Download or read book Mood in the Languages of Europe written by Björn Rothstein and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive survey of mood in the languages of Europe. It gives readers access to a collection of data on mood. Each article presents the mood system of a specific European language in a way that readers not familiar with this language are able to understand and to interpret the data. The articles contain information on the morphology and semantics of the mood system, the possible combinations of tense and mood morphology, and the possible uses of the non-indica-tive mood(s). The papers address the explanation of mood from an empirical and descriptive perspective. This book is of interest to scholars of mood and modality, language contact, and areal linguistics and typology.

Download or read book Perfects in Indo European Languages and Beyond written by Robert Crellin and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a detailed investigation of perfects from all the branches of the Indo-European language family, in some cases representing the first ever comprehensive description. Thorough philological examinations result in empirically well-founded analyses illustrated with over 940 examples. The unique temporal depth and diatopic breadth of attested Indo-European languages permits the investigation of both TAME (Tense-Aspect-Mood-Evidentiality) systems over time and recurring cycles of change, as well as synchronic patterns of areal distribution and contact phenomena. These possibilities are fully exploited in the volume. Furthermore, the cross-linguistic perspective adopted by many authors, as well as the inclusion of contributions which go beyond the boundaries of the Indo-European family per se, facilitates typological comparison. As such, the volume is intended to serve as a springboard for future research both into the semantics of the perfect in Indo-European itself, and verb systems across the world’s languages.

Download or read book Modals in the Languages of Europe written by Björn Hansen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive survey of modals and modal constructions in the languages of Europe. It is a collaborative effort between scholars from Europe and the United States, stemming from a workshop on Modals in the Languages of Europe in Valencia. The aim of this book is to describe the properties of modals and modal constructions in the European area and to compare the systems in individual languages or language families from an areal and genetic perspective. For the sake of contrast, the book also looks at the expression of modality in some languages just outside of Europe. The book consists of fourteen chapters on modal systems in individual languages or language families, written by experts in the respective languages, and an introductory and concluding chapter, written by the editors. The book gives both a description of the modals in the individual languages and an account of the nature and status of modals in general. It provides the reader with a theoretical account of how modals and modal constructions are grammaticalized. This theoretical account is informed by the parameters of grammaticalization of Christian Lehmann. These parameters were chosen because they are language-independent, as opposed to more language specific criteria (for instance, the NICE-criteria for English). The parameters themselves are examined as well for their suitability as part of any theory of grammaticalization. The book thus gives readers access to a collection of data on modality that surpasses most works in this field and also provides a fresh perspective on issues of grammaticalization and language contact. It is therefore of interest to scholars of modality, language contact and areal linguistics, grammaticalization theory and typology.

Download or read book Toward a Typology of European Languages written by Johannes Bechert and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

Download or read book Lingo written by Gaston Dorren and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Download or read book Constituent Order in the Languages of Europe written by Anna Siewierska and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Fate of Mood and Modality in Language Death written by Petar Kehayov and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research into the “grammar of language death” is often biased toward formal processes (e.g. paradigmatic levelling). In this study the author changes the perspective and shows that the relative susceptibility of linguistic elements to loss, change and innovation in language death circumstances can be dependent on meaning and thus organized along semantic notions rather than along structure.

Download or read book The Ancient Languages of Europe written by Roger D. Woodard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, describes the ancient languages of Europe, for the convenience of students and specialists working in that area. Each chapter of the work focuses on an individual language or, in some instances, a set of closely related varieties of a language. Providing a full descriptive presentation, each of these chapters examines the writing system(s), phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of that language, and places the language within its proper linguistic and historical context. The volume brings together an international array of scholars, each a leading specialist in ancient language study. While designed primarily for scholars and students of linguistics, this work will prove invaluable to all whose studies take them into the realm of ancient language.

Download or read book Tense and Aspect in Indo European Languages written by John Hewson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997-03-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages. Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that verbal systems have a staged development of time representations (chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b) aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of the daughter languages. The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended from ancient forbears such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the work.

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 Imperatives written by Mark Jary and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging overview of imperatives and a close examination of how different theoretical traditions have tried to explain them.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood written by Jan Nuyts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examines the full range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the many facets of the phenomena involved. Parts 1 and 2 of the volume present the basic linguistic facts about the systems of modality and mood in the languages of the world, covering the semantics and the expression of different subtypes of modality and mood respectively. The authors also examine the interaction of modality and mood, mutually and with other semantic categories such as aspect, time, negation, and evidentiality. In Part 3, authors discuss the features of the modality and mood systems in five typologically different language groups, while chapters in Part 4 deal with wider perspectives on modality and mood: diachrony, areality, first language acquisition, and sign language. Finally, Part 5 looks at how modality and mood are handled in different theoretical approaches: formal syntax, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and formal semantics.

Download or read book Die slavischen Sprachen The Slavic Languages Halbband 2 written by Sebastian Kempgen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-11-26 with total page 1276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present second volume completes the handbook Die slavischen Sprachen "The Slavic languages. Ein internationales Handbuch zu ihrer Struktur, ihrer Geschichte und ihrer Erforschung. An International Handbook of their History, their Structure and their Investigation". While the general conception is continued, the present volume now contains articles concerning inner and outer language history as well as problems of sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, standardology and language typology.

Download or read book The Changing Languages of Europe written by Bernd Heine and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-06-22 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The languages and dialects of Europe, this book shows, are becoming increasingly alike. Furthermore this unifying process goes at least as far back as the Roman empire, is accelerating, and affects every one of Europe's 150 or so languages including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The changes are by no means restricted to lexical borrowing but involve every grammatical aspect of the language. They are usually so minute that neither native speakers nor trained linguists notice them. But they accumulate and give rise to new grammatical structures that lead in turn to new patterns of areal relationship. Professor Heine and Professor Kuteva look for the causes of linguistic change in cultural and economic exchanges across national and regional boundaries and in the processes that occur when speakers learn or are in close contact with another language. Testing their data and conclusions against findings from elsewhere in the world, the authors reconstruct and reveal when, how, and why common grammatical structures have evolved and continue to evolve in processes of change that will, they argue, transform the linguistic landscape of Europe. The book is written in clear, non-technical language. It will appeal to scholars and students of language change and variation in Europe and elsewhere. It will also interest everyone concerned to understand the nature of language and language change.

Download or read book Modality in Contemporary English written by Roberta Facchinetti and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers original theoretical accounts and a wealth of descriptive information concerning modality in present-day English. At the same time, it provides fresh impetus to more general linguistic issues such as grammaticalization, colloquialization, or the interplay between sociolinguistic and syntactic constraints. The articles fall into four sections: (a) the semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs; (b) the status of emerging modal items; (c) stylistic variation and change; (d) sociolinguistic variation and syntactic models. The book is of considerable value to students and teachers of English and Linguistics at undergraduate and graduate level worldwide.

Download or read book The Major Languages of Western Europe written by Bernard Comrie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-24 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages, this is a key guide to one of the major language families. The areas covered include Germanic languages, English, and Romance languages.

Download or read book Mood written by Paul Portner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the essential background for understanding semantic theories of mood. Mood as a category is widely used in the description of languages and the formal analysis of their grammatical properties. It typically refers to the features of a sentence-individual morphemes or grammatical patterns-that reflect how the sentence contributes to the modal meaning of a larger phrase, or that indicate the type of fundamental pragmatic function that it has in conversation. In this volume, Paul Portner discusses the most significant semantic theories relating to the two main subtypes of mood: verbal mood, including the categories of indicative and subjunctive subordinate clauses, and sentence mood, encompassing declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. He evaluates those theories, compares them, and draws connections between seemingly disparate approaches, and he formalizes some of the literature's most important ideas in new ways in order to draw out their most significant insights. Ultimately, this work shows that there are crucial connections between verbal mood and sentence mood which point the way towards a more general understanding of how mood works and its relation to other topics in linguistics; it also outlines the type of semantic and pragmatic theory which will make it possible to explain these relations. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of semantics and pragmatics, philosophy, computer science, and psychology.