Download or read book Verbal Agreement and the Grammar behind its Breakdown written by Elly van Gelderen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about what the 'lack' of agreement indicates about the structure of language. Rather than assuming that mistakes occur in languages, disagreement can be seen as an indication of a certain structural relationship. In a Minimalist framework, the partial agreement or complete lack of agreement is determined by when checking of case and agreement takes place and with what nominal element. Earlier work has shown that there may be variation regarding the number of functional categories a language activates. If that account is correct, languages with fewer functional categories (Dutch and Old English) will also have fewer specifiers and therefore less Spec-Head agreement. In these cases, government will play a role in the checking of case and agreement. There are, however, other reasons for the 'breakdown'. For instance, expletives play a major role and they may only be specified for some features (number or person) and when they agree with the verb, the 'real' subject does not. Two additional reasons are discussed: the impact from grammaticalization and from asymmetrical (e.g. coordinate) structures. The focus is on Modern, Old and Middle English and Dutch, but other Germanic languages (German, Swedish, Yiddish), Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Spanish), Arabic, Chamorro, Hebrew, Hopi, Kirundi, O'odham, Navajo, and Urdu/Hindi are discussed as well.
Download or read book Variable Grammars Verbal Agreement in Northern Dialects of English written by Lukas Pietsch and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The northern dialects of Britain and Ireland have verbal agreement patterns that differ radically from those of Standard English: the children is singing vs. they are singing vs. they sing and dances. This so-called 'Northern Subject Rule' (agreement with adjacent personal pronoun subjects, but invariable verbal -s everywhere else), attested since the time of Middle English, was once a consistent, categorical grammatical system in the older dialects. It continues in the modern vernaculars in the form of complex variable systems, amalgamated from traditional dialectal patterns, Standard English forms, as well as modern supraregional vernacular influences. This study explores the variable use of verbal agreement forms in Scotland, northern England and Ulster, based on data ranging from the mid-20th century »Survey of English Dialects« up to dialect recordings of the 1990s. In analysing continuities and discontinuities between the different dialects involved, it also raises questions of a theoretical nature: what are the implications of these hybrid, variable systems for a usage-based theory of grammatical competence? Die Verbkongruenz in den nördlichen britischen Dialekten weicht auffällig vom Standardenglischen ab. Doch was in älteren Formen dieser Dialekte ein in sich geschlossenes System mit kategorischer Geltung war, tritt in modernen Varietäten stets variabel und in einer Vielfalt von Mischformen auf. Die Arbeit untersucht anhand von Korpora Kontinuitäten und Unterschiede zwischen den Dialekten dieser Region und diskutiert die Bedeutung solcher hybrider, variabler Systeme für eine Theorie der grammatischen Variation.
Download or read book The Diachrony of Verb Meaning written by Elly van Gelderen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative volume offers a comprehensive account of the study of language change in verb meaning in the history of the English language. Integrating both the author’s previous body of work and new research, the book explores the complex dynamic between linguistic structures, morphosyntactic and semantics, and the conceptual domain of meaning, employing a consistent theoretical treatment for analyzing different classes of predicates. Building on this analysis, each chapter connects the implications of these findings from diachronic change with data from language acquisition, offering a unique perspective on the faculty of language and the cognitive system. In bringing together a unique combination of theoretical approaches to provide an in-depth analysis of the history of diachronic change in verb meaning, this book is a key resource to researchers in historical linguistics, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and the history of English.
Download or read book Agreement Gender Relative Clauses written by Bernd Kortmann and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on three domains of grammatical variation in the British Isles. All studies draw heavily on the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a computerized corpus for predominantly British English dialects comprising some 2.5 million words. Besides an account of FRED and the advantages which a functional-typological framework offers for the study of dialect grammar, the volume includes the following three substantial studies. Tanja Herrmann's study is the first systematic cross-regional study of relativization strategies for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and four major dialect areas in England. In her research design Hermann has included a number of issues crucial in typological research on relative clauses, above all the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Lukas Pietsch investigates the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a special agreement phenomenon known from Northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. His study is primarily based on the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech, but also on the FRED and SED data (Survey of English Dialects) for the North of England. Susanne Wagner is concerned with the phenomenon of pronominal gender, focussing especially on the typologically rather unique semantic gender system in the dialects of Southwest England. This volume will be of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone interested in the structure of spontaneous spoken English.
Download or read book Merging Features written by José M. Brucart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-29 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which Merge and formal features, two factors in the Minimalist Program, interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. The authors combine grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of languages.
Download or read book Coordination Structures in Old and Middle High German written by Sophia Jana Oppermann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-12-02 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the quantitative analysis of a large corpus of Old and Middle High German prose texts, this volume provides a first extensive overview on the syntactic properties of coordination structures featuring the coordinators inti/und and joh in Old and Middle High German and discusses potential analyses in a generative framework. After introducing the main properties of coordination structures in Modern Standard German in Chapters 1 and 2, the results of the corpus study are presented in Chapters 3-6. Chapter 3 focuses on the coordinators inti/und and joh, showing that coordination structures with both coordinators already exhibit the same characteristic types of ellipsis as well as the same parallelism of the conjuncts as their Modern Standard German counterparts. Chapters 4-6 each discuss one major aspect of diachronic change: verbal agreement with conjoined subject-NPs (Chapter 4), the conditions regarding the omission of referential subject-pronouns in clausal or verbal coordination structures (Chapter 5) and so-called ‘inversion after und’ (Chapter 6). The volume thus provides a deeper understanding of the syntax of coordination structures in both a synchronic and diachronic perspective for researchers and students.
Download or read book Deriving Coordinate Symmetries written by John R. te Velde and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-18 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph proposes a minimalist, phase-based approach to the derivation of coordinate structures, utilizing the operations Copy and Match to account for both the symmetries and asymmetries of coordination. Data are drawn primarily from English, German and Dutch. The basic assumptions are that all coordinate structures are symmetric to some degree (in contrast to parasitic gap and many verb phrase ellipsis constructions), and these symmetries, especially with ellipsis, allow syntactic derivations to utilize Copy and Match in interface with active memory for economizing with gaps and assuring clarity of interpretation. With derivations operating at the feature level, troublesome properties of coordinate structures such as cross-categorial and non-constituent coordination, violations of the Coordinate Structure Constraint, as well as coordinate ellipsis (Gapping, RNR, Left-Edge Ellipsis) are accounted for without separate mechanisms or conditions applicable only to coordinate structures. The proposal provides support for central assumptions about the structure of West Germanic.
Download or read book Third Factors in Language Variation and Change written by Elly Van Gelderen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a unique angle, by linking insights from theoretical advances in generative syntax to phenomena from language variation and change.
Download or read book Ellipsis in Conjunction written by Kerstin Schwabe and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers of the volume mirror the ongoing debate on approaches towards two related topics: conjunction and ellipsis. The major issues are the syntactic relationship between the conjuncts, the syntactic category of the conjunction words, the size of the conjuncts, the syntactic and semantic status of the null elements, and semantic and information structural restrictions. A wide range of facts from various languages are explored in relation to phrasal coordination, Gapping, Pseudogapping, VP-ellipsis, and Sluicing.
Download or read book The Composition of Meaning written by Alice G. B. ter Meulen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the modular design of generative theory the syntaxsemantics interface has accounted all along for meanings at the level of Logical Form. The syntaxpragmatics interface, on the other hand, is the result of what one may call the 'pragmatic turn' in the linguistic theory, where content is partitioned into given and new information. In other words, the structural division of the clause has been subjected to criteria of information, or discourse structure. Both interfaces require a structurally descriptive inventory whose specific shapes can be motivated on theory-internal grounds only. The present collection of original articles develops the concept of these interfaces further. The papers in the first section focus on the syntaxsemantics interface, those in the second section on the syntaxpragmatics interface.
Download or read book The Handbook of the History of English written by Ans van Kemenade and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language. organizes the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language innovatively and applies recent insights to old problems surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research
Download or read book Cycles in Language Change written by Miriam Bouzouita 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 multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change, including the diachrony of negation, the internal structure of wh-words, and changes in argument structure. It combines descriptions of novel data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will appeal to historical linguists and to anyone working on language variation and change.
Download or read book Locality and the Architecture of Syntactic Dependencies written by L. López and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-03-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study on minimalist syntax this book develops an empirical argument for a crash-proof computational system. This framework allows for novel analyses of quirky subjects in Icelandic and Spanish, indefinite SE in Spanish and different types of expletive constructions in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Icelandic.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Grammar of English written by Elly van Gelderen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook introduces basic concepts of grammar in a format which should encourage readers to use linguistic arguments. It focuses on syntactic analysis and evidence. It also looks at sociolinguisic and historical reasons behind prescriptive rules.
Download or read book Bibliographie Linguistique de L annee 1999 written by Mark Janse and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2003 with total page 1484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Setting out the historical national and religious characteristics of the Italians as they impact on the integration within the European Union, this study makes note of the two characteristics that have an adverse effect on Italian national identity: cleavages between north and south and the dominant role of family. It discusses how for Italians family loyalty is stronger than any other allegiance, including feelings towards their country, their nation, or the EU. Due to such subnational allegiances and values, this book notes that Italian civic society is weaker and engagement at the grass roots is less robust than one finds in other democracies, leaving politics in Italy largely in the hands of political parties. The work concludes by noting that EU membership, however, provides no magic bullet for Italy: it cannot change internal cleavages, the Italian worldview, and family values or the country’s mafia-dominated power matrix, and as a result, the underlying absence of fidelity to a shared polity—Italian or European—leave the country as ungovernable as ever.
Download or read book Motives for Language Change written by Raymond Hickey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-16 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally published in 2003, brings together an international team of leading figures from different areas of linguistics to re-examine some of the central issues in this field and also to discuss new proposals. The volume is arranged into sections, including grammaticalisation, the typological perspective, the social context of language change and contact-based explanations. It seeks to cover the subject as a whole, bearing in mind its relevance for the general analysis of language, and will appeal to a broad international readership.
Download or read book Grammaticalization Scenarios from Europe and Asia written by Walter Bisang and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume intends to fill the gap in the grammaticalization studies setting as its goal the systematic description of grammaticalization processes in genealogically and structurally diverse languages. To address the problem of the limitations of the secondary sources for grammaticalization studies, the editors rely on sketches of grammaticalization phenomena from experts in individual languages guided by a typological questionnaire.
