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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure > General
Spanning more than two decades of thinking about generative approaches to Universal Grammar, the two interviews with Noam Chomsky in this book permit a rare and illuminating insight into his views on numerous issues in linguistics and beyond. The first discussion dates from the early days of the so-called Government Binding Theory, the second one took place after a decade of Minimalism. Thereby the evolution and the dynamics in linguistic theorizing are dramatically revealed. Scholars of grammar, cognitive scientists, philosophers will profit by reading this book, but anyone with an ardent interest in this marvellous, eminently human achievement of evolution called language will want to read about it in the words of the undisputed grand master of linguistic research, Noam Chomsky.
In the mid 20th century the people known as the Logbara were a diverse collection of groups fleeing from different parts and having different socail and political affiliations - essentially refugees in search of a new home. At the time that this book was originally published in 1960, existing conditions, resulting from the past history of Logbara, made it difficult to decide which dialect fo the language to choose for this analysis. The grammar as a whole in its features, details and rules is common to all parts of the country but the author chose the dialect spoken around Arua, the district headquarters of the West Nile as a baiss for the grammar and vocabulary, mainly out of considerations of practicability.
Speech practices as discursive practices for meaning-making across domains, genres, and social groups is an under-researched, highly complex field of sociolinguistics. This field has gained momentum after innovative studies of adolescents and young adults with mixed ethnic and language backgrounds revealed that they "cross" language and dialectal or vernacular borders to construct their own hybrid discursive identities. The focus in this volume is on the diversity of emerging hybridizing speech practices through contact with English, predominantly in Europe. Contributions to this collected volume originate from the DFG funded conference on language contact in times of globalization (LCTG4) and from members of the editor's funded research group "Discursive Multilingualism".
This innovative volume provides a comprehensive integrated account of the study of conceptual figures, demonstrating the ways in which figures and in particular, conflictual figures, encapsulate linguistic expression in the fullest sense and in turn, how insights gleaned from their study can contribute to the wider body of linguistic research. With a specific focus on metaphor and metonymy, the book offers a unified and systematic typology of linguistic figures, drawing on a number of different approaches, including both traditional and emerging frameworks within cognitive linguistics as well as syntactic theory, while also providing an exhaustive look at the unique features of a variety of conceptual figures, including metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, and synecdoche. In its aim of reconciling historically opposed theoretical approaches to the study of conflictual figures while also incorporating a thorough account of its distinctive varieties, this volume will be essential reading for researchers and scholars in cognitive linguistics, theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, and literary studies.
This book examines personal names, including given and acquired (or nick-) names, and how they were used in Anglo-Saxon England. It discusses their etymologies, semantics, and grammatical behaviour, and considers their evolving place in Anglo-Saxon history and culture. From that culture survive thousands of names on coins, in manuscripts, on stone and other inscriptions. Names are important and their absence a stigma (Grendel's parents have no names); they may have particular functions in ritual and magic; they mark individuals, generally people but also beings with close human contact such as dogs, cats, birds, and horses; and they may provide indications of rank and gender. Dr Colman explores the place of names within the structure of Old English, their derivation, formation, and other linguistic behaviour, and compares them with the products of other Germanic (e.g., Present-day German) and non-Germanic (e.g., Ancient and Present-day Greek) naming systems. Old English personal names typically followed the Germanic system of elements based on common words like leof (adjective 'beloved') and wulf (noun 'wolf'), which give Leofa and Wulf, and often combined as in Wulfraed, (raed noun, 'advice, counsel') or as in Leofing (with the diminutive suffix -ing). The author looks at the combinatorial and sequencing possibilities of these elements in name formation, and assesses the extent to which, in origin, names may be selected to express qualities manifested by, or expected in, an individual. She examines their different modes of inflection and the variable behaviour of names classified as masculine or feminine. The results of her wide-ranging investigation are provocative and stimulating.
Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective is a collection of
sixteen original papers by leading experts in Chinese syntax. The
papers focus on a broad range of topics, demonstrating how the
analysis of Chinese can inform our understanding of syntactic
phenomena in other languages, and how insights gained in the study
of other languages can in turn shed interesting new light on
patterns in Chinese. Each chapter compares a specific major
phenomenon in Chinese syntax with related patterns in at least one
other language from Asia, Europe, North America or Africa,
resulting in a series of fresh perspectives on Chinese and what the
study of Chinese can offer linguists working on other, genetically
unrelated languages.
This book presents the first systematic typological analysis of applicatives across African, American Indian, and East Asian languages. It is also the first to address their functions in discourse, the derivation of their semantic and syntactic properties, and how and why they have changed over time. Applicative constructions are typically described as transitivizing because they allow an intransitive base verb to have a direct object. The term originates from the seventeenth-century missionary grammars of Uto-Aztecan languages. Constructions designated as prepositional, benefactive, and instrumental may refer to the same or similar phenomena. Applicative constructions have been deployed in the development of a range of syntactic theories which have then often been used to explain their functions, usually within the context of Bantu languages. Dr Peterson provides a wealth of cross-linguistic information on discourse-functional, diachronic, and typological aspects of applicative constructions. He documents their unexpected synchronic variety and the diversity of diachronic sources about them. He argues that many standard assumptions about applicatives are unfounded, and provides a clear guide for future language-specific and cross-linguistic research and analysis.
Virtually all recent major work on Livius Andronicus has focused on assessing his artistic merits and his skills as a translator of Homer. But, as the oldest literary Latin preserved in any quantity, the language of Livius shows many features of linguistic interest and raises intriguing questions of phonolgy, morphology and syntax. In this book, Ivy Livingston frames an examination of Livius' Latin in the form of a commentary. Although Livius provides the starting-point of each comment, his language is sufficiently similar to his nearest successors - such as Naevius or Ennius - that many of the discussions do not also end with Livius, but explore wider-ranging problems of Latin and of Indo-European linguistics.
This text presents a corpus-based description of all different types of verbal peripheries used in modern Peninsula Spanish. It provides a description of semantics and syntax of verbal perphases, and introduces a new subclassification of analytical verbal constructions.
In the two volumes of Prosodic Syntax in Chinese, the author develops a new model, which proposes that the interaction between syntax and prosody is bi-directional and that prosody not only constrains syntactic structures but also activates syntactic operations. All of the facts investigated in Chinese provide new perspectives for linguistic theories as well as insights into the nature of human languages. The subtitles of the two volumes are Theory and Facts and History and Change respectively, with each focusing on different topics (though each volume has both theoretical and historical descriptive concerns). This book has shown that prosody has played a crucial role in triggering the many changes in the diachronic development of Chinese. On the one hand, this book investigates the existence of SOV structures in Early Archaic Chinese, a SVO language, and then demonstrates the role of VO prosody in causing the disappearance of the remnant structures after the Han Dynasty. On the other hand, this book surveys the historical evidence for analyses of bei passives and Ba-constructions, and then offers a prosodic analysis on the origin of these two sentence patterns in Chinese. It is claimed that prosody can be an important factor in triggering, balancing and finally terminating changes in the syntactic evolution of Chinese.
• The first introductory book of its kind to focus on morphology whilst assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics and linguistic concepts; • Written in a lively and conversational manner and uses a variety of languages as examples in order to appeal to not only an introductory undergraduate market studying linguistics but also a more general readership; • Includes pedagogical features throughout including data analysis, exercises and questions to engage with the reader.
The volume deals with valency phenomena in verbs and complex deverbal lexical structures (nominalizations, adjectivizations and compounds) in a variety of languages (English, Polish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, Hebrew, Bantu languages and the West African language Ga). The introduction offers an overview of valency related issues and up-to-date linguistic literature. The eleven contributions address specific problems, such as the interaction of valency with argument- and event-structure, properties of light verbs, impersonal constructions, antipassives, analogies between passivization and nominalization/adjectivization, effects of verbal prefixation, and synthetic compounds. The proposed analyses are couched in lexically and syntactically driven approaches.
Adriana Belletti here collects work presented by top scholars at a workshop at the University of Siena in connection with a visit by Noam Chomsky. These eight articles go beyond strictly mapping syntactic properties, touching on broader theoretical questions related to Chomsky's Minimalist Program in particular. The reputation of the contributors, combined with the collection of cutting-edge research in one place, will interest scholars and students of generative linguistics.
Conjunctions and Interjections in Modern Standard Arabic is a grammar for Modern Standard Arabic introducing conjunctions and interjections from the most basic to the most advanced, with drills for each grammatical point. Skill in the use of conjunctions and interjections is essential for acquiring proficiency in expressing relationships of causation, order, time sequence and other relationships among events and ideas. Each chapter presents the grammar of conjunctions and interjections in clearly organized tables with examples of each use. An additional section presents multiple drills for practice and functional use. Aimed as a textbook for students for all four years of university Arabic, and for independent learners.
This study analyses left dislocation, prepositions, and the progressive aspect in Ugandan English. It uses spoken data of English speakers with the three indigenous Ugandan languages. The results show high frequency use of left dislocation in Ugandan English. This suggests possible substrate influence from these first languages since left dislocation construction is used in these languages. The use of prepositions is overwhelmingly like in Standard English with just very few cases indicating variation from Standard English, although the three indigenous languages have very few prepositions in comparison to the English language. The use of the progressive illustrates variation among English speakers with the three first languages indicating that Ugandan English is not homogenous.
The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to the Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009), aiming to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters are devoted to theoretical and definitional matters, formal and semantic issues, interdisciplinary connections, and detailed descriptions of derivational processes in a wide range of language families. It presents the reader with the current state of the art in the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. Chapters are devoted to issues of theory, methodology, the historical development of derivation, and to child language acquisition, sociolinguistic, experimental, and psycholinguistic approaches. The second half of the book surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics. It ends with a consideration of both areal tendencies in derivation and the issue of universals.
This book focuses on two major traditions in the study of Modern English grammar: 'old grammar' in the Great Tradition of Sweet, Poutsma, Kruisinga, Curme, Jespersen and Quirk; and 'new grammar' in applications to Modern English of Chomskyan generative syntax. The purpose is to promote the study of Modern English grammar through proper acquaintance with both these two approaches; and in general to promote positive evaluations of pluriformity in Modern English grammar. For the first time, this book brings together in one place general presentations of the two traditions, and of their mutual relations and perceptions. But it argues against the view that the one approach to grammar may 'use' the other. It sees the two approaches as essentially incompatible: 'old' grammar proceeds inductively and aims at comprehensive coverage of facts; 'new' grammar is deductive and attempts to attain depth in its accounts of pertinent facts. As the case studies show, both approaches make contributions to the study of Modern English grammar - precisely provided they retain their own distinctive natures. The core of book is it's a-Z case studies. These are detailed comparisons, arranged alphabetically by title for ease of reference, of twenty-six problems in Modern English grammar, from both the 'old' and 'new' viewpoints.
Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax presents a groundbreaking approach to the study of sentence formation. Building on the emergentist thesis that the structure and use of language is shaped by more basic, non-linguistic forces--rather than by an innate Universal Grammar--William O'Grady shows how the defining properties of various core syntactic phenomena (phrase structure, co-reference, control, agreement, contraction, and extraction) follow from the operation of a linear, efficiency-driven processor. This in turn leads to a compelling new view of sentence formation that subsumes syntactic theory into the theory of sentence processing, eliminating grammar in the traditional sense from the study of the language faculty. With this text, O'Grady advances a growing body of literature on emergentist approaches to language, and situates this work in a broader picture that also includes attention to key issues in the study of language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and agrammaticism. This book constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in syntax and its place in the larger enterprise of cognitive science.
What is the essence of a part of speech? Why is it difficult to classify parts of speech? What are the bases and criteria for classifying them? How should they be classified? In doing so, how should a conversional word be dealt with? How should nomonalization be treated? These are just some of the questions answered in this book. The classification of parts of speech in Chinese is a tough job due to the language's lack of morphological differences. Based on the analysis of nearly 40,000 Chinese characters, this book proposes that, essentially, a part of speech is not of distributional type and that its intrinsic basis is an expressional function and the semantic type. Essentially, large categories such as substantive words, predicate words and modification words are classes of words classified according to their expressional functions. Basic categories such as nouns, verbs and adjectives are classes that combine semantic types with syntactical functions. In classifying parts of speech, the book pays attention not to identifying a single distributive characteristic that is internally universal and externally exclusive but to clustering the grammatical functions that have the same classification value through the "reflection-representation" relationship among distribution, expressional function and semantic type (distribution reflects expressional function and semantic type, which are, in turn, represented as distribution), thereby identifying the classification criteria. It uses distributional compatibility and the correlation principle to analyze which distributional differences represent differences in parts of speech and which do not. In this way, grammatical functions that have equal classification values are collected into one equivalent function cluster, each of which represents one part of speech. The book uses four strategies to classify parts of speech, namely the homogeneity strategy, the homomorphical strategy, the priority homomorphical strategy and the consolidation strategy. It will be a valuable reference for Chinese linguistic researchers and students as well as Chinese learners.
Variation in P is an essential follow-up to the seminal proposals of the generative tradition regarding prepositional syntax. Recent research shows that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in universal grammar. The papers collected in the first part of this volume not only test these proposals against new comparative data, but also shed light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume explores the role of prepositions in non-spatial environments as well as in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation. By drawing on evidence from less studied languages, and by considering prepositional syntax in interaction with clausal syntax as well as within prepositional phrases, Variation in P refines and develops theories introduced by previous generative studies.
Demonstratives and Grammaticalization offers an in-depth analysis of the demonstrative system in Turkish. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis dealing with both the synchronic variations in Turkish demonstratives and their grammatical changes. It sheds light on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the demonstratives, systematically describes the various usages of these forms, and provides a unified explanation for the various accounts of their distribution. While the focus is on Turkish, this analysis contributes to our understanding of how a demonstrative system operates in a language with a three-way distinction.
Lexical Ontological Semantics introduces ontological methods into lexical semantic studies with the aim of giving impetus to various fields of endeavours which envision and model the semantic network of a language. Lexical ontological semantics (LOS) provides a cognition-based computation-oriented framework in which nouns and predicates are described in terms of their semantic knowledge and models the mechanism in which the noun system is coupled with the predicate system. It expands the scope of lexical semantics, updates methodologies to semantic representation, guides the construction of semantic resources for natural language processing, and develops new theories for human-machine interactions and communications.
Russian Nouns of Common Gender in Use is a unique collection of more than 150 nouns that mainly have grammatical features of the feminine gender, but refer to both male and female persons. This book provides the meanings of the words and explains their use in discourse with the help of examples from literature, media, and everyday speech. Each entry includes parallel English translations, which are analogous and appropriate to the given context. These enable the reader to easily grasp each word's organic place and purpose in a particular sentence or situation. This book will serve as a valuable tool for students and instructors, translators, scholars, and anyone interested in learning the Russian language.
Shortlisted for the 2020 ESSE Book Award in English Language and Linguistics This monograph is the first comprehensive study of topicalization in Asian second-language varieties of English and provides an in-depth analysis of the forms, functions, and frequencies of topicalization in four Asian Englishes. Topicalization, that is, the sentence-initial placement of constituents other than the subject, has been found to occur frequently in the English spoken by many Asians, but so far the possible reasons for this have never been scrutinized. This book closes this research gap by taking into account the structures of the major contact languages, the roles of second-language acquisition and politeness as well as other factors in order to explain why topicalization is highly frequent in some varieties such as Indian English and much less frequent in other varieties such as Hong Kong English. In addition to exploring major and minor forces involved in explaining the frequency of topicalization, the forms and functions of the feature are assessed. Central questions addressed in this regard are the following: Which syntactic constituents tend to be topicalized the most and the least frequently? Which discourse effects does topicalization achieve? How can we approach topicalization methodologically? And, lastly, which influence do language processing and production have on topicalization? |
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