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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure > General
What is the role of prosody in the generation of sentence structure? A standard notion holds that prosody results from mapping a hierarchical syntactic structure onto a linear sequence of words. A radically different view conceives of certain intonational features as integral components of the syntactic structure. Yet another conception maintains that prosody and syntax are parallel systems that mutually constrain each other to yield surface sentential form. The different viewpoints reflect the various functions prosody may have: On the one hand, prosody is a signal to syntax, marking e.g. constituent boundaries. On the other hand, prosodic or intonational features convey meaning; the concept "intonational morpheme" (as e.g. an exponent of information structural notions like topic or focus) puts prosody and intonation squarely into the syntactic representation. The proposals collected in this book tackle the intricate relationship of syntax and prosody in the encoding of sentences. The contributions build their cases on the basis of solid empirical evidence, adducing data from experiments or from the careful analysis of natural speech. The volume thus represents a state of the art survey of research on the syntax-phonology interface.
This book offers a new perspective on natural language predicates by analyzing data from the Plains Cree language. Contrary to traditional understanding, Cree verbal complexes are syntactic constructs composed of morphemes as syntactic objects that are subject to structurally defined constraints, such as c-command. Tomio Hirose illustrates this in his study of vP syntax, event semantics, morphology-syntax mappings, unaccusativity, noun incorporation, and valency-reducing phenomena.
Focus particles (words such as even, only, also) play an important role in English, in various syntactic and semantic domains, but their characteristics pose numerous problems for current syntactic frameworks and semantic theories. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the syntax, meaning and use of focus particles and related function words in English and many other languages. It also provides a historical perspective on their development.
Using the Principles and Parameters framework, Henry analyses various syntactic constructions in Belfast English, and compares them with their Standard English counterparts to gain insight into both English syntax and general syntactic theory. The study will also make linguistic data on Belfast English readily available for the first time.
This volume investigates the interconnections between language and literacy in terms of the structures of language as well as the linguistic contexts of literacy. The work for this book was generated in order to focus on studies of the acquisition and impact of literacy on traditional assertions of linguistic analysts. The contributors show that claims regarding descriptions of the linguistic competence of native speakers contain phonemic, morphemic, and sentential constructs applicable only to literate language users. They also suggest that syntactic formalities -- elements lacking extensional reference -- are unlikely in the absence of literacy, and that the notions of "sentencehood" and syntactic well-formedness are functions of literacy. Finally, the book reviews the basic notions of literary relativity and the role of literacy in communication and civilization.
This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference that solves many classic problems relating to the topic.
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.
Accessing Noun-Phrase Antecedents offers a radical shift in the analysis of discourse anaphora, from a purely pragmatic account to a cognitive account, in terms of processing procedures. Mira Ariel defines referring expressions as markers signalling the degree of Accessibility in memory of the antecedent. The notion of Accessibility is explicitly defined, the crucial factors being the Salience of the antecedent, and the Unity between the antecedent and the anaphor. This analysis yields an astonishing array of new results. The precise distribution of referring expressions in actual discourse is directly predicted. Several universals of anaphoric relations are stated. Thus, although not all languages necessarily have the same markers, and nor do they assign them precisely the same function, Ariel shows that they all obey the same Accessibility marking hierarchy. This book will be compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in the semantics and pragmatics of referring expressions, in the interaction of semantics and pragmatics, and more generally in the interaction between peripheral and central cognitive systems.
Tense is one of the central issues of linguistics, and has been the focus of much attention in recent years. In this book, Declerck offers a detailed discussion of the temporal structures that are expressed by the combination of tense forms with the conjunction when.
Teaching computers to solve language problems is one of the major challenges of natural language processing. There is a large amount of interesting research devoted to this field. This book fills an existing gap in the literature with an up-to-date survey of the field, including the author's own contributions. A number of different fields overlap in anaphora resolution - computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), grammar, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and artificial intelligence. This book begins by introducing basic notions and terminology, moving onto early research methods and approaches, recent developments and applications, and future directions. It addresses various issues related to the practical implementation of anaphora systems, such as rules employed, algorithms implemented or evaluation techniques used. This is an ideal reference book for students and researchers in this particular area of computational linguistics. Since anaphora resolution is vital for the development of any practical NLP system, the book will be of interest to readers from both academia and industry.
This is the first book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The first volume presents linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, including French, Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic. Each outlines and analyses the development of sentential negation and of negative indefinites and quantifiers, including negative concord and, where appropriate, language-specific topics such as the negation of infinitives, negative imperatives, and constituent negation. The second volume (to be pubished in 2014) will offer comparative analyses of changes in negation systems of European and north African languages and set out an integrated framework for understanding them. The aim of both is a universal understanding of the syntax of negation and how it changes. Their authors develop formal models in the light of data drawn from historical linguistics, especially on processes of grammaticalization, and consider related effects on language acquisition and language contact. At the same time the books seek to advance models of historical syntax more generally and to show the value of uniting perspectives from different theoretical frameworks.
Translation Studies and linguistics have been going through a love -hate relationship since the 1950s. This book assesses both sides of the relationship, tracing the very real contributions that linguists have made to translation studies and at the same time recognizing the limitations of many of their approaches. With good humour and even handedness, Fawcett describes detailed taxonomies of translation strategies and deals with traditional problems such as equivalence. Yet he also explains and assesses the more recent contributions of text linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics. This work is exceptional in that it presents theories originally produced in Russian, German, French and Spanish as well as English. Its broad coverage and accessible treatment provide essential background reading for students of translation at all levels.
This collection reviews 20 years of research into Spoken Discourse by the Birmingham group, allowing, for the first time, a developmental perspective. It combines previously published but unavailable work with new research. Bringing together recent theories of discourse structure, with a new and detailed analytic framework, the book emphasises both historical context and new developments. The articles are comprehensive, ranging from the theoretical to the highly applied. Practical applications include language teaching, literary stylistics and forensic linguistics with examples taken from literature and language classrooms, telephone conversations, disputed witness statements and corpuses of spoken English.
This collection of papers addresses new trends in Cognitive Linguistics. Three parts of the book focus on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Integration Network Analysis. Both the theoretical contributions and the empirical case studies stress the importance of contextual factors in the meaning making processes. They employ qualitative methods to analyze the use of metaphor in political discourse and in the conceptualization of emotions. The data sets include multimodal data, sign languages and co-speech gestures. The fourth part of the book contains two corpus-based studies. The fifth part concentrates on the grammatical categories of passive voice and aspect. One contribution discusses the problem of categorization in phonology.
This standard introductory textbook presents in systematic form an account of current English practice. The introduction provides a full scheme of sentence analysis. Part I contains a treatment of syntactical phenomena based on the analysis of sentences; Part II classifies the uses of forms. Cross-references indicate how the two parts supplement one another.
First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Structure and Meaning in English is designed to help teachers of English develop an understanding of those aspects of English which are especially relevant for learners who speak other languages. Using corpus research, Graeme Kennedy cuts to the heart of what is important in the teaching of English. The book provides pedagogically- relevant information about English at the levels of sounds, words, sentences and texts. It draws attention to those linguistic items and processes which research has shown are typically hard for learners and which lead to errors. Each chapter contains: a description of one or more aspects of English an outline of typical errors or problems for learners specific learning objectives listed at the beginning of each chapter exercises or tasks based on aEURO~real EnglishaEURO (TM) taken from newspapers and other sources. discussion topics which can be worked through independently either as part of a course, or self study With answers to many of the tasks given at the back of the book, this groundbreaking work provides a comprehensive and accessible textbook on the structure and use of the language for teachers of English.
This study covers a number of topics that are prominent in the grammars of Australian Aboriginal languages, especially ergativity and manifestations of the hierarchy that runs from the speech-act participants down to inanimates. This hierarchy shows up in case marking, number marking and agreement, advancement and cross-referencing. Chapter 1 provides an overall picture of Australian languages. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with case systems, including voice alternations and other advancements. Chapter 5 deals with the distribution of case marking within the noun phrase. Chapter 6 deals with systems that allow the cross-referencing of bound pronouns. Chapter 7 deals with clauses which appear to have more than one verb. Chapter 8 deals with compound and complex sentences. Chapter 9 deals with word order, and emphasises a theme introduced in Chapter 5, namely the widespread use of discontinuous phrases. Chapter 10 draws together ergativity and various manifestations of the hierarchy, and attempts to interpret their distribution. The final section provides an interesting hypothesis about the evolution of core grammar in Australia.
Antonymy is the technical name used to describe 'opposites', pairs of words such as rich/poor, love/hate and male/female. Antonyms are a ubiquitous part of everyday language, and this book provides a detailed, comprehensive account of the phenomenon. This book demonstrates how traditional linguistic theory can be revisited, updated and challenged in the corpus age. It will be essential reading for scholars interested in antonymy and corpus linguistics.
This book examines the frequencies of the six possible basic word (or constituent) orders (SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS) provides a typologically grounded explanation for those frequencies in terms of three independent, functional principles of linguistic organization. From a database of nearly 1,000 languages and their basic constituent orders, a sample of 400 languages was produced that is statistically representative of both the genetic and areal distributions of the world's languages. This sample reveals the following relative frequencies (in order from high to low) of basic constituent order types: (1) SOV and SVO, (2) VSO, (3) VOS and OVS, (4) OSV. It is argued that these relative frequencies can be explained to be the result of the possible interactions of three fundamental functional principles of linguistic organization. Principle 1, the thematic information principle, specifies that initial position is the cross-linguistically favoured position for clause-level thematic information. Principle 2, the verb-object bonding principle, describes the cross-linguistic tendency for a transitive verb and its object to form a more tightly integrated unit, syntactically and semantically, than does a transitive verb and its subject. Principle 3, the animated principle, describes the cross-linguistic tendency for semantic arguments which are either more animate or more agentive to occur earlier in the clause. Each principle is motivated independently of the others, drawing on cross-linguistic data from more than 80 genetically and typologically diverse languages. Given these three independently motivated functional principles, it is argued that the relative frequency of basic constituent order types is due to the tendency for the three principles to be maximally realized in the world's languages. SOV and SVO languages are typologically most frequent because such basic orders reflect all three principles. The remaining orders occur less frequently because they reflect fewer of the principles. The 1,000-language database and the genetic and areal classification frames are published as appendices to the volume.
The first available Elementary Grammar of Old Icelandic in the English language, this book is primarily intended for the beginner. To this end, the greater part of the space is devoted to a detailed treatment of the inflexions and of such points of syntax as are likely to cause difficulties.
For decades, bilingualism has resisted definition. If bilingualism is defined as habitual, fluent, correct and accent-free use of two languages, few individuals would qualify as bilinguals. A more viable approach may be to concede that 'bilingual' can be seen instead as a range of points on a continuum that allows for differences. The psychological study of bilingualism encompasses a wide range of phenomena including the organization and representation of the grammar, the perception and production of language mixing, cerebral lateralization of language functions, and patterns of recovery of aphasic patients. This book collects together an international array of researchers in experimental psychology, linguistics and neuropsychology, who bring their expertise to bear on the critical issues that are raised by the bilingual phenomena.
This book discusses a class of Reduced Constructions which exhibit both mono- and bi-clausal characteristics. In Spanish, as well as other Romance languages, the most salient mono-clausal characteristic is the possibility of clitic climbing, i.e. the possibility of an object clitic attaching to a verb that is higher (in the appropriate sense) than the verb which selects the object to which the clitic corresponds. Reduced constructions come in essentially two varieties: clause reduction (or restructuring) constructions and union (or causative / perception verb)constructions. There has been a good deal of work on a number of aspects of reduced constructions; here the author discusses work in three areas: the analysis of pronominal clitics, the structure of clause reduction and union constructions (and how these treatments interact with the analysis of clitics to yield an account of clitic climbing), and the encoding of embedded subjects in union constructions. |
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