Download or read book Modality in Syntax Semantics and Pragmatics written by Werner Abraham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we say things like 'If only we knew what he was up to!' Clearly this is more than just a message, or a question to our addressee. We are expressing simultaneously that we don't know, and also that we wish to know. Several modes of encoding contribute to such modalities of expression: word order, subordinating subjunctions, sentences that are subordinated but nevertheless occur autonomously, and attitudinal discourse adverbs which, far beyond lexical adverbials of modality, allow the speaker and the listener to presuppose full agreement, partial agreement under presupposed conditions, or negotiation of common ground. This state of the art survey proposes a new model of modality, drawing on data from a variety of Germanic and Slavic languages to find out what is cross-linguistically universal about modality, and to argue that it is a constitutive part of human cognition.

Download or read book The Syntax Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood written by Henk Haverkate and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-09-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study provides a consistent description and explanation of the syntax, the semantics and the pragmatics of Spanish mood. A major focus of attention is the central role of the truthfunctional categories of realis, potentialis and irrealis as parameters relevant to mood selection in both subordinate and non-subordinate clauses. Furthermore, a proposal is offered for a new typology of clause-embedding predicates. The framework chosen stems from the insight that complement-taking predicates share the property of providing information on the set of mental processes which characterize intentional human behavior. At the level of pragmatic analysis, mood selection is examined from a variety of angles. Thus, specific research is conducted within the framework of speech act theory, relevance theory, politeness theory and the theory of Gricean maxims.

Download or read book Investigations of the Syntax semantics pragmatics Interface written by Robert D. Van Valin and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface presents on-going research in Role and Reference Grammar in a number of critical areas of linguistic theory: verb semantics and argument structure, the nature of syntactic categories and syntactic representation, prosody and syntax, information structure and syntax, and the syntax and semantics of complex sentences. In each of these areas there are important results which not only advance the development of the theory, but also contribute to the broader theoretical discussion. In particular, there are analyses of grammatical phenomena such as transitivity in Kabardian, the verb-less numeral quantifier construction in Japanese, and an unusual kind of complex sentence in Wari' (Chapakuran, Brazil) which not only illustrate the descriptive and explanatory power of the theory, but also present interesting challenges to other approaches. In addition, there are papers looking at the implications and applications of Role and Reference Grammar for neurolinguistic research, parsing and automated text analysis.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics written by Keith Allan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 967 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

Download or read book Challenges at the Syntax Semantics Pragmatics Interface written by Robert D. Van Valin Jr. and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together recent scholarship addressing a number of significant issues in linguistic theory and description, including verb classification, case marking, comparative constructions, noun phrase structure, clause linkage and reference-tracking in discourse. These topics are discussed with respect to a wide range of languages, including Bamunka (Bantu), Biblical Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, Pitjantjatjara (Australia), Russian and Taiwan Sign Language. The theoretical perspective employed in these analyses is that of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a theory which strives to describe language structure and grammatical phenomena in terms of the interaction of syntax, semantics and discourse-pragmatics. RRG differs from other parallel-architecture, constructionally-oriented theories in important ways, particularly with respect to the ability to formulate cross-linguistic generalizations. The ability of RRG to facilitate the formulation of cross-linguistic generalizations is exemplified well in the contributions to this volume. As such, this text makes important theoretical and descriptive contributions to contemporary linguistic discussions.

Download or read book Vocatives written by Virginia Hill and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vocatives proposes a formal syntactic approach to vocatives. The analysis focuses on the internal structure of vocatives phrases and on the mechanism through which a vocative phrase connects with the clause. Vocatives are nouns that encode conversational pragmatic features at their left periphery. Any vocative phrase with this structure becomes the indirect object of a Speech Act head mapped at the left periphery of clauses. This analysis has implications for the debate on whether pragmatic features are mapped into syntax, and, subsequently, on how a grammar of direct address may look like. Since particles of direct address, imperatives and exclamations fall under the same umbrella of speech acts, they all need re-assessment from the same perspective. "This book is a tour de force: Virginia Hill brings the vocative a category which had so far remained marginal and ill understood into main stream syntactic research by tying it in with recent progress in the study of the syntactization of pragmatic functions. What used to be a fringe phenomenon will now be part of the core theory." Liliane Haegeman, Ghent University "Virginia Hill has redrawn the syntax-pragmatics interface by nudging syntax into domains that are traditionally considered to be purely pragmatic in nature. She has done this with sophisticated analysis and a breathtaking array of cross-linguistic data." Shigery Miyagawa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Vocatives are a fundamental yet strangely neglected aspect of the grammar of many languages. General readers intrigued and perhaps puzzled by the nature of vocatives and how they are expressed cross-linguistically will find this a very helpful and enlightening book." Martin Maiden, University of Oxford"

Download or read book The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora written by Yan Huang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a pragmatic theory of anaphora within the neo-Gricean framework of conversational implicature. Chomsky claims that anaphora reflects underlying principles of innate Universal Grammar, and the view is widely held that only syntactic and semantic factors are crucial to intrasentential anaphora. Yan Huang questions the basis of the Government and Binding approach and argues that syntax and pragmatics are interconnected in determining many anaphoric processes. Furthermore, he proposes that the extent to which syntax and pragmatics interact varies typologically. There exists a class of language (such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean) in which pragmatics play a central role that in familiar European languages is alleged to be played by grammar. Yan Huang's pragmatic theory has far reaching implications for this important issue in theoretical linguistics.

Download or read book Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Languages written by Franz Guenthner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other.

Download or read book At the Syntax pragmatics Interface written by Lutz Marten and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interaction of grammar and context in human communication. Lutz Marten focuses on verbs and verb phrases: he examines the relationship between language rules and linguistic behaviour, seeking to distinguish between language-specific syntactic knowledge and the generalreasoning people need to understand and to make themselves understood. He considers how the component elements of linguistic theory explain what appear to be simple utterances but whose structure is hard to analyse - how, for example, 'Fran is baking Mary a cake in the oven' is different from 'Franis baking Mary a cake in the kitchen'.The author's account of the interactions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics is based on extensive observation among contrasting cultures and a variety of languages. He makes important contributions to understanding in all three areas. His book will appeal to linguistic theoreticians of allpersuasions.

Download or read book The Semantics and Pragmatics of Preposing written by Gregory L. Ward and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1988, this book examines the aspects of pragmatic competence involving the class of preposing constructions in English. By limiting the scope of investigation to particular grammatical categories, the author argues previous studies have failed to capture significant pragmatic generalisations. The author asserts what distinguishes one preposing type from another are the semantic and pragmatic properties of the referent of that constituent. After a review of the past literature on preposing, the book goes on to present a pragmatic theory in which two discourse functions of preposing are proposed. It then provides a functional taxonomy of the various preposing types which the theory is designed to account for. One type of preposing, Topicalization, and two of its subtypes, Proposition Affirmation and Ironic Preposing, are discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters before the book concludes with a summary along with directions for future research.

Download or read book Optimality theoretic Syntax Semantics and Pragmatics written by Géraldine Legendre and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of grammar, interpreting optimization as the result of conflicting, violable ranked constraints. Unlike previous work on the topic, this book also takes into account the question of directionality of grammar. A model of grammar in which optimization processes interact bidirectionally allows both language generation-the process of selecting the optimal form of a given meaning-and language interpretation-the process of optimal interpretation of a given form-to be taken into account. Chapters in this volume explore the consequences of both symmetric (unidirectional) and asymmetric (bidirectional) versions of Optimality Theory, investigating the syntax-semantics interface, first language acquisition, and sequential bilingual grammars. The volume presents cutting edge research in Optimality-Theoretic syntax and semantics, as well as demonstrating how optimization processes as modelled in this formalism serve as a viable approach for linguists and scholars in related fields.

Download or read book Prepositions in Their Syntactic Semantic and Pragmatic Context written by Susanne Feigenbaum and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing interest in prepositions is reflected by this impressive collection of papers from leading scholars of various fields. The selected contributions of Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context focus on the local and temporal semantics of prepositions in relation to their context, too. Following an introduction which puts this new approach into a thematical and historical perspective, the volume presents fifteen studies in the following areas: The semantics of space dynamics (mainly on French prepositions); Language acquisition (aphasia and code-switching); Artificial intelligence (mainly of English prepositions); Specific languages: Hebrew (from a number of perspectives — syntax, semiotics, and sociolinguistic impact on morphology), Maltese, the Melanesian English-based Creole Bislama, and Biblical translations into Judeo-Greek.

Download or read book Grammar Meaning and Pragmatics written by Frank Brisard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, cognitive, cultural, social, variational, interactional, or discursive points of view, this fifth volume looks at the field of linguistic pragmatics from a primarily grammatical angle. That is, it asks in which particular sense a variety of older and more recent functional (rather than generative) models of grammar relate to the study of language in use: how this affects their general outlook on language structure, whether issues of language use inform the very makeup of these models or are merely included as possible research themes, and how far the actual integration of pragmatics ultimately goes (is it a module/layer or is the model truly “usage-based”?). Each of the authors presenting these models has taken systematic care to highlight the relevant problems and focus on the implications of considering pragmatic phenomena from the point of view of grammar. Furthermore, a limited number of chapters deal with traditional topics in the grammatical literature, and specifically those which are called pragmatic because they either are not strictly concerned with truth (semantics), or receive their (truth) value only from an interaction with context. In the introduction, these theories and topics are set up against the historical background of a gradually changing attitude, on the part of grammarians, towards questions of linguistic knowledge and behavior, and the role of learning in their relationship.

Download or read book Analyzing meaning written by Paul R. Kroeger and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered. As the title indicates, this book is truly an INTRODUCTION: it provides a solid foundation which will prepare students to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics. It is also intended as a reference for fieldworkers doing primary research on under-documented languages, to help them write grammatical descriptions that deal carefully and clearly with semantic issues. The approach adopted here is largely descriptive and non-formal (or, in some places, semi-formal), although some basic logical notation is introduced. The book is written at level which should be appropriate for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. It presupposes some previous coursework in linguistics, but does not presuppose any background in formal logic or set theory.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics written by Maria Aloni and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 1239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formal semantics - the scientific study of meaning in natural language - is one of the most fundamental and long-established areas of linguistics. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, yet compact guide to the field, bringing together research from a wide range of world-leading experts. Chapters include coverage of the historical context and foundation of contemporary formal semantics, a survey of the variety of formal/logical approaches to linguistic meaning and an overview of the major areas of research within current semantic theory, broadly conceived. The Handbook also explores the interfaces between semantics and neighbouring disciplines, including research in cognition and computation. This work will be essential reading for students and researchers working in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science.

Download or read book The Role of Semantic Pragmatic and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case written by Jóhanna Barðdal and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-11 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this volume is to bring non-syntactic factors in the development of case into the eye of the research field, by illustrating the integral role of pragmatics, semantics, and discourse structure in the historical development of morphologically marked case systems. The articles represent fifteen typologically diverse languages from four different language families: (i) Indo-European: Vedic Sanskrit, Russian, Greek, Latin, Latvian, Gothic, French, German, Icelandic, and Faroese; (ii) Tibeto-Burman, especially the Bodic languages and Meithei; (iii) Japanese; and (iv) the Pama-Nyungan mixed language Gurindji Kriol. The data also show considerable diversity and include elicited, archival, corpus-based, and naturally occurring data. Discussions of mechanisms where change is obtained include semantically and aspectually motivated synchronic case variation, discourse motivated subject marking, reduction or expansion of case marker distribution, case syncretism motivated by semantics, syntax, or language contact, and case splits motivated by pragmatics, metonymy, and subjectification.

Download or read book Little Words written by Ronald P. Leow and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little Words is an interdisciplinary examination of the functions and change in the use of clitics, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, discourse particles, auxiliary/light verbs, prepositions, and other “little words” that have played a central role in linguistic theory and in language acquisition research. Leading scholars present advanced research in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse function, historical development, variation, and acquisition by children and adults. This unique volume integrates the views and findings of these different research areas into one professional source to be used within and across disciplines. Languages studied include English, Spanish, French, Romanian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Slavonic, and Medieval Leonese.