Download or read book Syntactic and Semantic Variation in Copular Sentences written by Daniel J. Wilson and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a novel account of syntactic and semantic variation in copular and existential sentences in Classical Hebrew. Like many languages, the system of Classical Hebrew copular sentences is quite complex, containing zero, pronominal, and verbal forms as well as eventive and inchoative semantics. Approaching this subject from the framework of Distributed Morphology provides an elegant and comprehensive explanation for both the syntactic and semantic variation in these sentences. This book also presents a theoretical model for analyzing copular sentences in other languages included related phenomena– such as pseudo-copulas. It is also a demonstration of what can be gained by applying modern linguistic analyses to dead languages. Citing and building off previous studies on this topic, this book will be of interest to those interested in the theoretical examination of copular and existential sentences and to those interested in Classical Hebrew more specifically.
Download or read book Copular Clauses written by Line Mikkelsen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-10-13 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses, and its relation to other kinds of copular structures, predicational and equative clauses in particular. Based on evidence from Danish and English, I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses — one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit — but differ in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization, where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position, the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse. Equative clauses are argued to be fundamentally different.
Download or read book The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages written by María J. Arche and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.
Download or read book Existential Sentences written by Michael Lumsden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between the structure of existential sentences and their meaning? How do hearers interpret existential sentences using pragmatic assumptions? This study attempts to account for the relationship between the structure of existential sentences (ES) and their meaning. The study of ES has received a great deal of attention because the construction has complex syntactic properties, is associated with restrictions of a semantic nature, and provides an interesting area for investigation at a pragmatic level.
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 Predicates and Their Subjects written by Susan Rothstein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic constraint. Chapters in the book show how the syntactic predication relation is semantically interpreted, and how the predication relation explains constraints on DP-raising and on the distribution of pleonastics in English. The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew, of the use of `be' in predicative and identity sentences in English, and concludes with a study of the meaning of the verb `be'.
Download or read book Exploring Interfaces written by Mónica Cabrera and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative exploration of the interface between grammar, meaning and form.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax written by Marcel den Dikken and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 1412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.
Download or read book Nonverbal Predication written by Isabelle Roy (Writer on linguistics) and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns the interpretation and structure of non-verbal predicates in copular sentences (i.e. sentences with the verb 'be'). The author provides a unifying analysis based on a ternary distinction between defining/characterizing/situation-descriptive predicates.
Download or read book Studies on Copular Sentences Clefts and Pseudo Clefts written by Renaat Declerck and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts.
Download or read book New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew written by Aaron D. Hornkohl and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the papers in this volume originated as presentations at the conference Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew: New Perspectives in Philology and Linguistics, which was held at the University of Cambridge, 8–10th July, 2019. The aim of the conference was to build bridges between various strands of research in the field of Hebrew language studies that rarely meet, namely philologists working on Biblical Hebrew, philologists working on Rabbinic Hebrew and theoretical linguists. This volume is the published outcome of this initiative. It contains peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew that advance the field by the philological investigation of primary sources and the application of cutting-edge linguistic theory. These include contributions by established scholars and by students and early career researchers.
Download or read book Ancient Texts and Modern Readers written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters of this volume address a variety of topics that pertain to modern readers’ understanding of ancient texts, as well as tools or resources that can facilitate contemporary audiences’ interpretation of these ancient writings and their language. In this regard, they cover subjects related to the fields of ancient Hebrew linguistics and Bible translation. The chapters apply linguistic insights and theories to elucidate elements of ancient texts for modern readers, investigate how ancient texts help modern readers to interpret features in other ancient texts, and suggest ways in which translations can make the language and conceptual worlds of ancient texts more accessible to modern readers. In so doing, they present the results of original research, identify new lines and topics of inquiry, and make novel contributions to modern readers’ understanding of ancient texts. Contributors are Alexander Andrason, Barry L. Bandstra, Reinier de Blois, Lénart J. de Regt, Gideon R. Kotzé, Geoffrey Khan, Christian S. Locatell, Kristopher Lyle, John A. Messarra, Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé, Jacobus A. Naudé, Daniel Rodriguez, Eep Talstra, Jeremy Thompson, Cornelius M. van den Heever, Herrie F. van Rooy, Gerrit J. van Steenbergen, Ernst Wendland, Tamar Zewi.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky written by James McGilvray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-24 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book The Syntax of Arabic written by Joseph E. Aoun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to Arabic syntax covering a broad variety of topics including argument structure, negation, tense, agreement phenomena, and resumption. The discussion of each topic sums up the key research results and provides new points of departure for further research.
Download or read book Information Structuring of Spoken Language from a Cross linguistic Perspective written by M. M. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information structure and the organization of oral texts have been rarely studied crosslinguistically. This book contains studies of the grammatical organization of information in languages from different areas (e.g. Amazonian, Finno-Ugric, South-Asian) from a variety of theoretical angles. It will be a valuable resource for researchers investigating the interaction of morphosyntax and discourse in familiar and less familiar languages.
Download or read book The Syntactic Nature of Inner Aspect written by Jonathan E. MacDonald and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the syntactic nature of inner aspect from a minimalist perspective. It begins with the new observation that there are two independent properties at play in English inner aspect: the object-to-event mapping and event structure. From a discussion of English statives and Russian, it is concluded that the former property is variant and the latter universal; a minimalist conception of language variation arises naturally in this context. Additionally, an exploration of a lexical derivational approach to achievements leads to the expectation that there are no accomplishments in the lexicon. A detailed look at idioms suggests that this expectation is met. These results support the division of labor between an operative lexicon and narrow syntax in aspectual composition; this naturally poses a problem for (neo-)constructional approaches to inner aspect. Finally, one conclusion reached about the syntactic nature of inner aspect regards the object-to-event mapping: it is a purely syntactic phenomenon.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Negation written by Viviane Déprez and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers reviews of cross-linguistic research on the major classic issues in negation, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume will be an essential reference on the topic of negation for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines.
