Download or read book Perspectives on Aspect written by Henk J. Verkuyl and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-01-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.

Download or read book The Language of Fiction written by Emar Maier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies.

Download or read book Cognitive Approaches to Tense Aspect and Epistemic Modality written by Adeline Patard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses problems of semantics regarding the analysis of tense and aspect (TA) markers in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Croatian, English, French, German, Russian, Thai, and Turkish. Its main interest goes out to epistemic uses of such markers, whereby epistemic modality is understood as indicating “a degree of compatibility between the modal world and the factual world” (Declerck). All contributions, moreover, tackle these problems from a more or less cognitive point of view, with some of them insisting on the need to provide a unifying explanation for all usage types, temporal and non-temporal, and all of them accepting the premise that the semantics of TA categories essentially refers to subjective, rather than objective, concerns. The volume also represents one of the first attempts to gather accounts of TA marking (in various languages) that are explicitly set within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. Ultimately, this volume aims to contribute to establishing an awareness that modal meaning elements are directly relevant to the analysis of the grammar of time.

Download or read book Aspect in English written by K. Kabakciev and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an earlier edition published in 1992 in Bulgarian, this book offers a specific approach to one of the most controversial problems in linguistics. According to it, aspect is the result of a subtle and complex interplay between the referents of verbs and nouns in the sentence. This volume is of interest to researchers of aspect and related problems, theoretical and applied linguists, psycholinguists, philosophers of language, graduate students of general linguistics, English (Germanic), and Bulgarian (Slavic).

Download or read book Investigations Into the Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art written by Peer F. Bundgaard and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-22 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.

Download or read book The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction written by Monika Fludernik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monika Fludernik presents a detailed analysis of free indirect discourse as it relates to narrative theory, and the crucial problematic of how speech and thought are represented in fiction. Building on the insights of Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences, Fludernik radically extends Banfield's model to accommodate evidence from conversational narrative, non-fictional prose and literary works from Chaucer to the present. Fludernik's model subsumes earlier insights into the forms and functions of quotation and aligns them with discourse strategies observable in the oral language. Drawing on a vast range of literature, she provides an invaluable resource for researchers in the field and introduces English readers to extensive work on the subject in German as well as comparing the free indirect discourse features of German, French and English. This study effectively repositions the whole area between literature and linguistics, opening up a new set of questions in narrative theory.

Download or read book A Theory of Aspectuality written by Henk J. Verkuyl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-05-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentences may pertain to states or processes or events. They may express duration, frequency, habituality, and many other forms of temporality. How do they do this? It is the aspectual properties of sentences in natural languages which allow the user to express a temporal structure, and Henk Verkuyl presents a unified formal system to account for them. He explains aspectuality in terms of the opposition between terminative aspect and durative aspect, and describes the way in which terminative aspect is compositionally formed on the basis of semantic information expressed by different syntactic elements, in particular the verb and its arguments. The aim is to determine which semantic conditions make a sentence terminative; but at least ten different forms of durative aspectuality are also treated. All are drawn into a theory which can account for both terminative and durative aspectuality together. A Theory of Aspectuality draws together into a coherent whole the author's thinking on the subject over the last twenty years, and will interest all those working on aspect and the semantics of noun phrases. It promises to be a major new contribution to our understanding of the subject.

Download or read book Temporal Reference Aspect and Actionality Semantic and syntactic perspectives written by Pier Marco Bertinetto and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Text Time and Context written by Richard P. Meier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carlota S. Smith was a key figure in linguistic research and a pioneering woman in generative linguistics. This selection of papers focuses on the research into tense, aspect, and discourse that Smith completed while Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Smith’s early work in English syntax is still cited today, and her early career also yielded key research on language acquisition by young children. Starting in the mid-1970s, after her move to UT, she embarked on her most important line of research. In numerous papers - the first of which was published in 1975 - and in a very important 1991 book (The Parameter of Aspect), Smith analyzed how languages encode time and how they encode the ways events and situations occur over time. Smith’s work on the expression of time in language is notable because of its careful analyses of a number of quite different languages, including not only English and French, but also Russian, Mandarin, and Navajo. Inspired by a year in France in the early 1970s, Smith began to analyze the differing ways in which languages encode time and how they encode the ways events and situations occur over time. In doing so, she developed her signature ‘two-component’ theory of aspect. This model of temporal aspect provided an excellent framework for graduate students seeking to analyze the temporal systems of an array of languages, including under-described languages that are so much the focus of research in UT’s Linguistics Department. Selected by Carlota Smith herself and by her longtime friends and colleagues, this book contains her 1980 piece on temporal structures in discourse, her 1986 comparison of the English and French aspectual systems, a 1996 paper on the aspect system in Navajo (an increasingly-endangered language which Smith worked to preserve), and her 1980 and 1993 papers on the child’s acquisition of tense and aspect. Smith, who died in 2007, was a trailblazer in her field whose broad interests fed into her scholarly research. She was an avid reader who sought to bring the analytic tools of linguistics to the humanistic study of literature, by examining the syntactic and pragmatic principles which underlie literary effects. Her research on rhetorical and temporal effects in context was integrated into her last book, Modes of Discourse (2003). The current volume of articles covers much of her most fruitful work on the way in which language is used to express time, and will be essential reading for many working and studying in linguistics generally and in semantics particularly.

Download or read book Recent Advances in the Syntax and Semantics of Tense Aspect and Modality written by Louis de Saussure and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation: information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this information has scope over the whole characterization of the eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers (originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses, aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts, aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives, economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality, past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics (general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and logic.

Download or read book Information Structure in a Cross Linguistic Perspective written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume draws together contributions from a number of scholars with an interest in empirical, cross-linguistic description. Most of the papers were first presented at the symposium Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective held in Oslo in November/December 2000. The descriptions are functionally oriented, and their common focus is how information structure – in a broad sense – can be compared across languages. 'Information structure' has been approached in a variety of ways by the authors, so as to give a broad picture of this fundamental principle of text production, involving the way in which a speaker/writer chooses to present a message in terms of given/new information, focus, cohesion, and point of view. Central to much of the research is the problem of establishing criteria for isolating linguistic constraints on language use from cultural-linguistic conventions in text production. The linguistic comparison includes English, German and/or one of the Scandinavian languages, with sidelights to other languages. Most of the papers are text- or corpus-based, and the ongoing work on parallel corpora in Scandinavia is reflected in several contributions.

Download or read book Modes of Discourse written by Carlota S. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages, units of several sentences or more. She introduces the key idea of the 'Discourse Mode', identifying five modes: Narrative, Description, Report, Information, Argument. These are realized at the level of the passage, and cut across genre lines. Smith shows that the modes, intuitively recognizable as distinct, have linguistic correlates that differentiate them. She analyzes the properties that distinguish each mode, focusing on grammatical rather than lexical information. The book also examines linguistically based features that appear in passages of all five modes: topic and focus, variation in syntactic structure, and subjectivity, or point of view. Operating at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in linguistics, stylistics and rhetoric.

Download or read book How to Show Things with Words written by Rui Linhares-Dias and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Show Things with Words is an interdisciplinary research study at the interface between linguistics and philosophy which sheds new light on the narrative-theoretical issue of proximal vs. distal stance adoption in discourse. Narrative distance ultimately depends on the epistemological source of the information conveyed, but English and other Indo-European languages have no inflectional systems for (en)coding that source of knowledge. To fill in the gap, speech act theory is (re)considered in the light of philosophical research on linguistic functions and a parallel is drawn between grammaticalized evidential categories and the objectifying acts of Husserl's phenomenology of constitution. These intuitive vs. signitive intentional acts do, indeed, roughly correspond to direct vs. indirect evidentiary forms and can be inferred from the temporal-perspectival organization of discourse by the so-called intimation or announcement function of language-systems. It turns out that perspectival immediacy requires tenses with overlapping event- and reference-points, but predictions of the sort are non-monotonic forms of reasoning defeasible by quantificational aspect distinctions, on the one hand, and inherent meaning considerations, on the other. To substantiate this claim, the bulk of the book provides an in-depth formal semantic account of tense, aspect and Aktionsart, interwoven with a detailed analysis of the cognitive processes associated with eventuality-description types. The book adresses an audience of linguists in general, formal semanticists, cognitive scientists, philosophers and narratologists with an interest in natural language semantics.

Download or read book Meaning and the Dynamics of Interpretation written by Hans Kamp and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 701 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of research papers written by Hans Kamp presents the core of his scientific research on natural language semantics and its relation to logic, philosophy and linguistics. Arranged in six sections, the topics range from philosophical reflection on the foundational issues in the ancient Sorites Paradox with a formal account of its solution, to a detailed account of presuppositions in dynamic semantics.

Download or read book Spaces Worlds and Grammar written by Gilles Fauconnier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought. These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals; the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self; abstract change expressions in Japanese; mood in Spanish; deictic expressions; copular sentences in Japanese; conditional constructions; and reference in American Sign Language. The ground-breaking research presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists. The contributors are Claudia Brugman, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Yo Matsumoto, Errapel Mejias-Bikandi, Laura A. Michaelis, Gisela Redeker, Jo Rubba, Shigeru Sakahara, Jose Sanders, Eve Sweetser, and Karen van Hoek.

Download or read book The Legacy of Zellig Harris written by Bruce E. Nevin and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to this volume relect the influence that Zellig Harris has had in syntax, semantics, mathematical linguistics, discourse analysis, informatics, philosophy, phonology and poetics.

Download or read book Linguistics Meets Philosophy written by Daniel Altshuler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With input from a team of scholars, this book brings together linguistics and philosophy, empowering new conversations in the process.