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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure > General
This workbook is intended as a source of supplementary reading and exercise material for courses based on Mastering English. Where appropriate, exercises that inquire into the development framework of Mastering English are provided.
As the first volume of a two-volume set that reexamines nouns and verbs in Chinese, this book proposes the verbs-as-nouns theory, corroborated by discussions of the nature and relationship between nouns and verbs in Chinese. Seeking to break free from the shackles of Western linguistic paradigms largely based on Indo-European languages and to a great extent inappropriate for Chinese, this two-volume study revisits the nature of nouns and verbs and relevant linguistic categories in Chinese to unravel the different relationships between nouns and verbs in Chinese, English, and other languages. It argues that Chinese nouns and verbs are related inclusively rather than in the oppositional pattern found in Indo-European languages, with verbs included in nouns as a subcategory. Preliminary to the core discussion on the verbs-as-nouns framework, the author critically engages with the issues of word classes and nominalization, as well as problems with the analysis of Chinese grammar due to the noun-verb distinction. Through linguistic comparisons, following chapters look into noticeable differences between Chinese and English, the referential and predicative natures of nouns and verbs, the asymmetry of the two, and the referentiality of predicates in Chinese. The volume will be a must-read for linguists and students studying Chinese linguistics, Chinese grammar, and contrastive linguistics.
Time in Natural Language investigates the relationship between the syntactic and semantic representations of sentences within the domain of tense. Assuming that tenses are semantically composed of three distinct times, Thompson proposes that these times map onto the syntax in a regular fashion: each time is associated with a unique syntactic head. Adopting the Minimalist approach to syntactic theory, this approach makes possible insightful analyses of syntactic structures involving temporal dependency. Thompson argues that, depending on their adjunction site, temporal adverbials modify different parts of the tense structure of the clause. Locating the Event time within VP, it is correctly predicted that an adverbial that modifies the Event time is adjoined to VP. On the other hand, since the Reference time is argued to be within AspP, when an adverbial is adjoined to AspP, it modifies the Reference time. The syntax of temporal adjunct clauses is accounted for in a similar fashion; they may be adjoined either to VP, where they are interpreted as simultaneous with the matrix event, or to AspP, where they are interpreted as nonsimultaneous. Thompson shows that the analysis sheds light on the less-studied issue of the temporal syntax of arguments. Subjects with gerundive relative clauses are claimed to be interpreted in VP at LF when the relative clause is temporally dependent on the Event time of the main clause, and in TP when the relative clause is dependent on the Speech time of the main clause. By extending the syntactic proposal to investigate the discourse-level effects of tense, an original analysis of the discourse representation of tense is proposed. Thompson argues that the discourse representation of tense is based on same primitives and subject to the same principles as the syntactic representation of tense, based on an in-depth examination of the structure and meaning of the temporal discourse adverb then.
This volume consists of nine original chapters on central issues in theoretical syntax, all written by distinguished authors who have made major contributions to generative syntax, plus an introductory chapter by the editor. Dedicated to Tarald Taraldsen, the collection reflects the diverse energies that have pushed the cartographic program forward over the last decade. The first three papers deal with subject extraction, the que/qui alternation, and relative clause formation. Luigi Rizzi presents arguments that subjects are 'criterial' and that subject extraction is highly restricted. Hilda Koopman and Dominique Sportiche concur, suggesting that what appears to be subject extraction in French has been misanalyzed, and involves a relative structure. Adriana Belletti shows that children avoid using object relatives, preferring subject relatives, even when it requires passivization. The fourth paper, by Ian Roberts, analyzes the loss of pro-drop in the history of French and Brazilian Portuguese. The papers by M. Rita Manzini and Richard S. Kayne both present novel analyses of complementizers, suggesting that they are essentially nominal, rather than verbal. The final three papers address the relationship of morphology to syntax. The first two argue for a syntactic approach to word formation, Guglielmo Cinque's in a typological context and Anders Holmberg's within an analysis of Finnish focus constructions. The final paper, by Edwin Williams, presents an argument for the limitations of the syntactic approach to word formation.
This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change. The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.
The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.
Modern Russian Grammar Workbook is an innovative book of exercises and language tasks for all learners of Russian. The book is divided into two parts.
A comprehensive answer key at the back of the book enables students to check on their progress. Main features include:
The Modern Russian Grammar Workbook is ideal for all learners of Russian, from beginner to intermediate and advanced students. It can be used both independently and alongside the Modern Russian Grammar: A Practical Guide, also published by Routledge. John Dunn is Honorary Research Fellow and Shamil Khairov is Lecturer in Russian, both at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow.
This book aims to dispel the myth that Chinese "doesn't have words" but instead "has characters." Jerome Packard challenges the common belief that Chinese has no morphology, demonstrating how analysis of Chinese word formation enhances our understanding of word universals in natural language. His book describes the intimate relationship between words and their components and offers new insights into their evolution. Models are offered for how Chinese words are stored in the mental lexicon and processed in natural speech.
Gives an account of the English verbal lexicon which not only systematizes the meanings of lexemes within a hierarchical framework, but also demonstrates the principled connections between meaning and highlights the syntactic complementation patterns of verbs and the patterns of conceptualization in the human mind. Explains lexical patterning and its relationship with meaning, syntax, and cognition.
In the last decade a profound change has occurred in linguistic science. Not only have old problems been tackled from an entirely new point of view but also quite a few new fields of linguistic research have been opened. The common characteristic of the majority of the theories and methods developed recently is the search for a more adequate description of language. Adequacy does not mean simply that the theory must conform to the facts. It must also meet the general requirements of present-day theories: coherence, clear-cut notions, rigor of presentation. It has also become abundantly clear that linguistic research cannot be content with the registration and classification of linguistic phenomena. In one way or another linguistics must try to explain the deep-seated regularities in language which in general do not appear on the surface in some straightforward way. Therefore, we find the attribute 'deep' very often in contemporary linguistic literature. Linguistic theories seek an explanation for the observed facts in terms of a system of hypotheses about the functioning of language. As research proceeds these will undergo essential changes. Some of them will be waived, others com plemented. The papers of the present volume follow these general principles of linguistic theory though they may differ from each other in the way of presentation considerably. Some of the papers make use of the framework of transformational-generative grammar (e. g. Kuroda; Perlmutter), others approach the pertinent problem from a different angle (e. g. Dupraz and Rouault; Apresyan, Mel'cuk, and Zolkovski)."
This book develops ideas of Minimalist syntax to derive functional categories from the partially-ordered features expressed by functional elements, thereby dispensing with functional categories as primitives of the theory. It generalizes attempts to do this in the literature, while drawing significant empirical consequences from general constraints formulated to block overgeneration. The resulting theory of the construction of functional categories is applied to various problems in syntactic analysis and comparative and historical syntax, including variation across Germanic languages in patterns of verb-second and in the occurrence of expletive subjects in existential constructions, verb positions in Old and Middle English, problems regarding the placement of clitic pronouns in Romance languages and Modern Greek, and some previously unexamined structures of reduced clause coordination in colloquial English. Facts from early stages of the acquisition of syntax are shown to follow from the mechanisms for the projection of functional features as functional categories, exercised before all of the features for a language, along with their ordering and feature co-occurrence restrictions, have been acquired. It is observed that child acquisition of functional elements exhibits successive developmental stages, each characterized by the number of clausal functional elements which can be represented together within a clause. This, and facts regarding the lag in development of functional categories by children with specific language impairment, are shown to be not entirely reducible to limitations in working memory or processing capacity, but to depend in part on the growth of representational resources for the projection of functional categories.
The renaissance of corpus linguistics and promising developments in experimental linguistic techniques in recent years have led to a remarkable revival of interest in issues of the empirical base of linguistic theory in general, and the status of different kinds of linguistic evidence in particular. Consensus is growing (a) that even so-called primary data (from introspection as well as authentic language production) are inherently complex performance data only indirectly reflecting the subject of linguistic theory, (b) that for an appropriate foundation of linguistic theories evidence from different sources such as introspective data, corpus data, data from (psycho-)linguistic experiments, historical and diachronic data, typological data, neurolinguistic data and language learning data are not only welcome but also often necessary. It is in particular by contrasting evidence from different sources with respect to particular research questions that we may gain a deeper understanding of the status and quality of the individual types of linguistic evidence on the one hand, and of their mutual relationship and respective weight on the other. The present volume is a collection of (selected) papers presented at the conference on 'Linguistic Evidence' in Tubingen 2004, which was explicitly devoted to the above issues. All of them address these issues in relation to specific linguistic research problems, thereby helping to establish a better understanding of the nature of linguistic evidence in particularly insightful ways.
This book presents a novel semantic account of weak, or selective, islands. Weak islands are configurations that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Examples of island violations with acceptable counterexamples include '#How much wine haven't you drunk?' (but 'Which girl haven't you introduced to Mary?'), '#How does John regret that he danced at the party?' (but 'Who does John regret that he invited to the party?') or '#How much wine do you know whether you will produce?' (but 'Which glass of wine do you know whether you'll poison?'). For forty years or more, explanations of the unacceptability of these island constructions have been syntactic. Syntactic accounts have also provided some of the key empirical motivation for Chomsky's claim that universal grammar (UG) contains language independent abstract syntactic constraints. But syntactic accounts, however subtle, fail to explain why many weak island violations are made almost acceptable by modals and attitude verbs, as in 'How much wine aren't you allowed to drink?'; 'How fast do you hope Lewis didn't drive?'; or 'How does Romeo regret he was allowed to go to the party?' Dr Abrusan considers which contexts and expressions create - or are sensitive to - weak island violations, and examines the factors that go some way to curing them. She puts forward a semantic analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of negative, presuppositional, quantificational and wh-islands. She explains why grammaticality violations can be obviated by certain modal expressions, and why and how far the grammaticality judgments of speakers depend on the context of the utterance. The book argues that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order to derive these facts; rather, they can be made to follow from independent semantic principles. If correct, this work has a fundamental consequence for the field of linguistics in general: it removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG, and hence weakens the arguments for postulating a module of UG.
This study aims at developing a unified perspective on nonfiniteness, encompassing its morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. It puts the emphasis on clause types distinct from standard infinitives (gerund clauses, Celtic verbo-nominal structures, Portuguese inflected infinitives, Latin dominant participle constructions) and takes advantage of the most recent developments in syntactic theory. The notions of defectiveness and completeness, the inheritance hypothesis, the labeling requirement, the syntactic definition of lexical categories, once combined together, appear to make accessible tighter and more elegant analyses than previous accounts.
Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and geographical varieties of English. Providing a probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which persistence - among several other internal and external factors - influences speakers' linguistic choices, the book departs from most writings in the field in that it seeks to bridge several research traditions. While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by psycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct a comprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works. The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.
'Any bibliophile will find many enjoyable nuggets in this compendium of book chat' Stephen Poole, Guardian 'An engaging little eye-opener about the publishing business, full of tasty nuggets about books, writers and their editors' Sunday Times 'Enjoyable ... engaging ... insightful' Independent Once upon a time, a writer had an idea. They wrote it down. But what happened next? Join Rebecca Lee, professional text-improver, as she embarks on a fascinating journey to find out how words get from an author's brain to finished, printed books. She'll reveal the dark arts of ghostwriters, explore the secret world of literary agents and uncover the hidden beauty of typesetting. Along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little-known (but often controversial) considerations that make a big impact: ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric points of grammar and juicy post-publication corrections. After all, the best stories happen when it all goes wrong. From foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, Missouri - turn the page to discover how books get made and words get good.* * Or, at least, better
The field of constructionist linguistics is rapidly expanding, as research on a broad variety of language phenomena is increasingly informed by constructionist ideas about grammar. This volume is comprised of 11 original research articles representing several emerging new research directions in construction grammar, which, together, offer a rich picture of the various directions in which the field seems to be moving.
Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale develop an approach to language change based on construction grammar. Construction grammar is a theory of signs construed at the level of the phrase, clause, and complex sentence. Until now it has been mainly synchronic. The authors use it to reconceptualize grammaticalization (the process by which verbs like to have lose semantic content and gain grammatical functions, or word order moves from discourse-prominent to syntax-prominent), and lexicalization (in which idioms become fixed and complex words simplified). Basing their argument on the notions that language is made up of language-specific form-meaning pairings and that there is a gradient between lexical and grammatical constructions, Professor Traugott and Dr Trousdale suggest that language change proceeds by micro-steps that involve closely related changes in syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse functions. They illustrate their exposition with numerous English examples drawn from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, many of which they discuss in depth. The book is organized in six chapters. The first outlines the approach and the questions to be addressed. The second reviews usage-based models of language change. The third considers the relation between grammatical constructionalization and grammaticalization. Chapters 4 and 5 focus respectively on lexical constructionalization and the role of context. The final chapter draws the authors' arguments together and outlines prospects for further research. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes propounds and demonstrates a new and productive approach to historical linguistics.
This is the first modern comprehensive account of the syntax of Old Avestan, the earliest known form of Iranian language, attested in the Gathas of Zarathushtra and the Liturgy in Seven Chapters. It is based on the most up-to-date understanding of the texts, while following traditional principles of grammatical analysis. There are also substantial sections on word order, stylistics, and figures of speech. Translations are provided for almost all passages quoted. The work will be welcomed by Iranianists as well as by historical linguists with wider Indo-European interests.
This volume presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Spanish evidential semi-auxiliaries parecer and resultar, the modal constructions with amenazar and prometer, and the modal auxiliaries poder, deber and tener que. These verbs have never been considered together in a global approach that transcends the classical "verbal periphrases" model. The book proposes a cognitive-functional account of evidentiality and modality in Spanish with special attention to subjectivity and grounding. The theoretical reflection relies on empirical evidence of two sorts: synchronic and diachronic corpus-analyses alternate with tests that measure the semantic and pragmatic compatibility of the evidential and epistemic constructions with specific sentences. Following the assumption that linguistic forms are determined by their meaning, the array of constructions that characterizes the different verbs justifies their grouping in three pairs of (semi-)auxiliaries: parecer vs resultar, amenazar vs prometer and poder vs deber/tener que. The distributional differences observed in the corpus are further shown to correlate with different degrees of grammaticalization. Primarily intended for scholars working in the field of Spanish functional linguistics, the monograph is also relevant for grammaticalization studies and for cognitive-semantic research at large. Given its combined theoretical and applied character, the volume is also of interest to anyone concerned with syntactic processes, lexical semantics or the wider area of discourse analysis and pragmatics.
Diagnosis is an essential part of scientific research. It refers to the process of identifying a phenomenon, property, or condition on the basis of certain signs and by the use of various diagnostic procedures. This book is the first ever to consider the use of diagnostics in syntactic research and focuses on the five core domains of natural language syntax - ellipsis, agreement, anaphora, phrasal movement, and head movement. Each empirical domain is considered in turn from the perspectives of syntax, syntax at the interfaces, neuropsycholinguistics, and language diversity. Drawing on the expertise of 20 leading scholars and their empirically rich data, the book presents current thoughts on, and practical answers to, the question: What are the diagnostic signs, techniques and procedures that can be used to analyse natural language syntax? It will interest linguists, including formalists, typologists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists.
This book provides a state-of-the-art review of the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect, in both first and second language acquisition. More specifically, it presents a comprehensive analysis of how child and adult speakers learn to mark aspect, an important subsystem of language that marks the temporal contour of events by means of inherent lexical meanings and/or grammatical morphology (in contrast to tense which marks the temporal location of events with respect to past, present, and future). Readers from linguistics, psychology, language acquisition, language education, and cognitive science should all find this book a relevant and important text for their research and teaching.
This book is the first comprehensive grammar in English of present-day standard Romanian. Its descriptive framework is modern in conception, terminology, topics, and bibliography, while eschewing excessively theoretical approaches and overly technical presentations. The book also offers a special system of notes which contain additional diachronic and comparative information, as well as discussions of dialectal and sociolinguistic usage. The Grammar of Romanian is an indispensable resource for Romance linguists, from advanced undergraduate level and above. |
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The Oxford Handbook of Information…
Caroline Fery, Shinichiro Ishihara
Hardcover
R4,740
Discovery Miles 47 400
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