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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
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.
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.
This book provides a detailed account of verb movement across more than twenty standard and non-standard Romance varieties. Norma Schifano examines the position of the verb with respect to a wide selection of hierarchically-ordered adverbs, as laid out in Cinque's (1999) seminal work. She uses extensive empirical data to demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, it is possible to identify at least four distinct macro-typologies in the Romance languages: these macro-typologies stem from a compensatory mechanism between syntax and morphology in licensing the Tense, Aspect, and Mood interpretation of the verb. The volume adopts a hybrid cartographic/minimalist approach, in which cartography provides the empirical tools of investigation, and minimalist theory provides the technical motivations for the movement phenomena that are observed. It provides a valuable tool for the examination of fundamental morphosyntactic properties from a cross-Romance perspective, and constitutes a useful point of departure for further investigations into the nature and triggers of verb movement cross-linguistically.
The articles collected in this book are concerned with the issues of restrictiveness and learnability within generative grammar, specifically, within Chomsky's 'Extended Standard Theory'. These issues have been central to syntactic research for decades and they are even more central now as results on syntactic theory, on learnability, and on acquisition begin to converge. I hope that this book can provide researchers in all of these areas with some insight into the evolution of ideas about these issues. The articles appear in their original form, with the following exceptions: A few typographical and other minor errors have been corrected; bibliog raphic references have been updated and a unified bibliography provided. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my vast intellec tual debt to Noam Chomsky. My research would not have been possible without his work, his advice, and his guidance. Next, I offer deep thanks to Chomsky and my other co-authors represented here: Bob Fiengo, Joe Kupin, Bob Freidin, and Mamoru Saito. I am grateful, indeed, for the opportunity to collaborate with such outstanding linguists, and, more immediately, for their permission to reprint their co-authored articles. I also offer general thanks to the holders of the copyrights of the reprinted material. Specific acknowledgements appear on a separate page."
This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. Michele Loporcaro investigates the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard; he draws on data from the Middle Ages to the present from all the Romance languages and dialects, discussing examples from Romanian to Portuguese and crucially also focusing on less widely-studied varieties such as Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian. The investigation first reveals that several varieties display more complex systems than the binary masculine/feminine contrast familiar from modern French or Italian. Moreover, it emerges that traditional accounts, whereby neuter gender was lost in the spoken Latin of the late Empire, cannot be correct: instead, the neuter gender underwent a range of different transformations from Late Latin onwards, which are responsible for the different systems that can be observed today across the Romance languages. The volume provides a detailed description of many of these systems, which in turns reveals a wealth of fascinating data, such as varieties where 'husbands' are feminine and others where 'wives' are masculine; dialects in which nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and one Romance variety (Asturian) in which it appears that grammatical gender has split into two concurrent systems. The volume will appeal to linguists from a range of backgrounds, including Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax, and is also of relevance to those working in sociology, gender studies, and psychology.
Illicit digital activity is a substantial and growing problem. Extremists' use of social media over the past decade or so has raised increasing concern among governments and media corporations alike. In Digital Grooming Nuria Lorenzo-Dus analyzes manipulation practices in digital spaces that are situated at, or beyond, the boundaries of law. Lorenzo-Dus identifies and examines in detail the online discourse of adults luring children for sexual abuse and exploitation (digital sexual grooming); extreme ideology groups aligning others to their views (digital ideological grooming); and drug dealers soliciting business in crypto markets (digital commercial grooming). With sophisticated style and stance analyses of large and varied datasets, the book reveals that digital sexual, ideological, and commercial grooming practices have much in common. Three stances-expertise, openness, and avidity-scaffold this manipulative work, which constructs groomers and their targets as sharing a homogenous identity. By shedding new light on grooming practices, this book provides a key resource for discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, communication, and media studies, as well as for practitioners aiming to counter online grooming through policy changes, detection software, and prevention-focused training to promote digital civility and safety.
Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar is both an ideal companion for undergraduate students wishing to acquire a high level of grammatical proficiency and a readily accessible reference work for teachers of English at all levels. It provides an introduction to basic grammatical terms and to elementary syntactic description, enabling students to analyse sentences and utterances down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of all constituents.
Loanwords and Japanese Identity: Inundating or Absorbed? provides an in-depth examination of public discussions on lexical borrowing in the Japanese language. The main objective of this book is to explore the relationship between language and identity through an analysis of public attitudes towards foreign loanwords in contemporary Japanese society. In particular, the book uncovers the process by which language is conceived of as a symbol of national identity by examining an animated newspaper controversy over the use of foreign loanwords. The book concludes that the fierce debate over the use of loanwords can be understood as a particular manifestation of the ongoing (re-)negotiation of Japanese national identity. This book will appeal to scholars and students in sociolinguistics, translation studies, and discourse analysis, while its cultural and geographic focus will attract readers in Japanese studies and East Asian studies.
In this innovative study, Tomiko Narahara offers a multi-disciplinary description of the Japanese copula, revealing it to be at the interface of morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Most striking is her discovery of the copula's function to express the speaker's knowledge or ignorance about the proposition of the sentence. She provides a new morphological feature analysis to derive this modal function and further proposes a series of unified accounts for a wide range of discourse phenomena.
1. OUTLINE German has the three main perfect constructions which are illustrated in (1. 1). 1 In each of these constructions, the verb appears in the past participial form and is combined with an auxiliary - in this case, haben ('have'); other verbs form their perfect constructions with the auxiliary sein ('be'). 2 The auxiliary can then be com bined with a tense -Le. the present tense as in (Ua), the past tense as in (b), or the future tense as in (c). 3 (1. 1) a. PRESENT PERFECT: Die Eule hat die Schule verlassen. the owl has the school left b. PAST PERFECT: Die Eule hatte die Schule verlassen. the owl had the school left c. FUTURE PERFECT: Die Eule wird die Schule verlassen haben. the owl will the school left have As will shortly become clear, the present perfect is the most intricate of the perfect constructions in German. It has been investigated intensely in the past, with the result that today there is little doubt about what the core problems concerning its semantics are."
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.
The Structure of German is a description of the major features of German according to the principles of modern linguistics. This second edition represents full updates of aspects of German phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc., differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc. Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some' (unstressed) , and this article cannot be used with singular count terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each', 'every', 'some', 'few', 'many'; and they use 'a(n)' as the indefinite article. They can, unlike the mass terms, take numerals as prefixes. Mass terms seem not to have a plural. Semantically, philo sophers have characterized count terms as denoting (classes of?) indi vidual objects, whereas what mass terms denote are cumulative and dissective. (That is, a mass term is supposed to be true of any sum of things (stuff) it is true of, and true of any part of anything of which it is true). Pragmatically, it seems that speakers use count terms when they wish to refer to individual objects, or when they wish to reidentify a particular already introduced into discoursc. Given a "space appropriate" to a count term C, it makes sense to ask how many C's there are in that space."
This book is the first collection of studies on an important yet under-investigated linguistic phenomenon, the processing and production of head-final syntactic structures. Until now, the remarkable progress made in the field of human sentence processing had been achieved largely by investigating head-initial languages such as English. The goal of the present volume is to deepen our understanding by examining head-final languages and offering a comparison of those results to findings from head-initial languages. This book brings together cross-linguistic investigations of languages with prominent head-final structures such as Basque, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. It will inform readers of linguistics with both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, as it provides accounts of previous studies, offers experimentally-based theoretical discussions, and includes experimental stimuli in the original languages.
Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas - New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist, mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial experience and new means of communication via social media. The volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition across indigenous languages.
This volume presents novel analyses of morphosyntax and phonology by well-known scholars in their respective fields. The book offers chapters on a range of Romance languages and dialects, including Canadian French, Standard French, Modern French, Sardinian, Sicilian, and Spanish. Other chapters focus on diachronic topics on French and Italian. The volume will be of interest to researchers looking for current research in linguistics on the Romance languages. It will also serve as a reference volume or supplemental reading for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in linguistics.
This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.
Hierdie is die eerste werklik omvattende boek in Afrikaans oor wat die tekslinguistiek as vakgebied behels. 'n Heel nuwe terrein vir taalkundige navorsing in Afrikaans word ontgin, want die klem val in die besonder op die insigte wat 'n studie van taaltekste (dus groter as die enkelsin) meebring. In hierdie opsig behoort die boek vir studente in die taal- en letterkunde asook almal wat belangstel in effektiewe kommunikasie van groot waarde te wees - as naslaanbron, maar veral as bron waarin 'n volume kennis byeengetrek is wat verdere selfstandige navorsing kan stimuleer.
In studies of copular clauses, the relation between specificational and predicative clauses has been a contentious issue. While most studies agree on the analysis of predicative clauses, specificational clauses have sparked much debate. A key concern is how specificational clauses with indefinite 'variable' NP (e.g. "A popular holiday go-to is Rome") compare to, and contrast with, other copular clauses, especially specificational clauses with definite 'variable' NP (e.g. "The main can't-miss in Italy is Rome") and predicative clauses with indefinite predicate nominative (e.g. "Rome is a great city"). This book addresses this concern by offering a functional-structural analysis of these three clause types in terms of their common characteristics and distinguishing features. The analysis of the clauses' structure and meaning is substantiated by evidence from corpus research which probes into various aspects of their actual usage (e.g. information structure and prosody, discourse-embedding). In doing so, the book offers an empirical basis for testing existing assumptions about predicative and specificational clauses, while also providing new insights into the interaction between the grammar and discourse usage of copular clauses.
This volume provides an introduction to word and paradigm models of morphology and the general perspectives on linguistic morphology that they embody. The recent revitalization of these models is placed in the larger context of the intellectual lineage that extends from classical grammars to current information-theoretic and discriminative learning paradigms. The synthesis of this tradition outlined in the volume highlights leading ideas about the organization of morphological systems that are shared by word and paradigm approaches, along with strategies that have been developed to formalize these ideas, and ways in which the ideas have been validated by experimental methodologies. An extended comparison of contemporary word and paradigm variants isolates the central assumptions about morphological units and relations that distinguish implicational from realizational models and clarifies the relation of these models to morpheme-based accounts. Designed to be accessible to a wide readership, this book will serve both as an introduction to morphology and morphological theory from the word and paradigm perspective for non-specialists, and for morphologists, as a detailed account of the history of the ideas that underlie these models.
*Provides a foundational understanding of linguistics as it applies to spoken and signed languages. *Covers numerous linguistic disciplines such as phonetics, semantics and sociolinguistics. *Makes linguistic theory accessible to speech-language pathologists. *Highlights the importance of integrating linguistic frameworks into clinical decision-making.
This study breaks new ground in describing how various linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms affect both the form of the narrative clause and the arrangement of the grammatical elements. The various possible forms that a narrative clause can take are classified in terms of their 'topic-comment' and 'focus-presupposition', and it is argued that the way in which these are articulated dictates the word order in the clause. The outcome of the study demonstrates that the traditional binary distinction between foreground and background, based purely on verb forms, is inadequate. A new model is offered showing how foregrounding is achieved by exploiting cognitive structures or by using specific evaluative devices.>
Safir's monograph develops a theory about the role of anaphora in the formulation of general syntax. He presents the following proposals: firstly, that the complementary distribution of forms that support anaphoric readings is not accidental; secondly, that dependent identity relations are always possible where they are not prohibited by a constraint; and lastly, that there are no parameters for ana phora - that all anaphora-specific principles are universal, and that the patterns of anaphora across languages arise entirely from lexical properties. The goal of this thoroughly comprehensive look at the phenomenon of anaphora is to fundametally redirect current thinking on the subject. |
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