Download or read book A Comparative Typology of English and German written by John A. Hawkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986, this book draws together analyses of English and German. It defines the contrasts and similarities between the two languages and, in particular, looks at the question of whether contrasts in one area of the grammar is systematically related to contrasts in another, and whether there is any ‘directionality’ or unity to contrast throughout grammar as a whole. It is suggested that there is, and that English and German can serve as a case study for a more general typology of languages than we now have. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, including students of Germanic languages; language typologists; generative grammarians attempting to ‘fix the parameters’ on language variation;’ historical linguists; and applied linguists.

Download or read book Comparative Grammar and Typology written by Alain Lemaréchal and published by Peeters Leuven. This book was released on 2010 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The comparative grammar of the Austronesian languages underwent an unprecedented change immediately after World War 2, owing to the use of lexicostatistics, the appeal to migration theory and the like, and also because of the idea of Formosa being the cradle of the language family. The present book is essentially an attempt at answering the following question: What would the comparative grammar of Austronesian look like in the absence of speculation on speaker migrations, and in the absence of the so-called "data" produced by lexicostatistics and glottochronology? Whereas typology is unable to offer the proof that a given language belongs to a group or subgroup of languages, grammaticalization theory can say whether a given state A may have preceded a state B or the reverse, and solid arguments are needed to propose a relative chronology between events that would be improbable, or even exceptional, in terms of the typology of linguistic change. This book revisits central issues of the comparative grammar of Austronesian languages from this angle, such as the history of person markers, particularly in the 2nd person, the genesis of the so-called "focus" verbal voice system and the typology of sentence structures. There is nothing in these domains that supports the supposition that Proto-Austronesian was very similar to the Formosan languages.

Download or read book Linguistic Categories Language Description and Linguistic Typology written by Luca Alfieri and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci, in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly, the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions, the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics, but also specialists in the philosophy of language, and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics, cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, anthropology).

Download or read book Reconstructing Grammar written by Spike Gildea and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-07-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization theory both belong to the broader category of historical linguistics, yet few linguists practice both. The methods and goals of each group seem largely distinct: comparative linguists have by and large avoided reconstructing grammar, while grammaticalization theoreticians have either focused on explaining attested historical change or used internal reconstruction to formulate hypotheses about processes of change. In this collection, some of the leading voices in grammaticalization theory apply their methods to comparative data (largely drawn from indigenous languages of the Americas), showing not only that grammar can be reconstructed, but that the process of reconstructing grammar can yield interesting theoretical and typological insights.

Download or read book Language Typology written by Alice Caffarel and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended as a systemic functional contribution to language typology both for those who would like to understand and describe particular languages against the background of generalizations about a wide range of languages and also for those who would like to develop typological accounts that are based on and embody descriptions of the systems of particular languages (rather than isolated constructions). The book is a unique contribution in at least two respects. On the one hand, it is the first book based on systemic functional theory that is specifically concerned with language typology. On the other hand, the book combines the particular with the general in the description of languages: it presents comparable sketches of particular languages while at the same time identifying generalizations based on the languages described here as well as on other languages. The volume explores eight languages, covering seven language families: French, German, Pitjantjatjara, Tagalog, Telugu, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese.

Download or read book Explanation in typology written by Karsten Schmidtke-Bode and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations. On this view, recurrent pathways of reanalysis and grammaticalization can lead to uniform synchronic results, obviating the need to postulate global forces like ambiguity avoidance, processing efficiency or iconicity, especially if there is no evidence for such motivations in the genesis of the respective constructions. On the other hand, the recent typological literature is equally ripe with talk of "complex adaptive systems", "attractor states" and "cross-linguistic convergence". One may wonder, therefore, how much room is left for traditional functional-adaptive forces and how exactly they influence the diachronic trajectories that shape universal distributions. The papers in the present volume are intended to provide an accessible introduction to this debate. Covering theoretical, methodological and empirical facets of the issue at hand, they represent current ways of thinking about the role of diachronic sources in explaining grammatical universals, articulated by seasoned and budding linguists alike.

Download or read book A Typology of Marked S Languages written by Corinna Handschuh and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case-systems all over the world exhibit striking similarities. In most lan- guages intransitive subjects (S) receives less overt marking than one of the two transitive arguments (agent-like A or patient-like P); the other one of these two arguments is usually encoded by the same form as S. In some languages the amount of overt marking is identical between S, A, and P. But hardly ever does the S argument receive more overt marking than A or P. Yet there are some languages that do not follow this general pattern. This book is about those languages that behave differently, the marked-S languages. Marked-S languages are well-known to be found in East Africa, where they occur in two different language families, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Sa- haran. They can also be found in North-Western America and the Pacific region. This book is the first investigation of marked S-languages that treats the phenomenon on a global scale. The study examines the functional distribution of the two main case- forms, the form used for S (S-case) and the case-form of the transitive ar- gument which receives less marking (the zero-case). It offers a very fine- grained perspective considering a wide range of constructions. The con- texts in which the case-marking patterns are investigated include nom- inal, existential and locational predication, subjects in special discourse function (e. g. focused constituents), subjects of passives and dependent clauses, as well as the forms used for addressing someone (vocative form) and for using a noun in isolation (citation form). Apart from the functional distribution of case forms, the formal means of marking are also considered. The main focus is on the synchronic de- scription and comparison of marked-S languages, but historical explana- tions for the unusual case-marking pattern are also discussed. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Download or read book Approaches to Language Typology written by Masayoshi Shibatani and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language typology is concerned with the construction of theoretical frameworks capable of delimiting the range of human languages and of capturing constraints on cross-linguistic variation. This text offers accounts of the theoretical foundations and findings of leading scholars in this field.

Download or read book A typology of questions in Northeast Asia and beyond written by Andreas Hölzl and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2018-08-29 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the distribution of linguistic and specifically structural diversity in Northeast Asia (NEA), defined as the region north of the Yellow River and east of the Yenisei. In particular, it analyzes what is called the grammar of questions (GQ), i.e., those aspects of any given language that are specialized for asking questions or regularly combine with these. The bulk of the study is a bottom-up description and comparison of GQs in the languages of NEA. The addition of the phrase and beyond to the title of this study serves two purposes. First, languages such as Turkish and Chuvash are included, despite the fact that they are spoken outside of NEA, since they have ties to (or even originated in) the region. Second, despite its focus on one area, the typology is intended to be applicable to other languages as well. Therefore, it makes extensive use of data from languages outside of NEA. The restriction to one category is necessary for reasons of space and clarity, and the process of zooming in on one region allows a higher resolution and historical accuracy than is usually the case in linguistic typology. The discussion mentions over 450 languages and dialects from NEA and beyond and gives about 900 glossed examples. The aim is to achieve both a cross-linguistically plausible typology and a maximal resolution of the linguistic diversity of Northeast Asia.

Download or read book Language Universals and Linguistic Typology written by Bernard Comrie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-07-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Comrie (linguistics, U. of Southern Cal.) is particularly concerned with syntactico-semantic universals, devoting chapters to word order, case marking, relative clauses, and causative constructions. This second edition takes full account of new research into generative grammatical theory. Acidic paper. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 1661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.

Download or read book Radical Construction Grammar written by William Croft and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is based on the results of research in language typology, and motivated by the need for a theory to explain them. Croft proposes intimate links between syntactic and semantic structures, and argues that the basic elements of any language are not syntactic but rather syntactic-semantic "Gestalts." He puts forward a new approach to syntactic representation and a new model of how language and languages work.

Download or read book Similative and Equative Constructions written by Yvonne Treis and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While comparative constructions have been extensively studied in the past decades, the expression of equality and similarity has so far attracted little attention in the typological literature. The fifteen contributions assembled in this volume study similative and equative constructions in typologically and genetically distant languages, albeit with a focus on Africa, and from a range of perspectives. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that also shed light on the diachronic development of similative and equative constructions in language contact situations. Sources of similative morphemes and lexically expressed concepts of likeness are examined, and little-known multifunctionality patterns and grammaticalisation targets of similative morphemes – such as purpose clause markers, modality morphemes and markers of glottonyms – are discussed. Based on a sample of 119 languages worldwide, a new typology of equative constructions is proposed. The book should be of interest to typologists, semanticists, specialists of grammaticalization, historical linguistics and syntax.

Download or read book Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations written by Pirkko Suihkonen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of 'give' (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument structure, typology of the Amdo Sprachbund, spatial realtors (Northeastern Turkic), core argument patterns (languages of Northern California), and typology of grammatical relations (LENCA) are the topics of articles based on cross-linguistic data. The broad empirical sweep and the fine-tuned theoretical analysis highlight the central role of argument structure and grammatical relations with respect to a plethora of linguistic phenomena.

Download or read book The Universal Structure of Categories written by Martina Wiltschko and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using data from a variety of languages such as Blackfoot, Halkomelem, and Upper Austrian German, this book explores a range of grammatical categories and constructions, including tense, aspect, subjunctive, case and demonstratives. It presents a new theory of grammatical categories - the Universal Spine Hypothesis - and reinforces generative notions of Universal Grammar while accommodating insights from linguistic typology. In essence, this new theory shows that language-specific categories are built from a small set of universal categories and language-specific units of language. Throughout the book the Universal Spine Hypothesis is compared to two alternative theories - the Universal Base Hypothesis and the No Base Hypothesis. This valuable addition to the field will be welcomed by graduate students and researchers in linguistics.

Download or read book Introducing Language Typology written by Edith A. Moravcsik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook provides an introduction to language typology which assumes minimal prior knowledge of linguistics.

Download or read book The Handbook of Historical Linguistics Volume II written by Richard D. Janda and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.