Download or read book The Semantics of Determiners RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by Johan Van Der Auwera and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of linguistic and philosophical papers dealing with the semantic problems of determiners. The language under investigation is mostly English, although a few papers deal with French and German, and, to a lesser extent, with Dutch, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. The majority of the contributions focus on the semantics of the definite and indefinite articles, leading into discussions of anaphoricness, specificness, opacity and transparency, referentiality and attributiveness and genericness. The relation of the determiners to other parts of grammar, in particular relativisation and predication, is also investigated. Some attention is also given to quantifiers. In the spirit of pluralism, there is no single paradigm unifying all the papers, rather, the volume reflects elements of the Extended Standard Theory, Generative Semantics, Montague Grammar, (Gricean) Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory.

Download or read book The Semantics of Determiners RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by Johan Van Der Auwera and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of linguistic and philosophical papers dealing with the semantic problems of determiners. The language under investigation is mostly English, although a few papers deal with French and German, and, to a lesser extent, with Dutch, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. The majority of the contributions focus on the semantics of the definite and indefinite articles, leading into discussions of anaphoricness, specificness, opacity and transparency, referentiality and attributiveness and genericness. The relation of the determiners to other parts of grammar, in particular relativisation and predication, is also investigated. Some attention is also given to quantifiers. In the spirit of pluralism, there is no single paradigm unifying all the papers, rather, the volume reflects elements of the Extended Standard Theory, Generative Semantics, Montague Grammar, (Gricean) Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory.

Download or read book Categorial Grammars RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by Mary McGee Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few years categorial grammars have been the focus of dramatically expanded interest and activity, both theoretical and computational. This book, the first introduction to categorical grammars, is written as an objective critical assessment. Categorial grammars offer a radical alternative to the phrase-structure paradigm, with deep roots in the philosophy of language, logic and algebra. Mary McGee Wood outlines their historical evolution and discusses their formal basis, starting with a quasi-canonical core and considering a number of possible extensions. She also explores their treatment of a number of linguistic phenomena, including passives, raising, discontinuous dependencies and non-constituent coordination, as well as such general issues as word order, logic, psychological plausibility and parsing. This introduction to categorial grammars will be of interest to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in current theories of grammar, including comparative, descriptive, and computational linguistics.

Download or read book The Formal Grammar of Switch Reference RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by Daniel L Finer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the syntax of switch-reference and its implications for the theory of grammar. Switch-reference, found in many genetically and geographically diverse languages, is a phenomenon whereby referential identity between subjects of hierarchically adjacent clauses is encoded by the presence of a morpheme, usually suffixed to the verb of the subordinate clause. This book argues that switch-reference should be analysed as a syntactic rather than a purely pragmatic or functional feature of language.

Download or read book Accessing Noun Phrase Antecedents RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by Mira Ariel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessing Noun-Phrase Antecedents offers a radical shift in the analysis of discourse anaphora, from a purely pragmatic account to a cognitive account, in terms of processing procedures. Mira Ariel defines referring expressions as markers signalling the degree of Accessibility in memory of the antecedent. The notion of Accessibility is explicitly defined, the crucial factors being the Salience of the antecedent, and the Unity between the antecedent and the anaphor. This analysis yields an astonishing array of new results. The precise distribution of referring expressions in actual discourse is directly predicted. Several universals of anaphoric relations are stated. Thus, although not all languages necessarily have the same markers, and nor do they assign them precisely the same function, Ariel shows that they all obey the same Accessibility marking hierarchy. This book will be compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in the semantics and pragmatics of referring expressions, in the interaction of semantics and pragmatics, and more generally in the interaction between peripheral and central cognitive systems.

Download or read book Production and Comprehension of Utterances RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by I.M. Schlesinger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, the author reviews the results of research on language performance and proposes a model of production and comprehension. Although recent developments in linguistics are taken into account, consideration of other requirements of a performance model leads to the conclusion that the grammar the speaker has in mind differs from the grammar as currently conceived of by most linguists. The author is also critical of recent computer simulations of language performance on the basis that they fall short of describing what goes on in human production and comprehension. The author therefore proposes that the basic issues must be rethought and new theoretical foundations reformulated, in order to arrive at a viable theory of language functioning. In developing the framework of the model presented in this book, requirements of flexibility in the performance mechanisms, the probabilistic nature of comprehension processes, and the interleaving of linguistic rules with context and knowledge of the world are emphasized.

Download or read book Determiners written by Jila Ghomeshi and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together recent work on the formal and interpretational properties of determiners across a variety of typologically and geographically unrelated languages. It seeks to answer the core question of modern linguistic theory: Which properties of languages are universal and which are variable? In recent theorizing, much of language variation is argued to stem from differences in the properties of features associated with functional heads. As such, this volume can be viewed as a case study of one such category: the determiner (D). The contributions all investigate the status of D as a language universal by examining the language-specific syntactic and semantic properties associated with this category. This volume will appeal to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, as well as to those who have more a specific interest in determiners and noun phrases.

Download or read book Theoretical Linguistics and Disordered Language RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by Martin Ball and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid increase of interest in disordered speech and language among linguists over the past decade or so has resulted in many books of practical help to speech pathologists in terms of assessment and remediation. Little, however, has appeared to examine the theoretical implications of the interaction between these two fields. This book aims to fill this gap, by showing how speech pathology can inform linguistic theory and vice versa.

Download or read book The Semantics of Grammar written by Anna Wierzbicka and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The semantics of grammar" presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither "autonomous" nor "arbitrary," but that it follows from "semantics." It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be compared in a precise and illuminating way, within one language and across language boundaries. The author develops a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals or near-universals (and, ultimately, on a system of universal semantic primitives), and shows that the same semantic metalanguage can be used for explicating lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language and thus offers a method for an integrated linguistic description based on semantic foundations. Analyzing data from a number of different languages (including English, Russian and Japanese) the author explores the notion of ethnosyntax and, via semantics, links syntax and morphology with culture. She attemps to demonstrate that the use of a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals makes it possible to rephrase the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in such a way that it can be tested and treated as a program for empirical research.

Download or read book Meanings and Prototypes written by Sabbas L. Tsochatzidēs and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Routledge Library Editions Linguistics Mini Set B Grammar written by Routledge and published by . This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RLE: Linguistics Mini-set B has brought together a collection of essential Grammar titles, ranging from Basic Word Order to Existential Sentences, from The Pragmatics of Style to The Semantics of Determiners. These books, some long out of print, form a classic collection by some of the world's leading linguists.

Download or read book Basic Word Order RLE Linguistics B Grammar written by Russell S. Tomlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the frequencies of the six possible basic word (or constituent) orders (SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS) provides a typologically grounded explanation for those frequencies in terms of three independent, functional principles of linguistic organization. From a database of nearly 1,000 languages and their basic constituent orders, a sample of 400 languages was produced that is statistically representative of both the genetic and areal distributions of the world's languages. This sample reveals the following relative frequencies (in order from high to low) of basic constituent order types: (1) SOV and SVO, (2) VSO, (3) VOS and OVS, (4) OSV. It is argued that these relative frequencies can be explained to be the result of the possible interactions of three fundamental functional principles of linguistic organization. Principle 1, the thematic information principle, specifies that initial position is the cross-linguistically favoured position for clause-level thematic information. Principle 2, the verb-object bonding principle, describes the cross-linguistic tendency for a transitive verb and its object to form a more tightly integrated unit, syntactically and semantically, than does a transitive verb and its subject. Principle 3, the animated principle, describes the cross-linguistic tendency for semantic arguments which are either more animate or more agentive to occur earlier in the clause. Each principle is motivated independently of the others, drawing on cross-linguistic data from more than 80 genetically and typologically diverse languages. Given these three independently motivated functional principles, it is argued that the relative frequency of basic constituent order types is due to the tendency for the three principles to be maximally realized in the world's languages. SOV and SVO languages are typologically most frequent because such basic orders reflect all three principles. The remaining orders occur less frequently because they reflect fewer of the principles. The 1,000-language database and the genetic and areal classification frames are published as appendices to the volume.

Download or read book The Role of Alternatives in Language written by Sophie Repp and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Formal Semantics written by Paul H. Portner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings is a collection of seminal papers that have shaped the field of formal semantics in linguistics.

Download or read book The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition written by Juana Liceras and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Chomsky's minimalist program as a framework, this volume explores the role of formal (or functional) features in current descriptions and accounts of language acquistion. In engaging, up-to-date articles, distinguished experts examine the role of features in current versions of generative grammar and in learnibility theory as it relates to native, non-native, and impaired acquisition.

Download or read book Autolexical Syntax written by Jerrold M. Sadock and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Autolexical Syntax, Jerrold M. Sadock argues for a radical departure from the derivational model of grammar that has prevailed in linguistics for thirty years. He offers an alternative theory in which the various components of grammar—in particular syntax, semantics, and morphology—are viewed as fully autonomous descriptive devices for various parallel dimensions of linguistic representation. The lexicon in this theory forges the connection between autonomous representations in that a typical lexeme plays a role in all three of the major components of the grammar. Sadock's principal innovation is the postulation of a uniform set of interface conditions that require the several orthogonal representations of a single natural language expression to match up in certain ways. Through a detailed application of his theory to the twin morphosyntactic problems of cliticization and incorporation, Sadock shows that very straightforward accounts are made possible by the nonderivational model. He demonstrates the empirical success of these accounts by examining more than two dozen morphosyntactic problems in almost as many languages. Autolexical Syntax will be of interest to those in the fields of theoretical grammar, particularly concerned with the problems of morphology and syntax, as well as philosophers of language, logicians, lexicographers, psychologists of language, and computer scientists.

Download or read book Logical Form and Language written by Gerhard Preyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeen specially written essays by eminent philosophers and linguists appear for the first time in this anthology, all with the central theme of logical form - a fundamental issue in analytical philosophy and linguistic theory.