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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure > General
This collection of articles form a tribute to Jan Svartvik and his pioneering work in the field. Covers corpus studies, problematic grammar, institution-based and observation-based grammars and the design and development of spoken and written text corpora in different varieties of English.
Theoretical Morphology provides a comprehensive and coherent treatment of contemporary morphological research and theory. A variety of theoretical paradigms are reviewed and illustrated by specific topics of debate within the field. The twenty-one chapters are divided into sections on inflection, function, historical/area studies, mapping to other components, and morphophonology.
1. Two main themes connect the papers on Japanese syntax collected in this volume: movements of noun phrases and case marking, although each in turn relates to other issues in syntax and semantics. These two themes can be traced back to my 1965 MIT dissertation. The problem of the so-called topic marker wa is a perennial problem in Japanese linguistics. I devoted Chapter 2 of my dissertation to the problem of wa. My primary concern there was transformational genera tive syntax. I was interested in the light that Chomsky'S new theory could shed on the understanding of Japanese sentence structure. I generalized the problem of deriving wa-phrases to the problem of deriving phrases accompanied by the quantifier-like particles mo, demo, sae as well as wa. These particles, mo, demo and sae may roughly be equated with a/so, or something like it and even, respectively, and are grouped together with wa under the name of huku-zyosi as a subcategory of particles in Kokugogaku, Japanese scholarship on Japanese grammar. This taxonomy itself is a straightforward consequence of distributional analysis, and does not require the mechanisms of transformational grammar. My transformational analysis of wa, and by extension, that of the other huku zyosi, consisted in formally relating the function of the post-nominal use of wa to that of the post-predicative use by means of what I called an attachment transformation."
This book presents a study of various important aspects of Tamazight Berber syntax within the generative tradition. Work on Berber linguistics from a generative perspective remains in many ways uncharted territory. There has been hardly any published research on this languageand its different dialects, especially in English -- this book fills some of these gaps and lays down the foundations forfurther research.Ouali looks at three seemingly disparate ranges of syntactic phenomena, namely Subject-verb agreement, Clitic-doubling and Negative Concord. These phenomena have received different analytical treatments, but Ouali proposes that they are all forms of agreement derived under the same Chomskian 'Agree' mechanism. The book addresses a fundamental question in the ongoing debate in recent Minimalism with regard to how subject-verb agreement is obtained and proposes a new analysis of the so-called Anti-Agreement Effect.Itwill be of interest to all syntacticians and to researchers in Afroasiatic languages.
Serial verbs are a recently recognized construction in which a string of verbs or verb-like items is used to convey a single meaning within one clause, for example, 'go get your hair cut'. Though the construction is rare in English, it is common in many languages. This book shows what serial verbs are, where they are found (particularly in the Oceanic languages of the Pacific), and how current theory accounts for them. The author argues that their formation is a consequence of contact between different languages.
Grammar and Meaning is an introduction to the study of grammar of contemporary English. It provides an impressive survey of all the main areas of English grammar, from words through to sentences and texts. It introduces and explains the linguistic terms needed to talk about the ways in which language works, from simple terms like adjective to more complex terms like non-finite clause. To meet the needs of both students and scholars, Howard Jackson has produced an innovative approach to the study of English grammar. Instead of concentrating on the formal and theoretical discussion of grammar, as many introductions do, this original analysis examines the 'meanings' we want to express when we use language. Beginning with the question, "What do we talk about?", it goes on to investigate how these meanings are structured in the grammar of English. These notions are closer to our ordinary understanding of what language is doing, and therefore the forms and structures of grammar are more easily grasped. The book is extensively illustrated with examples from real English. With analytical exercises in each chapter and a comprehensive glossary of terms, the book will prove and invaluable aid to students of English language, linguistics and English as a Foreign Language, whilst also being accessible to anyone who studies English grammar as part of their course.
Routledge is proud to be re-issuing this landmark series in association with the International African Institute. The series, originally published between 1930 and 1987, provides an invaluable resource for the study of African languages and for critically on reflecting the history of the field. A number of the volumes remain highly relevant today, while others provide a unique snapshot of approaches and findings at the time of their publication. The volumes are supplemented with maps, which will be available to view on https://www.routledge.com/ or available as pdfs from the publishers.
In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses initially appear plausible. Exploring the nature of such phenomena permits a deeper understanding of the nature of syntax and of neighbouring modules and their interaction. The book contributes to both traditional work in generative syntax and to the recent emphasis placed on questions related to the interfaces. The major topics covered include areas of current intensive research within the Minimalist Program and syntactic theory more generally, such as constraints on scope and binding relations, information-structural effects on syntactic structure, the structure of words and idioms, argument- and event-structural alternations, and the nature of the relations between syntactic, semantic, and phonological representations. After the editors' introduction, the volume is organized into four thematic sections: architectures; syntax and information structure; syntax and the lexicon; and lexical items at the interfaces. The volume is of interest to syntactic theorists, as well as linguists and cognitive scientists working in neighbouring disciplines such as lexical and compositional semantics, pragmatics and discourse structure, and morphophonology, and anyone with an interest in the modular architecture of the language faculty.
' The] consistent interplay between theoretical and applied pursuits has always been a defining feature of systemic functional theory... This kind of mutual enrichment is clearly demonstrated in Alice Caffarel's work. The result is a description which penetrates to the heart of the language, revealing it at one and the same time as a specimen of the human semiotic and a unique resource for the continuous creation of meaning.' Professor M A K Halliday, from the Preface.
Bridging theoretical modelling and advanced empirical techniques is a central aim of current linguistic research. The progress in empirical methods contributes to the precise estimation of the properties of linguistic data and promises new ways for justifying theoretical models and testing their implications. The contributions to the present collective volume take up this challenge and focus on the relevance of empirical results achieved through up-to-date methodology for the theoretical analysis and modelling of argument structure. They tackle issues of argument structure from different perspectives addressing questions related to diverse verb types (unaccusatives, unergatives, (di)transitives, psych verbs), morpho-syntactic operations (prefixation, simple vs. particle verbs), case distinctions (dative vs. accusative, case vs. prepositions), argument and voice alternations (dative vs. benefactive alternation, active vs. passive), word order alternations and the impact of animacy, agentivity, and eventivity on argument structure. The volume will be of interest to theoretical linguists, psycholinguists, and corpus linguists interested in the syntax of argument structure and its modelling using precise empirical methods.
This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity - the 'evo-devo revolution' - which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, The Biolinguistic Enterprise will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.
o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless turned out to be the case. Within this theory, it is seen as highly desirable to be able to account for several differences on the surface by deriving them from fewer under lying differences. The reason is that, in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, it is assumed that not all knowledge of any given language is the result of learning, but that instead children already possess part of this knowledge at birth (the innate part of linguistic knowledge will obviously be the same for all human beings, and thus this theory also provides an explanation of language universals). The fewer "real" (i.e."
This monograph is a translation of two seminal works on corpus-based studies of Mandarin Chinese words and parts of speech. The original books were published as two pioneering technical reports by Chinese Knowledge and Information Processing group (CKIP) at Academia Sinica in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Since then, the standard and PoS tagset proposed in the CKIP report have become the de facto standard in Chinese corpora and computational linguistics, in particular in the context of traditional Chinese texts. This new translation represents and develops the principles and theories originating from these pioneering works. The results can be applied to numerous fields; Chinese syntax and semantics, lexicography, machine translation and other language engineering bound applications. Suitable for graduate and scholars in the fields of linguistics and Chinese, Mandarin Chinese Words and Parts of Speech provides a comprehensive survey of the issues around wordhood and PoS. Chapter 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and the appendixes V-VII of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com
The Semantics of Chinese Classifiers and Linguistic Relativity focuses on the semantic structure of Chinese classifiers under the cognitive linguistics framework, and the implications thereof on linguistic relativity and language acquisition. It examines the semantic correlation between a given classifier and its associated nouns. Nouns in Chinese, which are assigned specific classifiers according to their selected characteristics, reflect the process of human categorization. The concrete categories formed by the relationship between nouns and classifiers may serve to explain the conceptual structure of the Chinese language and certain underlying aspects of culture and human cognition. Song Jiang is Assistant Professor of Chinese for the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at university of Hawai'i at Manoa.
This book brings together many of Peter Culicover's most significant observations on the nature of syntax and its place within the architecture of human language. Over four decades he has sought to understand the cognitive foundations of linguistic theory and the place of syntactic theory in explaining how language works. This has led him to specific proposals regarding the proper scope of syntactic theory and to a re-examination of the empirical basis of syntactic analyses, which reflect judgements reflecting not only linguistic competence but the complexity of the computations involved in acquiring and using language. After a brief a retrospective the author opens the book with the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis, an article written with Ray Jackendoff, that proposes significant restrictions on the scope of the syntactic component of the grammar. The work is then divided into parts concerned broadly with representations, structures, and computation. The chapters are provided with contextual headnotes and footnote references to subsequent work, but are otherwise printed essentially as they first appeared. Peter Culicover's lively and original perspectives on syntax and grammar will appeal to all theoretical linguists and their advanced students.
The goals of this study are twofold. First, it investigates the internal structure of words and clauses in Standard Arabic (SA), in the light of recent developments of Government and Binding Theory (GB). Second, it argues for a specific theory of typological variation. SA morphology is essentially non-concatenative, but word formation is hierarchical. Unmarked word order is VS(O), but it alternates with SVO. Sentences are verbless as well as verbal. Arguments can be null. The rich and complex agreement system interacts significantly with word order, pronominal incorporation, and expletive structures. SA's productive Case system raises interesting issues for Case theory. The DP system exhibits intriguing complementary distributions between overt determiners, genitive complements, and possessive markers. Tense, Aspect, Modal, and negation properties interact in significant ways. Different Case checking strategies are licensed in the same functional domain. These descriptive ingredients, compared to those of Germanic and Romance in particular, provide new grounds for analyzing typologically related or non-related languages. Within the invariant system of principles and the set of parameter specifications provided by Universal Grammar, the burden of learning is placed on functional categories. A system of Multi-Valued Functional Parametrization is used to account for cross-linguistic variation. The focus of SA's own' descriptive problems turns out to raise interesting comparative and theoretical questions. Issues are framed within the GB model, but unnecessary technicalities are avoided. The book is accessible to linguists and students broadly interested in general, Semitic, and Arabiclinguistics, in addition to those concerned with the development of the GB field.
This is a collection of previously published essays on comparative syntax by the distinguished linguist Richard Kayne. The papers cover issues of comparative syntax as they are applied to French, Italian, and other Romance languages and dialects, together forming a strongly cohesive set that will be valuable to both scholars and students.
French Creoles: A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar is the first complete reference to present the morphology, grammar and syntax of a representative selection of French Creoles in one volume. The book is organised to promote a thorough understanding of the grammar of French Creoles and presents its complexities in a concise and readable form. An extensive index, cross-referencing and a generous use of headings provides readers with immediate access to the information they require. The varieties included within the volume provide a representative collection of French Creoles from the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including: Mauritian Creole, Seychelles Creole, Reunion Creole (where relevant), Haitian Creole, Martinique Creole, Guadeloupe Creole, Guyanese French Creole, Karipuna, St. Lucia Creole, Louisiana Creole and Tayo. By providing a comprehensive description of a range of French Creoles in a clear and non-technical manner, this grammar is the ideal reference for all linguists and researchers with an interest in Creole studies and in French, descriptive and historical linguistics.
This book provides substantial new results in a novel field of research examining the syntactic and semantic consequences of event structure. The studies of this volume examine the hypothesis that event structure correlates with word order, the presence or absence of the verbal particle, the ]/- specific] feature of the internal argument, aspect, focusing, negation, and negative quantification, among others. The results reported concern the telicising vs. perfectivizing role of the verbal particle; the syntactic and semantic differences of verbs denoting a delimited change, and those denoting creation or coming into being; evidence of viewpoint aspect in a language with no morphological viewpoint marking; the aspectual role of non-thematic objects; the source of the exhaustive identification' function of structural focus; the interaction of negation and aspect etc.
Available for the first time in book form, Prince and Smolensky's
"Optimality Theory" is "the" seminal work in the field. This
influential work:
- Defines grammatical well-formedness as optimality with respect
to a ranked set of universal constraints
- Presents the theory both through examples and formally,
emphasizing its core commitments: strict domination, the
Markedness/Faithfulness distinction, strong universality of the
constraint set, interlinguistic variation as variation in
ranking
- Illuminates generalization patterns shared across empirically
diverse phenomena ranging from epenthesis to infixation to complex
dependencies among prominence, syllabification, stress and
word-form
- Derives universals of basic syllable structure and constructs
a prosodic theory based on multipolar scales, laying the groundwork
for a domain-general approach to gradient interactions
- Shows how to obtain universal and language-particular
inventories, identifies the role of optimality in structuring the
lexicon, and deals with key foundational issues. For the newcomer, this pivotal work serves as an excellent introduction to the principles and practice of Optimality Theory. For the professional audience, it will suggest many directions for further exploration and development.
According to Platonists, entities such as numbers, sets, propositions and properties are abstract objects. But abstract objects lack causal powers and a location in space and time, so how we could ever come to know of them? Cheyne presents a systematic and detailed account of this epistemological objection to the Platonist doctrine that abstract objects exist and can be known. Since mathematics has such a central role in the acquisition of scientific knowledge, he concentrates on mathematical Platonism. He also concentrates on our knowledge of what exists, and argues for a causal constraint on such existential knowledge. Finally, he exposes the weaknesses of recent attempts by Platonists to account for our supposed Platonic knowledge.
This book, first published in 1990, is a study of both the specific syntactic changes in the more recent stages of Greek and of the nature of syntactic change in general. Guided by the constraints and principles of Universal Grammar, this hypothesis of this study allows for an understanding of how these changes in Greek syntax occurred and so provides insight into the mechanism of syntactic change. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.
The aim of this syntactic study, first published in 1979, is to formulate part of a generative grammar of Mohawk. A generative grammar is a finite set of explicit rules which enumerate the sentences of the language and which automatically assign to each sentence its correct grammatical analysis or structural description. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.
This set reissues 22 books on syntax, originally published between 1971 and 1994. Together, the volumes cover key topics within the larger subject of syntax, including reflexivization, morphology and syntactical theory. Written by an international set of scholars, particular volumes focus on languages such as French and Spanish, whilst other volumes are devoted specifically to syntax in the English language. This collection provides insight and perspective on various elements of syntax over a period of over 20 years and demonstrates its enduring importance as a field of research.
This book provides a description and analysis of a phenomenon that appears to be unique among languages that have been brought to the attention of linguists, namely the occurrence of endoclitics. Examination of this is important because it helps us to understand what a word is from a cross-linguistic point of view. The second part of the book shows how Udi came to be so different from other languages, and how in this sense it explains the phenomenon. |
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