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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure > General
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
This distinctive cross-linguistic examination of spelling examines the cognitive processes that underlie spelling and the process of learning how to spell. The chapters report and summarize recent research in English, German, Hebrew, and French. Framing the specific research on spelling are chapters that place spelling in braod theoretical perspectives provided by cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistic, and writing system-linguistic frameworks. Of special interest is the focus on two major interrelated issues: how spelling is acquired and the relationship between reading and spelling. An important dimension of the book is the interweaving of these basic questions about the nature of spelling with practical questions about how children learn to spell in classrooms. A motivating factor in this work was to demonstrate that spelling research has become a central challenging topic in the study of cognitive processes, rather than an isolated skill learned in school. It thus brings together schooling and learning issues with modern cognitive research in a unique way. testing, children writing strings of letters as a teacher pronounces words ever so clearly. In parts of the United States it can also bring an image of specialized wizardry and school room competition, the "spelling bee." And for countless adults who confess with self-deprecation to being "terrible spellers," it is a reminder of a mysterious but minor affliction that the fates have visited on them. Beneath these popular images, spelling is a human literacy ability that reflects language and nonlanguage cognitive processes. This collection of papers presents a sample of contemporary research across different languages that addresses this ability. To understand spelling as an interesting scientific problem, there are several important perspectives. First, spelling is the use of conventionalized writing systems that encode languages. A second asks how children learn to spell. Finally, from a literacy point of view, another asks the extent to which spelling and reading are related. In collecting some of the interesting research on spelling, the editors have adopted each of these perspectives. Many of the papers themselves reflect more than one perspective, and the reader will find important observations about orthographies, the relationship between spelling and reading, and issues of learning and teaching throughout the collection.
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.
In this book we hope to acquaint the reader with the fundamentals of truth conditional model-theoretic semantics, and in particular with a version of this developed by Richard Montague in a series of papers published during the 1960's and early 1970's. In many ways the paper 'The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English' (commonly abbreviated PTQ) represents the culmination of Montague's efforts to apply the techniques developed within mathematical logic to the semantics of natural languages, and indeed it is the system outlined there that people generally have in mind when they refer to "Montague Grammar." (We prefer the term "Montague Semantics" inasmuch as a grammar, as conceived of in current linguistics, would contain at least a phonological component, a morphological component, and other subsystems which are either lacking entirely or present only in a very rudi mentary state in the PTQ system. ) Montague's work has attracted increasing attention in recent years among linguists and philosophers since it offers the hope that semantics can be characterized with the same formal rigor and explicitness that transformational approaches have brought to syntax. Whether this hope can be fully realized remains to be seen, but it is clear nonetheless that Montague semantics has already established itself as a productive para digm, leading to new areas of inquiry and suggesting new ways of conceiving of theories of natural language. Unfortunately, Montague's papers are tersely written and very difficult to follow unless one has a considerable background in logical semantics."
A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent
years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has
proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological
research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in
the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to.
With Morphology and Syntax of Old Hindi scholars and students of medieval Hindi literature acquire an essential tool for learning one of its important but difficult dialects, the so called sadhukkari bhasha. Based on an early Rajasthani manuscript, the volume includes a commented edition of one hundred poems attributed to medieval mystic and thinker Kabir, followed by a detailed treatment of morphological structure and main syntactic features of the language. The exposition is accompanied by numerous textual examples and index of all lexical and grammatical morphs. The book can be used as a descriptive grammar of the dialect in question, an aid to the study of historical development of New Indo-Aryan languages, and a reader for use in university courses.
Ancient Greek is commonly considered a 'synthetic' or 'inflectional' language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word 'periphrastic' constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in , 'it was happening', or *s , 'he has dishonoured'. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek offers a systematic investigation of periphrastic constructions with the verbs 'to be' and 'to have' based on an extensive corpus of texts, ranging from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD. It clarifies the notions of 'verbal periphrasis' and 'adjectival periphrasis' from a theoretical point of view, and offers a broad introduction to a selection of recent advancements in linguistics. It includes a diachronic analysis which investigates constructions in all three main aspectual domains-perfect aspect, imperfective aspect, and perfective aspect-combining a qualitative with a quantitative approach. In doing so, the volume presents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ancient Greek verbal system and its development over time.
Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area offers the first comprehensive account of this important understudied word class from synchronic, diachronic, literary, and descriptive perspectives. The work contains studies from the four major language families of South Asia (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman) and covers domains in semantics, morphosyntax, and phonotactics. It also includes studies from literature and film that show how expressive form and function are embedded in performative contexts. Finally, the volume also contains first of its kind data from several small endangered languages from the region. Proposing an innovative methodology that combines structural and semiotic analysis, the volume advances a more holistic understanding of areal phenomena that departs from previous studies of the South Asian linguistic area.
*A fresh and engaging take on English grammar, exploring the subject as an intellectual challenge and aiming to reinvigorate interest in a traditionally dry field *grammar is a major part of any course on English language and linguistics and also is a topic of wide general interest; both authors are experienced in addressing these groups *the overall concept of seeing grammar as a set of puzzles and not a set of rules and the irreverent engaging style sets it apart from other titles
This volume is a direct result of the International Symposium on
Japanese Sentence Processing held at Duke University. The symposium
provided the first opportunity for researchers in three
disciplinary areas from both Japan and the United States to
participate in a conference where they could discuss issues
concerning Japanese syntactic processing. The goals of the
symposium were three-fold:
Containing around 17,000 headwords and detailed phonetic descriptions, this book makes available for the first time the material gathered by the historic "Survey of English Dialects," fully alphabetized. A separate section provides a systematic analysis of the syntactic patterns of various dialects. The book is an indispensable tool for dialectologists worldwide.
1.1. AIMS AND ASSUMPTIONS This book presents an analysis of infinitival complement constructions in Old French (OF) from the perspective of the Government-Binding (GB) framework. It aims, therefore, to establish within the terms of the GB framework just how the OF constructions are to be characterized and in just what sense they can or cannot be compared with the corresponding constructions in other Romance languages. The GB framework is an articulated theory about the structure of language which is based on the view that the aim of research into language is to construct a description of language which accurately reflects its essential nature. Whilst we know that individual languages may appear to be superficially very different, we also know that all languages are capable of expressing complex concepts and that all children acquire mastery of the language or languages to which they are exposed. The task, therefore, is to determine both the properties which languages have in common and the bounds within which they may differ. In the pursuit of these aims, the study of various languages of the Romance family has provided a rich source of material for the develop ment of the descriptive apparatus. Evidence of the contribution supplied by such work is apparent in references to Romance material in Chomsky (1981, 1982), in volumes such as Jaeggli (1982), Rizzi (1982a), Kayne (1984b), Burzio (1986), and in numerous papers devoted to particular constructions in a variety of Romance languages."
This book is a comprehensive advanced introduction to linguistics, unique in its integration of variation and change with the more structural or synchronic topics. It includes chapters on variation and change in lexicon, phonology, and syntax. It also covers the topics of pidgins and creoles, on first and second language acquisition, on the development of language in the human species, and on the growth of writing, printing in information technology and how these have affected, and continue to affect, language. Key features include: integration of variation and change; new treatment of functional and typological approaches to syntax; emphasis on the widest possible diversity of languages. It offers alternative ways of looking at language.
Berezowski investigates the origin of the concept of the zero article and clearly demonstrates why it is problematic. The zero article is a staple element of any description of English article usage from advanced research publications down to student grammars, but there has been very little inquiry into its meaning and its other properties. There are copious amounts of publications dealing with the definite and indefinite articles but none about the zero article. Berezowski investigates the origin of the concept of the zero article and shows that it has roots both in structural linguistics of the 1940s and earlier historical linguistics. Structural linguists went on to claim that, since the use of articles in English is deemed 'obligatory', the zero article exists but it has no overt form. Looking through earlier attempts at analyzing the meaning of the zero article, from Jespersen to Chesterman, Berezowksi shows how they all fail. An answer to theoretical problems of grammaticalization are developed; it is shown that English articles have not yet reached a stage in their development where their use has spread to all grammatical environments. Thus, a model is developed for determining when there is no article in English. The new model is tested against a commonly occurring case of zero article, using a corpus-based approach. "The Myth of the Zero Article" will appeal to academics and students interested in grammar and syntax. It covers an issue recurrent in the teaching and learning of English as Second/Foreign language, and will also appeal to teacher trainers and trainee teachers.
In this scholarly volume, each of the living Slavonic languages are
analyzed and described in depth, together with the two extinct
languages--Old Church Slavonic and Polabian. In addition, the
various alphabets of the Slavonic languages--especially Roman,
Cyrillic, and Glagolitic--are discussed, and the relationships of
the Slavonic languages to other Indo-European languages and to one
another, are explored. The last chapter provides an account of
those Slavonic languages "in exile" such as Russian, Ukrainian,
Polish, Czech, and Slovak in the US.
Examining a key issue in second language acquisition (SLA) research, this book explores the relation between second language (L2) production and comprehension at the level of processing. The central question underlying this interface is the relationship between grammatical encoding and decoding, namely: are the two modalities of production and comprehension subserved by different types of processors, or by the same syntactic processing module? Proposing an 'Integrated Encoding-Decoding Model' of SLA, Anke Lenzing presents the results of a comprehensive empirical study to demonstrate the extent to which the two modalities rely on shared representations and/or shared processes. Through this detailed analysis The Production-Comprehension Interface in Second Language Acquisition sheds new light on the cognitive architecture of human language processing and offers a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at work in the L2 acquisition process.
The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics
regarding such matters as auxiliary selection, partitive
cliticization, bare subjects, participle agreement, and more. For
the past two decades the Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach
has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He here
re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical
evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and
surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan, and
concludes that it is essentially unmotivated. Alternative
explanations are advanced, based on information structure,
semantics and the impact on synchrony of diachronic change. The
picture that emerges is one of a complex but interrelated set of
causalities. |
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