus-based linguistics of medieval Celtic languages. Its chapters detail theoretical advances in analysing variation/change in the Celtic languages and computational tools necessary to process/analyse the data. Many contributions situate the Celtic material in the broader field of corpus-based diachronic linguistics. The application of computational methods to Celtic languages is in its infancy and this book is a first in medieval Celtic Studies, which has mainly concentrated on philological endeavours such as editorial and literary work. The Celtic languages represent a new frontier in the development of NLP tools because they pose special challenges, like complicated inflectional morphology with non-straightforward mappings between lemmata and attested forms, irregular orthography, and consonant mutations. With so much data available in non-electronic form and ongoing efforts to convert these data to computer-readable format, there is much room for the developing/testing of new tools. This books provides an overview of this process at a crucial time in the development of the field and aims to the data accessible to computational linguists with an interest in diachronic change.
Download or read book Introducing Semantics written by Nick Riemer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the study of meaning in language for undergraduate students.
Download or read book Morphosyntactic Change written by Bettelou Los and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.
Download or read book Semantics and morphosyntactic variation qualities and the grammar of property concepts written by Itamar Francez and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores why different languages have systematically different ways of saying the same thing. It focuses on adjectival predication and shows that systematic differences in the meaning of words expressing adjectival notions have systematic effects on the form of the sentences they appear in
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 Semantic Variation written by Ruqaiya Hasan and published by Equinox Publishing (Indonesia). This book was released on 2009 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sociolinguistic turn of the 1960's has been remarkably successful: variability of language is no longer an issue open to debate. But studies of variation have by and large been restricted to the level of expression. This volume makes a contribution to a neglected area in sociolinguistics, namely variation at the level of meaning, i.e., semantic variation. The chapters in this volume discuss the results of an empirical research strongly supporting the view that systematic variation in the choice of semantic elements occurs across different social strata: mothers and their young children less than four years old showed a highly consistent, statistically significant, orientation to distinct styles of meaning, which correlated with their social positioning. The comparison of kindergarten teachers' ways of meaning with those of mothers', not surprisingly, reveal that teacher talk is an exaggerated version of middle class mothers' talk. Findings of this research are relevant to any serious discourse about equitable education.
Download or read book Tense and Aspect written by Alessandra Giorgi and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework and compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones. In the OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX series.
Download or read book Degrammaticalization written by Muriel Norde and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Norde shows that linguistic change via the well-attested process of grammaticalization is reversible and that degrammaticalization can occur on all levels: semantic, morphological, syntactic, and phonological. Her careful analysis of the process makes a significant contribution to methods of linguistic reconstruction and language change.
Download or read book Microvariation in Syntactic Doubling written by Sjef Barbiers and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-10-17 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains seventeen papers on microvariation in syntactic doubling. This work provides an overview of the syntactic doubling phenomena attested and of the theoretical analyses available. It discusses the syntactic doubling phenomena including, among others, subject pronoun doubling, WH pronoun doubling, clitic doubling and auxiliary doubling.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics written by Kimberly L. Geeslin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 1098 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for both researchers and advanced students, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the field of Spanish linguistics. Balancing different theoretical perspectives among expert scholars, it provides an in-depth examination of all sub-fields of research in Hispanic linguistics, with a focus on recent advances.
Download or read book Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation written by Lauren Hall-Lew and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'third wave' of variation study, spearheaded by the sociolinguist Penelope Eckert, places its focus on social meaning, or the inferences that can be drawn about speakers based on how they talk. While social meaning has always been a concern of modern sociolinguistics, its aims and assumptions have not been explicitly spelled out until now. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive overview of the central tenets of variation study, examining several components of dialects, and considering language use in a wide variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. Each chapter, written by a leader in the field, posits a unique theoretical claim about social meaning and presents new empirical data to shed light on the topic at hand. The volume makes a case for why attending to social meaning is vital to the study of variation while also providing a foundation from which variationists can productively engage with social meaning.
Download or read book Cartography and Explanatory Adequacy written by Ángel J. Gallego and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contributes to the ongoing empirical, conceptual, and meta-theoretical debates regarding the merits and drawbacks of the cartographic program in linguistic theory. Although cartography has its roots in the study of the left periphery, its empirical scope has expanded significantly over the years and now covers a wide range of domains such as argument structure, modification, and constituent order. The chapters in this volume offer a critical examination of the cartographic assumption that there is a rich array of functional projections whose hierarchical order is fixed and determined by Universal Grammar. They discuss the nature of these cartographic hierarchies and their relation to the central theoretical goal of explanatory adequacy: are functional hierarchies an irreducible property of Universal Grammar (hence constituting part of the "residue" beyond the scope of principled explanation), or are they emergent, deriving from independent principles that do not require a further enrichment of Universal Grammar?
Download or read book Icelandic Nominalizations and Allosemy written by Jim Wood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings a basic yet detailed description of Icelandic nominalizations to bear on the general theoretical and architectural issues that nominalizations have raised since the earliest work in generative syntax. While nominalization has long been central to theories of argument structure, and Icelandic has been an important language for the study of argument structure and syntax, Icelandic has not been brought into the general body of theoretical work on nominalization. In this work, Jim Wood shows that Icelandic-specific issues in the analysis of derived nominals have broad implications that go beyond the study of that one language. In particular, Icelandic provides special evidence that Complex Event Nominals (CENs), which seem to inherit their argument structure from the underlying verbs, can be formed without nominalizing a full verb phrase. This conclusion is at odds with prominent theories of nominalization that claim that CENs have the properties that they have precisely because they involve the nominalization of full verb phrases. The book develops a theory of allosemy within the framework of Distributed Morphology, showing how one single syntactic structure can get distinct semantic interpretations corresponding to the range of readings that are available to derived nominals. The resulting proposal demonstrates how the study of Icelandic nominalizations can both further our understanding of argument structure and shed new light on the syntax-semantics interface.
Download or read book Angles of Object Agreement written by Andrew Nevins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws on insights from a range of theoretical perspectives to explore objects, agreement, and their intersecting angles, based on novel data from multiple language families. The chapters explores the mechanics of object agreement, constraints on symmetry, features of object agreement, and issues relating to the left periphery.
Download or read book Nominalization written by Artemis Alexiadou and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. The contributors take stock of developments in this area and offer new perspectives based on data from a wide range of typologically diverse languages.
Download or read book Gender and Noun Classification written by Eric Mathieu and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the many ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or classes. The findings in the volume have significant implications for syntactic theory and theories of interpretation, and contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation.
