Download or read book Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English written by Betty J. Birner and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work provides a comprehensive discourse-functional account of three classes of noncanonical constituent placement in English — preposing, postposing, and argument reversal — and shows how their interaction is accounted for in a principled and predictive way. In doing so, it details the variety of ways in which information can be 'given' or 'new' and shows how an understanding of this variety allows us to account for the distribution of these constructions in discourse. Moreover, the authors show that there exist broad and empirically verifiable functional correspondences within classes of syntactically similar constructions. Relying heavily on corpus data, the authors identify three interacting dimensions along which individual constructions may vary with respect to the pragmatic constraints to which they are sensitive: old vs. new information, relative vs. absolute familiarity, and discourse- vs. hearer-familiarity. They show that preposed position is reserved for information that is linked to the prior discourse by means of a contextually licensed partially-ordered set relationship; postposed position is reserved for information that is 'new' in one of a small number of distinct senses; and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preverbal constituent be at least as familiar within the discourse as that represented by the postverbal constituent. Within each of the three classes of constructions, individual constructions vary with respect to whether they are sensitive to familiarity within the discourse or (assumed) familiarity within the hearer's knowledge store. Thus, although the individual constructions in question are subject to distinct constraints, this work provides empirical evidence for the existence of strong correlations between sentence position and information status. The final chapter presents crosslinguistic data showing that these correlations are not limited to English.

Download or read book Inversion in Modern Written English written by Rolf Kreyer and published by Gunter Narr Verlag. This book was released on 2006 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dislocated Elements in Discourse written by Benjamin Shaer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is about 'dislocation' – the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge. Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis.

Download or read book Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax written by Andreas Dufter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 1104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

Download or read book Discourse Syntax written by Heidrun Dorgeloh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discourse Syntax is the study of syntax that requires an understanding of the surrounding text and the overall discourse situation, including considerations of genre and modality. Using corpus data and insights from current research, this book is a comprehensive guide to this fast-developing field. It takes the reader 'beyond the sentence' to study grammatical phenomena, like word order variation, connectives, ellipsis, and complexity. It introduces core concepts of Discourse Syntax, integrating insights from corpus-based research and inviting the reader to reflect on research design decisions. Each chapter begins with a definition of learning outcomes, provides results from empirical articles, and enables readers to critically assess data visualization. Complete with helpful further reading recommendations as well as a range of exercises, it is geared towards intermediate to advanced students of English linguistics and it is also essential reading for anyone interested in this exciting, fast-moving discipline.

Download or read book Viewpoint in Language written by Barbara Dancygier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a new understanding of the role and structure of viewpoint in cognition and communication.

Download or read book Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change written by Sam Featherston and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.

Download or read book Discourse Function Syntactic Form in Natural Language Generation written by Cassandre Creswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-12-24 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in statistical natural language generation is rapidly increasing. This work sheds important light from theoretical linguistics on the type of information crucial to statistical NLG algorithms.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis written by Chris Shei and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 823 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese is a discourse-oriented language and the underlying mechanisms of the language involve encoding and decoding so the language can be correctly delivered and understood. To date, there has been a lack of consolidation at the discourse level such that a reference framework for understanding the language in a top-down fashion is still underdeveloped. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis is the first to showcase the latest research in the field of Chinese discourse analysis to consolidate existing findings, put the language in both theoretical and socio-functional perspectives, offer guidance and insights for further research and inspire innovative ideas for exploring the Chinese language in the discourse domain. The book is aimed at both students and scholars researching in the areas of Chinese linguistics and discourse analysis.

Download or read book Discourse Functions at the Periphery Noncanonical Word Order in English written by Betty J. Birner and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Syntax of Spoken Indian English written by Claudia Lange and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an in-depth analysis of several features of spoken Indian English that are generally considered as 'typical', but have never before been studied empirically. Drawing on authentic spoken data from the International Corpus of English, Indian component, the book focuses on the domain of discourse organization and examines the form, function and distribution of invariant tags such as isn't it and no/na, non-initial existential there, focus markers only and itself, topicalization and left-dislocation. By focusing on multilingual speakers' interactions, the study demonstrates conclusively that spoken Indian English bears all the hallmarks of a vibrant contact language, testifying to a pan-South Asian 'grammar of culture' which becomes apparent in contact-induced language change in spoken Indian English. The book will be highly relevant for anyone interested in postcolonial varieties of English, contact linguistics, standardization, and discourse-pragmatic sentence structure.

Download or read book Explorations of Language Transfer written by Terence Odlin and published by Channel View Publications. This book was released on 2022-05-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When learners of a new language draw on their native language (or on any other that they may know), this earlier acquired linguistic knowledge may influence their success. Such cross-linguistic influence, also known as language transfer, has long raised questions about what linguists can predict about success in the new language and about what processes are involved in using prior knowledge. This book lucidly brings together many insights on transfer: e.g. on the relation between translation and transfer, the relation between comprehension and production, and the problem of how complete any predictions of difficulty may ever be. The discussions also explore implications for future research and for classroom practice. The book will thus serve as a reliable guide for teachers, researchers, translators, interpreters, and students curious about language contact.

Download or read book Experimental Approaches to Pragmatics written by Valentina Cuccio and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Morphosyntax of Imperatives written by Daniela Isac and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the properties of imperative clauses in the context of a theory of Universal Grammar. Daniela Isac argues that the specificity of imperative clauses cannot be the result of a unique imperative Force feature; instead, the type' of imperative clauses can be traced back to a plurality of finer grained features, such as Modality and phi-features, hosted by the Mod, Infl, and Speech Event heads, among others. The data are drawn from a wide range of languages including various Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages, as well as Finnish and Inuktitut. The analysis accounts for recurrent patterns in the interaction of imperative mood with phenomena like negation, restrictions on grammatical subjects, and the possibility of embedding imperative clauses. The approach, which focuses exclusively on morphosyntactic rather than semantic features, is potentially transferable to the analysis of other clause types, such as exclamatives, interrogatives, and declaratives.

Download or read book Dramatized Discourse written by Jing-Schmidt Zhuo and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language is a symbolic system of meanings evoked by linguistic forms. The choice of forms in communication is non-arbitrary. Rather, speakers pick those forms whose meanings best convey their discourse intention. The meaning of the Mandarin ba-construction, argues Jing-Schmidt, is discourse dramaticity, a concept that includes high conceptual salience and subjectivity. The ba-construction and its "syntactic variations" are never interchangeable because contrast in their meanings determines difference in their functions. Quantitative analyses based on authentic data validate the postulation of discourse dramaticity. By taking discourse pragmatics seriously, the dramaticity hypothesis enables a unitary explanation that transcends sentence grammar. The diachronic treatment reveals the syntactic change of the ba-construction as an adaptive process of pragmatization, which raises the issue of linguistic evolution as a result of socio-cultural development. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the interaction between grammar and pragmatics and to teachers confronting the controversy of the ba-construction in foreign language pedagogy.

Download or read book Semantics Sentence and Information Structure written by Paul Portner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.

Download or read book Minimal reference written by Ritva Laury and published by Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. This book was released on 2005-06-23 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents some of the most recent research on Finnish and Estonian pronouns and other minimal forms of reference. The articles deal with features particular to the pronoun systems of Finnic languages, such as logophoricity and the use of demonstratives for human referents, as well as other topics of current interest in research into the nature of pronominal reference, in particular the contextual, interactive and grammatical factors which influence the use and interpretation of pronouns. An international group of authors approach these questions from several theoretical frameworks including psycholinguistics, syntax, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. The volume is the first collection of articles on this topic published in English. Authors include Outi Duvallon, Marja Etel채m채ki, P채ivi Juvonen, Elsi Kaiser, Lea Laitinen, Renate Pajusalu, Eeva-Leena Sepp채nen, and the editor, Ritva Laury.