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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure

The Syntax of Anaphora (Hardcover, New): Ken Safir The Syntax of Anaphora (Hardcover, New)
Ken Safir
R4,296 Discovery Miles 42 960 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic - Cycles of Alignment Change (Hardcover): Eleanor Coghill The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic - Cycles of Alignment Change (Hardcover)
Eleanor Coghill
R4,014 Discovery Miles 40 140 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative alignment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative alignment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. Thus an entire cycle of alignment change can be traced, something which had previously been considered unlikely. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through which these alignment changes took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as 'see' and 'hear', which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.

The Prosodic Word in European Portuguese (Hardcover, Reprint 2011): Marina Vigario The Prosodic Word in European Portuguese (Hardcover, Reprint 2011)
Marina Vigario
R4,234 Discovery Miles 42 340 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The book investigates the diagnostics for the prosodic word in European Portuguese, the prosodic organization of various sorts of morphosyntactic objects, and the definition of the prosodic word domain. The book bears on the organization of grammar and phonology, its interface with morphology and syntax, and the nature of phonological representations. Besides focusing primarily on European Portuguese, it also refers to languages such as Italian, Dutch, German, and English, among many others.

Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation (Hardcover): Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Lluisa Hernanz, Carme Picallo, Francesc Roca Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation (Hardcover)
Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Lluisa Hernanz, Carme Picallo, Francesc Roca
R5,748 Discovery Miles 57 480 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In this outstanding collection of new work, the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change. The editors open the volume with an extensive and accessible introduction to the ideas and techniques deployed in the book and the phenomena and issues on which they are brought to bear. Seventeen chapters follow, divided into two parts, the first concerned with grammaticalization and the second with parametric variation. These show what the application of contemporary theories of syntax and language variation can reveal about syntactic change and variation and the processes of parametric change which lie behind them. They also demonstrate the value of testing and constructing synchronic theories on the basis of historical data. The analyses range over many languages and language families, including Germanic, Romance, Greek, and Chinese.
This book will interest scholars and students of grammatical change and theory at graduate level and above

Deconstructing Ergativity - Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features (Hardcover): Maria Polinsky Deconstructing Ergativity - Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features (Hardcover)
Maria Polinsky
R3,660 Discovery Miles 36 600 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.

The Chicago Manual of Style (Hardcover, 18th Edition): The University of Chicago Press Staff The Chicago Manual of Style (Hardcover, 18th Edition)
The University of Chicago Press Staff
R1,635 Discovery Miles 16 350 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Much has happened in the years since the publication of the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The world has transformed, and the Manual has risen to meet the moment. The eighteenth edition of this classic guide for writers, editors, and publishers is the most extensive revision in two decades.

Every chapter has been reexamined with diversity and accessibility in mind, and major changes include updated and expanded coverage of pronoun use and inclusive language, revised guidelines on capitalization, a broader range of examples, new coverage of Indigenous languages, and expanded advice on making publications accessible to people with disabilities. The Manual’s traditional focus on nonfiction has been expanded to include fiction and other creative genres in coverage of topics such as punctuation and dialogue, and the needs of self-published authors receive wider attention.

The citation chapters have been thoroughly reorganized for the benefit of new and experienced users alike, and the key concepts for editing mathematics have been integrated into the chapters where they will be most useful to generalists. Evolving technologies—from open-access publishing models to AI—are covered throughout. And naturally, there are some well-considered updates to familiar rules, including changes intended to align the Manual’s recommendations more closely with real-world usage.

As with every new edition, devotees of the Manual will find much to discover and ponder.

Rethinking Parameters (Hardcover): Luis Eguren, Olga Fernandez Soriano, Amaya Mendikoetxea Rethinking Parameters (Hardcover)
Luis Eguren, Olga Fernandez Soriano, Amaya Mendikoetxea
R3,455 Discovery Miles 34 550 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ( "The nature of variation and parameters ") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ( "Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies ") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.

A Grammar of Jamsay (Hardcover): Jeffrey Heath A Grammar of Jamsay (Hardcover)
Jeffrey Heath
R7,495 Discovery Miles 74 950 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Jamsay is the largest-population language among some twenty Dogon languages in Mali, West Africa. This is the first comprehensive grammar of any Dogon language, including a full tonology. The language is verb-final, with subject agreement on the verb and with no other case-marking. Its most striking feature is the morphosyntactically triggered use of stem-wide tone-contour overlays on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. All stems have a lexical tone contour such as H[igh], L[ow]-H, HL, or LHL with at least one H-tone. An exam of tone overlay is tone-dropping to stem-wide all-L. This is used for Perfective verbs (in the presence of a focalized constituent), and for a noun or adjective before an adjective. It is also used to mark the head NP in a relative clause (the head NP is not extracted, so this is the only direct indication of head NP status). The verb in a relative clause is morphologically a participle, agreeing with the head NP in humanness and number, rather than with the subject. "Intonation" is used grammatically. For example, NP conjunction 'X and Y' is expressed as X Y, without a conjunction, but with "dying-quail" intonation on both conjuncts.

A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations (Hardcover): Samuel D. Epstein, Erich M. Groat, Ruriko Kawashima, Hisatsugu... A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations (Hardcover)
Samuel D. Epstein, Erich M. Groat, Ruriko Kawashima, Hisatsugu Kitahara
R2,397 Discovery Miles 23 970 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book explores the central concept of "syntactic relation" arguing that certain fundamental relations such as c-command, dominance and checking relations can be explained within a derivational approach to structure-building. The result is a level-free model of syntax in which derivations, rather than phrase-markers, undergo aemantic/phonological interpretation.

Form and Function in Language Research - Papers in Honour of Christian Lehmann (Hardcover): Johannes Helmbrecht, Yoko Nishina,... Form and Function in Language Research - Papers in Honour of Christian Lehmann (Hardcover)
Johannes Helmbrecht, Yoko Nishina, Yong-Min Shin, Stavros Skopeteas, Elisabeth Verhoeven
R5,034 Discovery Miles 50 340 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on evidence from the world's languages, functional-typological linguistics has established a number of thorough generalizations about the nature of linguistic categorizations and their manifestation in natural languages. Empirical studies in these fields of linguistics have contributed to sharpen linguistic theory in several respects. This volume is a collection of 19 contributions from outstanding scholars in the field of functional-typological linguistics that address fundamental issues in the study of language, such as the nature of linguistic categories, the constitution of functional domains, and the form of cross-linguistic continua. Empirical data from individual languages and from typological samples are investigated in order to achieve generalizations about the properties of human grammar(s). Several grammatical phenomena are dealt with including tonal systems, person distinctions, modalities, reciprocity, complex predicates, grammatical relations, word order, clause linkage, and information structure. The structure of the book illustrates the fundamental importance of the analytical distinction between the onomasiological and the semasiological approach to language and language diversity. Both perspectives are integrated in most papers with a dominant focus on either the former or the latter perspective.

Sentence and Discourse (Hardcover): Jacqueline Gueron Sentence and Discourse (Hardcover)
Jacqueline Gueron
R3,490 Discovery Miles 34 900 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 3 - Further Grammatical Topics (Hardcover): R. M. W. Dixon Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 3 - Further Grammatical Topics (Hardcover)
R. M. W. Dixon
R5,787 Discovery Miles 57 870 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Basic Linguistic Theory provides a fundamental characterization of the nature of human languages and a comprehensive guide to their description and analysis. In crystal-clear prose, R. M. W. Dixon describes how to go about doing linguistics. He show how grammatical structures and rules may be worked out on the basis of inductive generalisations, and explains the steps by which an attested grammar and lexicon can built up from observed utterances. He describes how the grammars and vocabulary of one language may be compared to others of the same or different families, explains the methods involved in cross-linguistic parametric analyses, and shows how to interpret the results. Volume 3 introduces and examines key grammatical topics, each from a cross-linguistic perspective. The subjects include number systems, negation, reflexives and reciprocals, passives, causatives, comparative constructions, and questions. The final chapter discusses the relation between linguistic explanation and the culture and world-view of the linguist and speakers of the language he or she is describing. The book ends with a guide to sources, a consideration of the number of languages in the world, a glossary, and indexes of authors, languages, and subjects covering all three volumes. Volume 1 addresses the methodology for recording, analysing, and comparing languages and includes chapters on analysis, typology, phonology, the lexicon, and field linguistics. Volume 2, like the present work, considers underlying principles of grammatical organization, and has chapters devoted to the word, nouns and verbs, adjectives, transitivity, copula constructions, pronouns and demonstratives, possession, relative clauses and complementation. Basic Linguistic Theory is the triumphant outcome of a lifetime's thinking about every aspect and manifestation of language. The volumes comprise a one-stop introduction for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, as well as for those in neighbouring disciplines, such as psychology and anthropology.

Evolutionary Syntax (Hardcover): Ljiljana Progovac Evolutionary Syntax (Hardcover)
Ljiljana Progovac
R3,630 Discovery Miles 36 300 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In this book, Ljiljana Progovac proposes a gradualist, adaptationist approach to the evolution of syntax, subject to natural selection. She provides a specific framework for its study, combining the fields of evolutionary biology, theoretical syntax, typology, neuroscience, and genetics. The author pursues an internal reconstruction of the stages of grammar based on the syntactic theory associated with Chomskyan Minimalism and arrives at specific, testable hypotheses, which are then corroborated by an abundance of theoretically analysed 'living fossils' drawn from a variety of languages. Her approach demonstrates that these fossil structures do not just coexist alongside more modern structures, but are in fact built into the very foundation of more complex structures, leading to quirks and complexities that are suggestive of a gradualist evolutionary scenario. By reconstructing a particular path along which syntax evolved, Evolutionary Syntax sheds light on the crucial properties of language design itself, as well as on the major parameters of crosslinguistic variation. As a result, this reconstruction can be meaningfully correlated with both the hominin timeline and the ever-growing body of genetic evidence that is available.

A History of the Irish Language - From the Norman Invasion to Independence (Hardcover): Aidan Doyle A History of the Irish Language - From the Norman Invasion to Independence (Hardcover)
Aidan Doyle
R3,860 Discovery Miles 38 600 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In this book, Aidan Doyle traces the history of the Irish language from the time of the Norman invasion at the end of the 12th century to independence in 1922, combining political, cultural, and linguistic history. The book is divided into seven main chapters that focus on a specific period in the history of the language; they each begin with a discussion of the external history and position of the Irish language in the period, before moving on to investigate the important internal changes that took place at that time. A History of the Irish Language makes available for the first time material that has previously been inaccessible to students and scholars who cannot read Irish, and will be a valuable resource not only for undergraduate students of the language, but for all those interested in Irish history and culture.

Recent Developments in Phase Theory (Hardcover): Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck, Cora Pots, Tanja Temmerman Recent Developments in Phase Theory (Hardcover)
Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck, Cora Pots, Tanja Temmerman
R4,178 Discovery Miles 41 780 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The overarching goal of this volume is to explore a number of recent developments in Phase Theory (both theoretical and empirical), thus contributing to our overall understanding of the concept of phases. The volume is divided into three parts, of which the first focuses on the traditional role played by phases in defining successive cyclicity, while at the same time examining the interaction between that traditional role and Chomsky (2013)'s proposal about labeling. The second part focuses on the question of whether only the highest projection of the clausal and nominal domain, CP and DP, are phases or whether those domains also contain an internal phase: vP and NP/NumP/QP, while the third part contains two chapters that focus on the extent to which ellipsis can be used as a reliable diagnostic for phasehood. As a whole, the volume provides a detailed and in-depth view on a number of recent developments in Phase Theory, which will likely continue to dominate the debate for several years to come.

Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit - The Syntax and Semantics of Adjectival Verb Forms (Hardcover): John J. Lowe Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit - The Syntax and Semantics of Adjectival Verb Forms (Hardcover)
John J. Lowe
R4,018 Discovery Miles 40 180 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book examines several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, and the passages in which they appear, in terms of both their syntax and semantics. The Rigveda is an ancient collection of sacred Indian hymns, written in Vedic Sanskrit, and is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. It is also a poetic text in which deliberate obscurity is the governing aesthetic and in which the rules of language are pushed to their limits in order to produce the ideal poetic expression. Many Vedic sentences are of controversial, disputed meaning, and Vedic scholarship is thus fraught with controversy. John J. Lowe applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how participles are used. The author uses his findings to recategorize the data, by defining certain stems and stem-types as outside the synchronic category of participle on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. He suggests alternative sources for these forms and considers the linguistic processes that transformed old participles into non-participial entities. In his conclusion he reassesses the category of participles within the verbal and nominal systems, looks at their prehistory in Proto-Indo-European, and describes their universal, typological characteristics. Among his conclusions are that tense-aspect-stem participles have the technical properties of adjectival verbs, not verbal adjectives, and that such participles are not fully dependent on corresponding finite verbal forms. That is, a perfect participle, for example, need not share all the semantic and functional features of the finite perfect forms built to the same stem. These and many other conclusions drawn either directly challenge or radically revise received opinion and recent work.

Grammatical Replication and Borrowability in Language Contact (Hardcover): Bjoern Wiemer, Bernhard Walchli, Bjoern Hansen Grammatical Replication and Borrowability in Language Contact (Hardcover)
Bjoern Wiemer, Bernhard Walchli, Bjoern Hansen
R4,727 Discovery Miles 47 270 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The volume presents new insights into two basic theoretical issues hotly debated in recent work on grammaticalization and language contact: grammatical replication and grammatical borrowability. The key issues are: How can grammatical replication be distinguished from other, superficially similar processes of contact-induced linguistic change, and under what conditions does it take place? Are there grammatical morphemes or constructions that are more easily borrowed than others, and how can language contact account for areal biases in the borrowing (vs. calquing) of grammatical formatives? The book is a major contribution to the ongoing theoretical discussion concerning the relationship between grammaticalization and language contact on a broad empirical basis.

Mastering English - A Student's Workbook and Guide (Hardcover, Reprint 2012): Alex Klinge Mastering English - A Student's Workbook and Guide (Hardcover, Reprint 2012)
Alex Klinge
R3,339 R2,604 Discovery Miles 26 040 Save R735 (22%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days

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.

Cognitive Semantics and the Polish Dative (Hardcover, Reprint 2011): Ewa D abrowska Cognitive Semantics and the Polish Dative (Hardcover, Reprint 2011)
Ewa D abrowska
R3,922 Discovery Miles 39 220 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Duration in English - A Basic Choice, Illustrated in Comparison with Dutch (Hardcover, Reprint 2014): Lia Korrel Duration in English - A Basic Choice, Illustrated in Comparison with Dutch (Hardcover, Reprint 2014)
Lia Korrel
R3,336 Discovery Miles 33 360 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Norm and Ideology in Spoken French - A Sociolinguistic History of Liaison (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2020): David Hornsby Norm and Ideology in Spoken French - A Sociolinguistic History of Liaison (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2020)
David Hornsby
R2,426 Discovery Miles 24 260 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

This volume offers a diachronic sociolinguistic perspective on one of the most complex and fascinating variable speech phenomena in contemporary French. Liaison affects a number of word-final consonants which are realized before a vowel but not pre-pausally or before a consonant. Liaisons have traditionally been classified as obligatoire (obligatory), interdite (forbidden) and facultative (optional), the latter category subject to a highly complex prescriptive norm. This volume traces the evolution of this norm in prescriptive works published since the 16th Century, and sets it against actual practice as evidenced from linguists' descriptions and recorded corpora. The author argues that optional (or variable) liaison in French offers a rich and well-documented example of language change driven by ideology in Kroch's (1978) terms, in which an elite seeks to maintain a complex conservative norm in the face of generally simplifying changes led by lower socio-economic groups, who tend in this case to restrict liaison to a small set of traditionally obligatory environments.

Phases - Developing the Framework (Hardcover): Angel J Gallego Phases - Developing the Framework (Hardcover)
Angel J Gallego; Introduction by Noam Chomsky
R4,702 Discovery Miles 47 020 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This volume explores and develops the framework of phases (so-called Phase Theory), first introduced in Chomsky (2000). The antecedents of such framework go back to the well-known notion of "cycle", which concerns broader notions, such as compositionality, locality, and economy conditions. Within generative grammar, this idea of the cycle took a concrete form in the fifties, with Chomsky, Halle, and Lukoff's (1955) pioneering work on stress, later on extended in Chomsky & Halle (1968), Halle & Vergnaud (1987), and further applied to morpho-phonology (Mascaro 1976 and Kiparski 1982), semantics (Jackendoff 1969), and syntax (Chomsky 1965, 1973). In recent years, several attempts have tried to refine and reformulate the cycle (Freidin 1999, Lasnik 2006, Uriagereka 2011). Such was the goal behind explorations on bounding nodes (Chomsky 1973) and barriers (Chomsky 1986), for which there is substantial empirical evidence showing how computation proceeds in a step-by-step fashion. Much work within minimalism has been devoted to investigate the nature of phases and their relevance for other areas of linguistic inquiry. Although it has been argued that phases have natural correlates at the interfaces, it is still unclear what the defining properties of these domains are, whether they can help us understand language acquisition, language variation, or language evolution. This book aims at addressing these questions, sharpening our understanding about phases and the nature of the Faculty of Language. Angel J. Gallego (ed.), Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona 1. Cedric Boeckx, Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avancats / Universitat de Barcelona 2. Zeljko Boskovic, University of Connecticut 3. Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4. Samuel D. Epstein, University of Michigan 5. Wolfram Hinzen, Durham University 6. Hisatsugu Kitahara, Keio University 7. Julie Anne Legate, University of Pennsylvania 8. Hiroki Narita, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study 9. Miki Obata, Mie University 10. Marc D. Richards, University of Frankfurt 11. Ian G. Roberts, University of Cambridge 12. Bridget Samuels, University of Southern California 13. Yosuke Sato, National University of Singapore 14. T. Daniel Seely, Eastern Michigan University 15. Juan Uriagereka, University of Maryland

Time in Natural Language - Syntactic Interfaces with Semantics and Discourse (Hardcover): Ellen Thompson Time in Natural Language - Syntactic Interfaces with Semantics and Discourse (Hardcover)
Ellen Thompson
R5,018 Discovery Miles 50 180 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Early Greek Relative Clauses (Hardcover): Philomen Probert Early Greek Relative Clauses (Hardcover)
Philomen Probert
R3,608 Discovery Miles 36 080 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Early Greek Relative Clauses contributes to an old debate currently enjoying a revival: should we expect languages spoken a few thousand years ago, such as Proto-Indo-European, to be less well-equipped than modern languages when it comes to subordinate clauses? Early Greek relative clauses provide a test case for this problem. Early Greek uses several kinds of relative clause, but all these are usually thought to come from one, or at most two, prehistoric types. In a new look at the evidence, this book finds that a rich variety of relative clause types has been in place for a considerable time. The reconstruction of prehistoric linguistic stages requires detailed work on the individual languages descending from them. A substantial part of the book is therefore devoted to a new look at the relative clause systems found in a wide variety of early Greek texts. It emerges that the same basic system is in use across all these texts. Different kinds of relative clause predominate in different kinds of text, however, because relative clause syntax and semantics interact with the needs of different kinds of text. Considering material as diverse as the Homeric poems, laws inscribed in stone on the island of Crete, and the philosophical prose of Heraclitus, the discussion remains clear and straightforward as Probert considers the uses and histories of different relative clause types.

Studies in Syntax and Semantics (Hardcover, 1969 ed.): F. Kiefer Studies in Syntax and Semantics (Hardcover, 1969 ed.)
F. Kiefer
R2,674 Discovery Miles 26 740 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

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)."

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