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Book The Syntax of Serial Verbs

Download or read book The Syntax of Serial Verbs written by Mark Sebba and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is about the chains of verbs commonly found in Creole Languages, West African languages, in particular the Kwa sub-group of Niger-Congo, Chinese and certain other languages and have acquired the name of 'serial verbs' in the literature. As a case study, the serial constructions of Sranan, a creole language of Surinam with an English lexical base, are examined in detail.

Book The Syntax of Serial Verbs

Download or read book The Syntax of Serial Verbs written by Mark Sebba and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 1987 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is about the chains of verbs commonly found in Creole Languages, West African languages, in particular the Kwa sub-group of Niger-Congo, Chinese and certain other languages and have acquired the name of 'serial verbs' in the literature. As a case study, the serial constructions of Sranan, a creole language of Surinam with an English lexical base, are examined in detail.

Book Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions

Download or read book Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions written by Carol Lord and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993-08-06 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines both historical and comparative evidence in documenting the sweep of diachronic change in the context of serial verb constructions. Using a wide range of data from languages of West Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, it demonstrates how shifts in meaning and usage result in syntactic, morphological and lexical change. The process by which verbs lose lexical semantic content and develop case-marking functions is described; it is argued that the change is directional, from verb to preposition (or postposition) to affix, along a grammaticalization continuum. This same grammaticalization process is shown to result in the development of complementizers, adverbial subordinators, conjunctions, adverbs and auxiliaries from verbs. Strong parallels across languages are found in the meanings of the verbs that become “defective” and in the functions they come to mark. The changes are documented in detail, with examples from a number of languages illustrating the effect of the changes on typology and word order, implications for the encoding of definiteness and aspect, and the relevance of notions such as discourse topic, foreground and transitivity. With respect to theoretical assumptions and terminology, the author has taken a relatively nonpartisan approach, and the discussion is accessible to students of language as well as of interest to theoreticians.

Book Serial Verbs in White Hmong

Download or read book Serial Verbs in White Hmong written by Nerida Jarkey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Serial Verbs in White Hmong Nerida Jarkey investigates verb serialization, a highly productive grammatical strategy in this dynamic Southeast Asian language in which multiple verbs are simply concatenated within a single clause to depict a single event. The investigation identifies four major types of serial verb construction (SVC) in White Hmong and finds that the key function of all these types is to depict a single event in an elaborate and vivid way, a much-favoured method of description in this language. These findings concerning the nature and function of SVCs in White Hmong contribute to broader discussions on the nature of events as both cognitive and cultural constructs.

Book Serial Verb Constructions

Download or read book Serial Verb Constructions written by Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A serial verb construction is a sequence of verbs which acts together as one. This oustanding book is the first to study the phenomenon across languages of different typological and genetic profiles. The authors, all experienced linguistic fieldworkers, follow a unified typological approach and avoid formalisms.

Book Complex Predicates

Download or read book Complex Predicates written by Alex Alsina i Keith and published by Stanford Univ Center for the Study. This book was released on 1997 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A variety of approaches to the question of the range and nature of complex predicates.

Book The Acquisition of Creole Languages

Download or read book The Acquisition of Creole Languages written by Dany Adone and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study into how children acquire Creoles as their first language in the absence of a conventional language model.

Book Thai  An Essential Grammar

Download or read book Thai An Essential Grammar written by Jay L. Nadeau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the First Edition “essential reading for any physical scientist who is interested in performing biological research.” ?Contemporary Physics "an ambitious text.... Each chapter contains protocols and the conceptual reasoning behind them, which is often useful to physicists performing biological experiments for the first time." –Physics Today This fully updated and expanded text is the best starting point for any student or researcher in the physical sciences to gain firm grounding in the techniques employed in molecular biophysics and quantitative biology. It includes brand new chapters on gene expression techniques, advanced techniques in biological light microscopy (super-resolution, two-photon, and fluorescence lifetime imaging), holography, and gold nanoparticles used in medicine. The author shares invaluable practical tips and insider’s knowledge to simplify potentially confusing techniques. The reader is guided through easy-to-follow examples carried out from start to finish with practical tips and insider’s knowledge. The emphasis is on building comfort with getting hands "wet" with basic methods and finally understanding when and how to apply or adapt them to address different questions. Jay L. Nadeau is a scientific researcher and head of the Biomedical Engineering in Advanced Applications of Quantum, Oscillatory, and Nanotechnological Systems (BEAAQONS) lab at Caltech and was previously associate professor of biomedical engineering and physics at McGill University.

Book Analyzing Syntax

Download or read book Analyzing Syntax written by Paul Kroeger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-08 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing Syntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach is a comprehensive and accessible 2004 textbook on syntactic analysis, designed for students of linguistics at advanced undergraduate or graduate level. Working within the 'Lexical Functional Grammar' (LFG) approach, it provides students with a framework for analyzing and describing grammatical structure, using extensive examples from both European and non-European languages. Topics covered include: tests for constituency, passivization and other relation-changing processes, reflexive pronouns, the control relation, Topic and Focus, relative clauses and Wh-questions, causative constructions, serial verbs, 'quirky case', and ergativity. As well as building on what linguists have learned about language in general, particular attention is paid to the unique features of individual languages. While its primary focus is on syntactic structure, the book also deals with aspects of meaning, function and word-structure that are directly relevant to syntax. Clearly organised into topics, this textbook is ideal for one-semester courses in syntax and grammatical analysis.

Book Pseudo Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions

Download or read book Pseudo Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions written by Giuliana Giusti and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-03-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Verbal Pseudo-Coordination (as in English ‘go and get’) has been described for a number of individual languages, but this is the first edited volume to emphasize this topic from a comparative perspective, and in connection to Multiple Agreement Constructions more generally. The chapters include detailed analyses of Romance, Germanic, Slavic and other languages. These contributions show important cross-linguistic similarities in these constructions, as well as their diversity, providing insights into areas such as the morphology-syntax and syntax-semantics interfaces, dialectal variation and language contact. This volume establishes Pseudo-Coordination as a descriptively important and theoretically challenging cross-linguistic phenomenon among Multiple Agreement Constructions and will be of interest to specialists in individual languages as well as typologists and theoreticians, serving as a foundation to promote continued research.

Book Multi verb Constructions

Download or read book Multi verb Constructions written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys multi-verb constructions in multiple languages from the Americas, showing a very rich tapestry of typologically unusual constructions, including serial verbs, auxiliaries, co-verbs, phasal verbs. Where possible, a diachronic perspectrive is offered.

Book Syntactic Structures

Download or read book Syntactic Structures written by Noam Chomsky and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

Book Multi verb constructions in Eastern Indonesia

Download or read book Multi verb constructions in Eastern Indonesia written by Volker Unterladstetter and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constructions with multiple verbal elements have posed a long-standing challenge to linguistic analysis. Most studies of verb serialisation have been confined to single languages rather than looking at crosslinguistic patterns. This book provides the first in-depth account into the areal characteristics of multi-verb constructions (MVCs) in Eastern Indonesia. By collating published data as well as corpus data from 32 Austronesian and Papuan languages, the study traces commonalities as well as differences in MVC use across the area. Analysis takes place on two levels: first, the morpho-syntactic behaviour of MVCs is taken into account. As this plane of analysis arguably does not provide any meaningful insights into why MVCs are construed and used the way they are, a semantic account of MVCs is presented. One of the main hypotheses advanced in this book is that the crucial driving force behind multi-verb construals is semantic interaction between the verbs, leading to four principal techniques of event formation: merging, staging, modification, and free juxtaposition. The study aims at showing that while all four techniques are, to varying degrees, in use in Eastern Indonesian languages, the morpho-syntactic output does not necessarily mirror these underlying differences in event conception. Applying insights from Davidsonian event semantics as well as from predicate decomposition, the book provides a model of event interaction that helps to explain differences in MVC behaviour such as issues in constituent order or operator assignment.

Book Understanding Syntax

Download or read book Understanding Syntax written by Maggie Tallerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assuming no prior knowledge, Understanding Syntax illustrates the major concepts, categories and terminology associated with the study of cross-linguistic syntax. A theory-neutral and descriptive viewpoint is taken throughout. Starting with an overview of what syntax is, the book moves on to an explanation of word classes (such as noun, verb, adjective) and then to a discussion of sentence structure in the world’s languages. Grammatical constructions and relationships between words in a clause are explained and thoroughly illustrated, including grammatical relations such as subject and object; function-changing processes such as the passive and antipassive; case and agreement processes, including both ergative and accusative alignments; verb serialization; head-marking and dependent-marking grammars; configurational and non-configurational languages; questions and relative clauses. The final chapter explains and illustrates the principles involved in writing a brief syntactic sketch of a language, enabling the reader to construct a grammatical sketch of a language known to them. Data from approximately 100 languages appears in the text, with languages representing widely differing geographical areas and distinct language families. The book will be essential for courses in cross-linguistic syntax, language typology, and linguistic fieldwork, as well as for basic syntactic description.

Book A Grammar of Rapa Nui

Download or read book A Grammar of Rapa Nui written by Paulus Kieviet and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island. After an introductory chapter, the grammar deals with phonology, word classes, the noun phrase, possession, the verb phrase, verbal and nonverbal clauses, mood and negation, and clause combinations. The phonology of Rapa Nui reveals certain issues of typological interest, such as the existence of strict conditions on the phonological shape of words, word-final devoicing, and reduplication patterns motivated by metrical constraints. For Polynesian languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs in the lexicon has often been denied; in this grammar it is argued that this distinction is needed for Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui has sometimes been characterised as an ergative language; this grammar shows that it is unambiguously accusative. Subject and object marking depend on an interplay of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Other distinctive features of the language include the existence of a ‘neutral’ aspect marker, a serial verb construction, the emergence of copula verbs, a possessive-relative construction, and a tendency to maximise the use of the nominal domain. Rapa Nui’s relationship to the other Polynesian languages is a recurring theme in this grammar; the relationship to Tahitian (which has profoundly influenced Rapa Nui) especially deserves attention. The grammar is supplemented with a number of interlinear texts, two maps and a subject index.

Book Serial Verbs in Oceanic

Download or read book Serial Verbs in Oceanic written by Terry Crowley and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terry Crowley introduces the idea of serial verbs which are clauses that include multiple verbs or verb-like items that are used to convey a single meaning like wash the plates clean. The author argues that their formation is a consequence of contact between different languages.

Book Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse

Download or read book Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse written by Wendan Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse Wendan Li offers a comprehensive and innovative account of how Mandarin Chinese, as a language without extensive morphological marking, highlights (or foregrounds) major events of a narrative and demotes (or backgrounds) other supporting descriptions. Qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis and examinations of authentic written text provide extensive evidence to demonstrate that various types of morpho-syntactic devices are used in a wide range of structural units in Chinese to mark the distinction between foregrounding and backgrounding. The analysis paves the way for future studies to systematically approach grounding-related issues. The typological viewpoint adopted in the chapters serves well readers from both the Chinese tradition and other languages in discourse analysis.