Download or read book Tense aspect Transitivity and Causativity written by Werner Abraham and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents typological work on tense, aspect, and epistemic modality in a variety of languages and against the background of different schools of thinking, among which the St. Petersburg Typological School developed and so masterfully implemented by the Petersburg linguist, Vladimir Petrovich Nedjalkov. The volume honors this reputed scholar for his life work. It is in mainly this spirit (and the EUROTYPE spirit) that the following scholars have contributed to the volume: T.Tsunoda on Warrungu (Australian indigeneous language), L. Kulikov on Vedic, K. Kiryu on Japanese, Korean and Newari, N. Sumbatova on Svan (from the Kartvelian group), T.Bulygina & A. Shmelev on Russian, W. Boeder on Georgian, R. Thieroff on aorist and imperfect in European languages, Y. Poupynin on Russian, L. Johanson on Kipchak Turkic, I. Dolinina on Russian, N. Kozintseva on Old and Modern Eastern Armenian, Ch. Lee on Korean, W. Abraham on split ergative languages and German, G. Silnitsky on Russian, V. Plungian on Russian, E. Rakhilina on Russian, and K. Ebert on Kalmyk.

Download or read book Aspects of Linguistic Variation written by Daniël Olmen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic variation is a topic of ongoing interest to the field. Its description and its explanations continue to intrigue scholars from many different backgrounds. By taking a deliberately broad perspective on the matter, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation and examining phenomena ranging from negation over connectives to definite articles in well- and lesser-known languages, the volume furthers our understanding of variation in general. The papers offer new insights into, among other things, the theoretical notion of comparative concepts, the social or mental nature of language structure, the areal factor in lexical typology and the diachronic implications of semantic maps. The collection will thus be of relevance to typologists and historical linguists, as well as to people studying variation within the areas of cognitive and functional linguistics.

Download or read book Language Typology and Language Universals 2 Teilband written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-07-14 with total page 1013 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of our current insights into the diversity and unity found across the 6000 languages of this planet. The 125 articles include inter alia chapters on the patterns and limits of variation manifested by analogous structures, constructions and linguistic devices across languages (e.g. word order, tense and aspect, inflection, color terms and syllable structure). Other chapters cover the history, methodology and the theory of typology, as well as the relationship between language typology and other disciplines. The authors of the individual sections and chapters are for the most part internationally known experts on the relevant topics. The vast majority of the articles are written in English, some in French or German. The handbook is not only intended for the expert in the fields of typology and language universals, but for all of those interested in linguistics. It is specifically addressed to all those who specialize in individual languages, providing basic orientation for their analysis and placing each language within the space of what is possible and common in the languages of the world.

Download or read book Aspect in Burmese written by Nicoletta Romeo and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents an overview of the aspectual system of Burmese, and it focuses on the analysis and description of the meaning and function of some aspectual markers which are among the most commonly used in the language. The analysis highlights a few important facts. Firstly, these markers, which typically follow the main verb within the verbal complex, derive from lexical verbs which are still in use in Burmese. This is an important descriptive factor, since the function of these markers can only be fully understood by looking at the interplay between the semantics of their lexical sources and the semantics of the verbs they modify. Secondly, it is the semantics of the aspectual markers that determines both their order vis-à-vis the main verb and their order vis-à-vis the other markers within the verbal complex. The interplay between the semantics and the syntax of these markers is analysed by adopting Role and Reference Grammar.

Download or read book Aspect and the Categorization of States written by David Brian Roby and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, the Spanish copulae ser and estar are argued to be aspectual morphemes. Their binary opposition reflects the universal aspectual values ÃÃplus or minus¨Perfective¨, which are the same ones overtly expressed by the preterite and imperfect past tense forms in Spanish. It can therefore be shown that different types of states, just like different types of events, can be categorized based on their aspectual composition. Additionally, the inherent semantic differences between events and states can be accounted for by analyzing aspect as applying to events internally and to states externally. A useful resource for the beginning linguist as well as the most seasoned analyst, this work is written in language that is easy to understand while remaining faithful to all of the appropriate relevant technical terminology. Anyone who is seriously interested in exploring why the Spanish verbs ser and estar are used the way they are should read this book.

Download or read book Interfaces with English Aspect written by Debra Ziegeler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-11-22 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of verbal aspect has been a focus for the derivation of a multiplicity of theoretical approaches ranging over decades of linguistic research. From the point of view of recent studies, though, there has been relatively little emphasis on the nature of the interaction of aspect with other categories, and the ways in which our knowledge of aspect acts as a primary semantic contributor to the creation of other basic verbal parameters such as tense and modality. This book aims to cross some of the categorial borders, using a collection of studies on the interfaces of English aspect with other grammatical domains. The studies in the book have been assembled in order to answer two central issues surrounding the nature of English aspect: the possibility of the historical co-existence of a perfective and imperfective grammatical distinction in English, and the derivation of modality as an inference arising out of specific conflicts and combinations of lexical and grammatical aspect. In answering these questions, a data-driven, rather than a theory-driven approach is favoured, and the general principles of Gricean pragmatics and grammaticalisation are applied to a wide range of empirical sources to propose alternative explanations to some long-established problems of English historical linguistics and semantics.

Download or read book Aspect in Mandarin Chinese written by Richard Xiao and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-11-29 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.

Download or read book Proto Indo European Syntax and its Development written by Leonid Kulikov and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although for some scholars the very possibility of syntactic reconstruction remains dubious, numerous studies have appeared reconstructing a variety of basic elements of Proto-Indo-European syntax based on evidence available particularly from ancient and/or archaic Indo-European languages. The papers in this volume originate from the Workshop “PIE Syntax and its Development” (Thessaloniki 2011), which aimed to bring together scholars interested in these problems and to shine new light on current research into ancient Indo-European syntax. Special attention was paid to the development of the hypothetical reconstructed features within the documented history of Indo-European languages. The articles in this volume were originally published in the Journal of Historical Linguistics Vol. 3:1 (2013).

Download or read book Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo European Linguistics written by Jared Klein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 877 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.

Download or read book Auxiliary Selection in Spanish written by Malte Rosemeyer and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although usage-based linguistics emphasises the need for studies of language change to take frequency effects into account, there is a lack of research that tries to systematically model frequency effects and their relation to diffusion processes in language change. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the change in Spanish perfect auxiliary selection between Old and Early Modern Spanish that led to the gradual replacement of the auxiliary ser ‘be’ with the auxiliary haber ‘have’. It analyses this process in terms of the interaction between gradience, gradualness, and the conserving effects of frequency and persistence in language change. The study contributes to the theory and methodology of diachronic linguistics, additionally offering insights on how to explain synchronic grammatical variation both within a language and between languages. The book is of interest to the fields of Spanish and Romance linguistics, syntax, as well as historical and variationist linguistics.

Download or read book Aspect and Modality in Kwa Languages written by Felix K. Ameka and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the thesis that in the Kwa languages of West Africa, aspect and modality are more central to the grammar of the verb than tense. Where tense marking has emerged it is invariably in the expression of the future, and therefore concerned with the impending actualization or potentiality of an event, hence with modality, rather than the purely temporal sequencing associated with tense. The primary grammatical contrasts are perfective versus imperfective. The main languages discussed are Akan, Dangme, Ewe, Ga and Tuwuli while Nzema-Ahanta, Likpe and Eastern Gbe are also mentioned. Knowledge about these languages has deepened considerably during the past decade or so and ideas about their structure have changed. The volume therefore presents novel analyses of grammatical forms like the so-called S-Aux-O-V-Other or “future” constructions, and provides empirical data for theorizing about aspect and modality. It should be of considerable interest to Africanist linguists, typologists, and creolists interested in substrate issues.

Download or read book Reconstructing Syntax written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot’s (2002: 625) conclusion: “[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we’ll eat the pudding.” This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, showcasing the results in the introduction and eight articles. These examples are offered as both tastier and also more nourishing than the pudding Lightfoot had in mind when discarding the viability of reconstructing syntax.

Download or read book Types of Reduplication written by Veronika Mattes and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book systematically discusses the formal and functional properties as well as the rules of the manifold productive reduplication types of Bikol, an Austronesian language of the Philippines. Based on the author's own fieldwork, this case study demonstrates the highly complex and grammaticized status of reduplication. In addition, the formal and semantic properties of unproductive reduplicative forms of the language are also investigated.

Download or read book Voice and Grammatical Relations written by Tasaku Tsunoda and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-03-10 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents thirteen original papers dealing with various aspects of two related areas of research of major concern to linguists of all theoretical persuasions: voice and grammatical relations. The papers are written from typological, functional, and cognitive perspectives, and contain a number of general studies as well as studies focusing on specific issues, and offer a wealth of data from a broad range of languages. The volume provides up-to-date discussions of an array of issues of theoretical concern, including the nature of grammatical relations, voice in agent/patient systems, the expression vs. non-expression of participant roles, and personal vs. impersonal passives. The papers in the volume demonstrate that investigations into the nature of voice and grammatical relations can still yield fresh theoretical and typological insights.

Download or read book The Indo European Languages written by Mate Kapović and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indo-European Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language subgroups within this language family. With over four hundred languages and dialects and almost three billion native speakers, the Indo-European language family is the largest of the recognized language groups and includes most of the major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent. Written by an international team of experts, this comprehensive, single-volume tome presents in-depth discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic features of the Indo-European languages. This unique resource remains the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indo-European linguistics and languages, but also for more experienced researchers looking for an up-to-date survey of separate Indo-European branches. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology and language development.

Download or read book Evidentiality written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-11-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists.

Download or read book Language at Large written by Alexandra Aikhenvald and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume brings together important essays on syntax and semantics by Aikhenvald and Dixon, highlighting their expertise in various fields of linguistics. The first part focusses on linguistic typology, covering case markers used on verbs, argument-determined constructions, unusual meanings of causatives, the semantic basis for a typology, word-class-changing derivations, speech reports and semi-direct speech. The second part concentrates on documentation and analysis of previously undescribed languages, from South America and Indigenous Australia. The third part addresses a variety of issues in grammar and lexicography of English. This includes pronouns with transferred reference, comparative constructions, features of the noun phrase, and the discussion of 'twice'. The treatment of Australian Aboriginal words in dictionaries is discussed in the final chapter.