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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall,
linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems
differ, and how they change over time. Micro-Syntactic Variation in
North American English provides a systematic look at minimal
differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North
America. The book makes available for the first time a range of
data on unfamiliar constructions drawn from several regional and
social dialects, data whose distribution and grammatical properties
shed light on the varieties under examination and on the properties
of English syntax more generally. The nine contributions collected
in this volume fall under a number of overlapping topics: variation
in the expression of negation and modality (the "so don't I "
construction in eastern New England, negative auxiliary inversion
in declaratives in African-American and southern white English,
multiple modals in southern speech, the "needs washed "
construction in the Pittsburgh area); pronouns and reflexives
(transitive expletives in Appalachia, personal dative constructions
in the Southern/Mountain states, long-distance reflexives in the
Minnesota Iron Range); and the relation between linguistic
variation and language change (the rise of "drama SO " among
younger speakers, the difficulty in establishing which phenomena
cluster together and should be explained by a single point of
parametric variation). These chapters delve into the syntactic
analysis of individual phenomena, and the editors' introduction and
afterword contextualize the issues and explore their semantic,
pragmatic, and sociolinguistic implications.
Japanese syntax has been studied within the framework of generative
linguistics for nearly 50 years. But when it is studied in
comparison with other languages, it is mostly compared with
English. Japanese Syntax in Comparative Perspective seeks to fill a
gap in the literature by examining Japanese in comparison with
other Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Turkish, and
Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages of India. By focusing on
Japanese and other Asian languages, the ten papers in this volume
(on topics such as ellipsis, postponing, and wh-questions) make a
unique contribution to the study of generative linguistics, and to
the Principles and Parameters theory in particular.
This introductory guide to grammar explains one hundred basic
grammatical terms. A knowledge of such terms, and how they
interconnect, is crucial for an understanding of the structure and
function of language. The explanations are listed alphabetically
for easy reference, like a dictionary, but offer much more than a
simple definition. Each entry is divided into sections, providing a
clear explanation, examples, exercises, and highlighting the main
contrasts and interrelationships between the terms. Many entries
contain a ?for interest? section which sets out further fascinating
points, often drawing on some of the more exotic languages of the
world, or discussing important contemporary issues, such as
dialects, standard language, and sexism in language. Clearly
written and easy to use, this book will be an invaluable source of
information for students of language and linguistics.
Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a
number of languages and language families, along with an account of
the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A
cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional
category followed by renewal. Some well-known cycles involve
negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and
affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again. Verbal
agreement is another example: full pronouns are reanalyzed as
agreement markers and are renewed again. Each chapter provides data
on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages. Van Gelderen argues
that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy
Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal
Grammar. She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to
classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides
insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it
evolved.
This volume comprises the first comprehensive grammar of a language from the Aslian subgroup, within the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic family. Spoken by approximately 4,000 people in the lowland forests of the Malay Peninsula, Semelai has many distinctive features of interest to linguistic typologists, phonologists, morphologists and syntacticians. The volume provides a unique reference resource for South-East Asian language specialists, as well as general linguists.
The aim of this book is try to illustrate with numerous examples
how quantitative methods can most fruitfully contribute to
linguistic analysis and research. In addition, it does not intend
to offer an exhaustive presentation of all statistical techniques
available to linguistics, but to demonstrate the contribution that
statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. This book
shows how quantitative methods and statistical techniques can
supplement qualitative analyses of language. It attempts to present
some mathematical and statistical properties of natural languages,
and introduces some of the quantitative methods which are of the
most value in working empirically with texts and corpora,
illustrating the various issues with numerous examples and moving
from the most basic descriptive techniques to decision-taking
techniques and to more sophisticated multivariate statistical
language models.
This volume provides a detailed and comprehensive description of
the morphological system of Dutch. Following an introduction to the
basic assumptions of morphological theory, separate chapters are
devoted to the inflectional system, derivation, and compounding,
the interface between morphology and phonology, the interaction
between morphology and syntax, and, new to this edition, a more
detailed study of the features of separable complex verbs. Geert
Booij demonstrates in this book that the morphology of Dutch poses
multiple interesting descriptive and theoretical challenges. The
volume also contributes to ongoing discussions on the nature and
representation of morphological processes, the role of paradigmatic
relations between words - and between words and phrases - and the
interaction between morphology, phonology, and syntax. This second,
fully revised edition has been updated throughout with expanded
coverage of Dutch morphological phenomena and results from new
research. Alongside a brand new chapter on separable complex verbs,
it also includes a more sophisticated analysis of the relation
between morphology and syntax, and an introduction to the basic
tenets of Construction Morphology.
Product Description An enthusiastic and practical approach to
language learning A riveting and valuable combination of David
Crystal's language expertise and Geoff Barton's sound, practical
classroom experience. Essential reference for every student working
towards GCSE and Standard Grade.
This book is the final volume of a four-volume set on modern
Chinese complex sentences, assessing the key attributes, related
sentence structures, and semantic and pragmatic relevance of
complex sentences. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique
in formation and meaning. Following on from analysis on coordinate,
causal, and adversative types of complex sentences, the ten
chapters in this volume review the characteristics of complex
sentences as a whole. The author discusses the constituents,
related structures, semantic and pragmatic aspects of complex
sentences, covering topics such !!as the constraints and
counter-constraints between sentence forms and semantic
relationships, six type crossover markers, distinctions between
simple sentences and complex sentences, clauses formed by a
noun/nominal phrase followed by le, the shi structure, subject
ellipsis or tacit understanding of clauses, as well as
double-subject sentences, alternative question groups and their
relationships with complex sentences. The book will be a useful
reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language
interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.
An Introduction to English Sentence Structure puts the study of
English sentences into the meaningful perspective provided by the
broad essentials of functionalism. The book starts from the premise
that the structure of language reflects the structure of events in
everyday experience. By contrast, grammars that are more structural
in nature often begin with gross facts about language structure,
such as the observation that clauses can be divided into subjects
and predicates. The book's premise reflects the fundamental
Hallidayan principle that language simultaneously codes for three
dimensions of structure: clause as representation, clause as
exchange, and clause as message. This approach has the effect of
situating the study of language in the student's familiar world of
ideas, relationships, and discourses. The book blends insights from
three prominent modern schools of grammatical thought
(functionalism, structuralism, and generativism) using
functionalism as the philosophical and organizational motif. The
book focuses on the representational function of language,
encouraging students to use their knowledge of the way the world
works in order to understand how language works. The approach taken
is hybrid: It assumes that form matters, and in this sense it is
structural. It also assumes that forms follows function, and in
this sense it is functional. As its subtitle suggests, the book is
concerned with the argument structure of clauses, the boundary
markers of clause combinations, and the syntactic and experiential
resources that permit language users to supply the content of empty
categories, which are the missing elements.
This book includes twelve articles that present new research on the
Finnic and Baltic languages spoken in the southern and eastern part
of the Circum-Baltic area. It aims to elaborate on the various
contact situations and (dis)similarities between the languages of
the area. Taking an areal, comparative, or sociolinguistic
perspective, the articles offer new insights into the grammatical,
semantic, pragmatic, and textual patterns of different types of
predicates or nouns or consider the variation of grammatical
categories from a typological perspective. The qualitative analyses
find support in quantitative data collected from language corpora
or written sources, including those representing the less studied
varieties of the area.
This monograph presents a contrastive-corpus analysis of the
semantic category of gratification. It takes as a case study the
verb reward and its various forms in Polish and in English, as
prototypical of the semantics of gratification. The study, set
predominantly in the framework of semantic syntax, and drawing from
the theory of valence and frame semantics, adopts a corpus-driven
and usage-based approach to language analysis. By exploring the
syntactic realization and distribution of arguments opened by the
predicates of gratification in the two languages, the book offers
new insights into language representation in English and Polish,
and addresses the combinatoricity of human thought and cognitive
mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of the
situation of rewarding.
In Present-Day English, the only flexible sentence constituent in
unmarked declarative sentences is the adverbial, which can often be
placed in initial, medial, or end position. This book presents the
first empirical and corpus-based study on the usage patterns and
functions of medially-placed linking adverbials in
conceptually-written academic English. By combining quantitative
with detailed qualitative analyses of selected corpus examples, the
present study explores whether the placement of linking adverbials
in medial position can be regarded as a focusing strategy, similar
to focusing adverbs and cleft sentences. Moreover, it investigates
whether different medial positions are associated with distinct
discourse functions, such as the marking of contrastive topics or
different focus meanings.
This volume highlights the dynamic nature of the field of English
Linguistics and features selected contributions from the 8th
Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of
Contemporary English. The contributions comprise studies (i) that
focus on the structure of linguistic systems (or subsystems) or the
internal structure of specific construction types, (ii) that take
an interest in variation at all linguistic levels, or (iii) that
explore what linguistic findings can tell us about human cognition
in general, and language processing in particular. All chapters
represent state-of-the-art research that relies on rigorous
quantitative and qualitative analysis and that will inform current
and future linguistic practice and theory building.
The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the
Fifth International Symposium Russian Grammar: System-Usus-Language
Variation, from September 22 to 24, 2021, at the University of
Potsdam (Germany). The selected essays tackle the issues that arise
when Russian Grammar meets new linguistic paradigms (such as corpus
linguistics) and new challenges (such as heritage languages). The
relevant findings are discussed with a particular focus on an
updated version of the 1980 Academy grammar of Russian.
This work comprises a collection of the writings of Ruqaiya Hasan,
an influential figure in the systemic functional linguistic
learning school. It discusses the relation between text and context
and the realization of context in language; the 'network', which is
outlined as analytic tool which can be applied at two strata of
language, the lexico-grammatical and the semantic; as well as
aspects of the social structure that are implicated in the way
cultures and subcultures express themselves.
"This book takes theoretical linguistics by storm, moving our
understanding of the passive construction onto a whole new level.
Samirah Aljohani puts the adjectival passive under the empirical
lexico-grammatical microscope, producing numbers which both dazzle
and clarify. Inspired science from copious data presented in an
accessible style - absolutely brilliant!" (Dr Christopher Beedham,
University of St Andrews, Scotland) Most analyses of the English
passive (formed with be + V-ed) claim that there is a verbal
passive and an adjectival passive. How can the same form express
polar opposite meanings? This study of the adjectival passive
reconciles the contradiction using Christopher Beedham's aspect
analysis of the passive, in which the so-called actional passive
(verbal passive) is said to express an action and its resultant
state. In the study, the author presented approximately one
thousand 2nd participles, mainly from transitive verbs, to three
native speaker informants in putative noun phrases such as an
accepted practice and putative clauses with un-, such as It is
unaccepted, and asked the informants to say if they are
grammatical, ungrammatical or borderline. She also interrogated her
participles in the British National Corpus for their adjectival
properties. In this way, she arrived at five adjective-like
properties which a 2nd participle can have. Finally, she put her
participles into eight groups, ranging from "0% state, 100% action"
to "50% state, 50% action", depending on how many and which of the
five adjective-like properties they can exhibit. The result is a
new gradient scale of adjectival passives.
This book investigates the phenomenon of control structures,
configurations in which the subject of the embedded clause is
missing and is construed as coreferential with the subject of the
embedding clause (e.g. John wanted to leave). It draws on data from
English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to investigate the
relationship that control bears both to restructuring - the
phenomenon whereby some apparently biclausal structures behave as
though they constitute just one clause - and to the meanings of the
embedding predicates that participate in these structures. Thomas
Grano argues that restructuring is cross-linguistically pervasive
and that, by virtue of its co-occurrence with some control
predicates but not others, it serves as evidence for a basic
division within the class of complement control structures. This
division is connected to how the semantics of the control predicate
interacts with general principles of clausal architecture and of
the syntax-semantics interface. His findings have general
implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship
between form and meaning in natural language.
This book documents modern Baba Malay, a critically endangered
Austronesian-based contact language with a Sinitic substrate.
Formed via intermarriage between Hokkien-speaking male traders and
indigenous women in the Malay Peninsula, the language has less than
1,000 speakers in Singapore and less than 1,000 speakers in
Malacca, Malaysia. This volume fills a gap for reference grammars
of contact languages in general. Reference grammars written on
contact languages are rare, and much rarer is a reference grammar
written about a critically endangered Austronesian-based contact
language. The reference grammar, which aims to be useful to
linguists and general readers interested in Baba Malay, describes
the language's sociohistorical background, its circumstances of
endangerment, and provides information regarding the phonology,
parts of speech, and syntax of Baba Malay as spoken in Singapore. A
chapter that differentiates this variety from that spoken in
Malacca is also included. The grammar demonstrates that the nature
of Baba Malay is highly systematic, and not altogether simple,
providing structural information for those who are interested in
the typology of contact languages.
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