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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
Conjunctions and Interjections in Modern Standard Arabic is a grammar for Modern Standard Arabic introducing conjunctions and interjections from the most basic to the most advanced, with drills for each grammatical point. Skill in the use of conjunctions and interjections is essential for acquiring proficiency in expressing relationships of causation, order, time sequence and other relationships among events and ideas. Each chapter presents the grammar of conjunctions and interjections in clearly organized tables with examples of each use. An additional section presents multiple drills for practice and functional use. Aimed as a textbook for students for all four years of university Arabic, and for independent learners.
Originally published in 1990, Nature and History examines how Darwin's theory of evolution has been expanded by scholars and researchers to include virtually every scientific discipline. The book presents a morphological analysis of historical and social sciences - sciences which have traditionally have been viewed as too random in their progressions to conform to a model. Through the evaluation of empirical and factual evidence, the book builds a case for an evolutionary paradigm which encompasses both natural and social sciences, and presents the form's adaptiveness in working historical models.
This textbook describes and systematizes all aspects of the grammar of Russian--including patterns of orthography, sounds, inflection, syntax, tense-aspect-mood, word order, and intonation. It is especially concerned with the meaning of combinations of words (constructions) and the core concept is that of the predicate history (a record of the states of entities through time and across possibilities). Using predicate histories, the book presents an integrated account of the semantics of verbs, nouns, case, and aspect. It will appeal to students, scholars and language professionals interested in Russian.
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.
In the two volumes of Prosodic Syntax in Chinese, the author develops a new model, which proposes that the interaction between syntax and prosody is bi-directional and that prosody not only constrains syntactic structures but also activates syntactic operations. All of the facts investigated in Chinese provide new perspectives for linguistic theories as well as insights into the nature of human languages. The subtitles of the two volumes are Theory and Facts and History and Change respectively, with each focusing on different topics (though each volume has both theoretical and historical descriptive concerns). This book has shown that prosody has played a crucial role in triggering the many changes in the diachronic development of Chinese. On the one hand, this book investigates the existence of SOV structures in Early Archaic Chinese, a SVO language, and then demonstrates the role of VO prosody in causing the disappearance of the remnant structures after the Han Dynasty. On the other hand, this book surveys the historical evidence for analyses of bei passives and Ba-constructions, and then offers a prosodic analysis on the origin of these two sentence patterns in Chinese. It is claimed that prosody can be an important factor in triggering, balancing and finally terminating changes in the syntactic evolution of Chinese.
Variation in P is an essential follow-up to the seminal proposals of the generative tradition regarding prepositional syntax. Recent research shows that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in universal grammar. The papers collected in the first part of this volume not only test these proposals against new comparative data, but also shed light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume explores the role of prepositions in non-spatial environments as well as in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation. By drawing on evidence from less studied languages, and by considering prepositional syntax in interaction with clausal syntax as well as within prepositional phrases, Variation in P refines and develops theories introduced by previous generative studies.
What is the essence of a part of speech? Why is it difficult to classify parts of speech? What are the bases and criteria for classifying them? How should they be classified? In doing so, how should a conversional word be dealt with? How should nomonalization be treated? These are just some of the questions answered in this book. The classification of parts of speech in Chinese is a tough job due to the language's lack of morphological differences. Based on the analysis of nearly 40,000 Chinese characters, this book proposes that, essentially, a part of speech is not of distributional type and that its intrinsic basis is an expressional function and the semantic type. Essentially, large categories such as substantive words, predicate words and modification words are classes of words classified according to their expressional functions. Basic categories such as nouns, verbs and adjectives are classes that combine semantic types with syntactical functions. In classifying parts of speech, the book pays attention not to identifying a single distributive characteristic that is internally universal and externally exclusive but to clustering the grammatical functions that have the same classification value through the "reflection-representation" relationship among distribution, expressional function and semantic type (distribution reflects expressional function and semantic type, which are, in turn, represented as distribution), thereby identifying the classification criteria. It uses distributional compatibility and the correlation principle to analyze which distributional differences represent differences in parts of speech and which do not. In this way, grammatical functions that have equal classification values are collected into one equivalent function cluster, each of which represents one part of speech. The book uses four strategies to classify parts of speech, namely the homogeneity strategy, the homomorphical strategy, the priority homomorphical strategy and the consolidation strategy. It will be a valuable reference for Chinese linguistic researchers and students as well as Chinese learners.
Lexical Ontological Semantics introduces ontological methods into lexical semantic studies with the aim of giving impetus to various fields of endeavours which envision and model the semantic network of a language. Lexical ontological semantics (LOS) provides a cognition-based computation-oriented framework in which nouns and predicates are described in terms of their semantic knowledge and models the mechanism in which the noun system is coupled with the predicate system. It expands the scope of lexical semantics, updates methodologies to semantic representation, guides the construction of semantic resources for natural language processing, and develops new theories for human-machine interactions and communications.
The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.
Russian Nouns of Common Gender in Use is a unique collection of more than 150 nouns that mainly have grammatical features of the feminine gender, but refer to both male and female persons. This book provides the meanings of the words and explains their use in discourse with the help of examples from literature, media, and everyday speech. Each entry includes parallel English translations, which are analogous and appropriate to the given context. These enable the reader to easily grasp each word's organic place and purpose in a particular sentence or situation. This book will serve as a valuable tool for students and instructors, translators, scholars, and anyone interested in learning the Russian language.
The volume deals with valency phenomena in verbs and complex deverbal lexical structures (nominalizations, adjectivizations and compounds) in a variety of languages (English, Polish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, Hebrew, Bantu languages and the West African language Ga). The introduction offers an overview of valency related issues and up-to-date linguistic literature. The eleven contributions address specific problems, such as the interaction of valency with argument- and event-structure, properties of light verbs, impersonal constructions, antipassives, analogies between passivization and nominalization/adjectivization, effects of verbal prefixation, and synthetic compounds. The proposed analyses are couched in lexically and syntactically driven approaches.
The volume explores the semantics of nominalizations from different theoretical points of view: formal and lexical semantics, cognitive-functional grammar, lexical-functional grammar, discourse representation theory. Data from a variety of languages are taken into account, including Hungarian, Italian, French, German and English. The papers discuss the semantics of distinct readings of nominalizations and meaning differences observed between competing affixes.
This book is about the doing and experiencing of diagnosis in everyday life. Diagnoses are revealed as interactive negotiations rather than as the assigning of diagnostic labels. The authors demonstrate, through detailed discourse analyses, how the diagnostic process depends on power and accountability as expressed through the talk of those engaged in the diagnostic process. The authors also show that diagnostic decisions are not only made by professional experts trained in the art and science of diagnosis, but they can also be made by anyone trying to figure out the nature of everyday problems. Finally, diagnostic reasoning is found to extend beyond typical diagnostic situations, occurring in unexpected places such as written letters of recommendation and talk about the nature of communication. Together, the chapters in this book demonstrate how diagnosis is a communication practice deeply rooted in our culture. The book is interdisciplinary and unusually broad in its focus. The authors come from different experiential scholarly backgrounds. Each of them takes a different look at the impact and nature of the diagnostic process. The diagnoses discussed include autism, Alzheimer's disease, speech and language disorders, and menopause. The focus is not only on the here and now of the diagnostic interaction, but also on how diagnoses and diagnostic processes change over time. The book can serve as an undergraduate or graduate text for courses offered in various disciplines, including communication, sociology, anthropology, communication disorders, audiology, linguistics, medicine, and disability studies.
This volume brings together a series of studies of morphological processing in Germanic (English, German, Dutch), Romance (French, Italian), and Slavic (Polish, Serbian) languages. The question of how morphologically complex words are organized and processed in the mental lexicon is addressed from different theoretical perspectives (single and dual route models), for different modalities (auditory and visual comprehension, writing), and for language development. Experimental work is reported, as well as computational and statistical modeling. Thus, this volume provides a useful overview of the range of issues currently attracting reseach at the intersection of morphology and psycholinguistics.
Negation is one of the main functions in human communication.A History of English Negation is the first book to analyse English negation over the whole of its documented history, using a wide database and accessible terminology. After an introductory chapter, the book analyses evidence from the whole sample of Old English documents available, and from several Middle English and Renaissance documents, showing that the range of forms used at any single stage is wider, and the pace of their change considerably faster, than previously commonly assumed. The book moves on to review current formalised accounts of the situation in Modern English, tracing the changes in rules for expressing negation that have intervened since the earliest documented history of the language. Since the standard is only one variety of a language, it also surveys the means of negation used in some non-standard and dialectal varieties of English. The book concludes with a look at relatively recently born languages such as Pidgins and Creoles, to investigate the degree of naturalness of the principles that rule the expression of English negation.
This study analyses left dislocation, prepositions, and the progressive aspect in Ugandan English. It uses spoken data of English speakers with the three indigenous Ugandan languages. The results show high frequency use of left dislocation in Ugandan English. This suggests possible substrate influence from these first languages since left dislocation construction is used in these languages. The use of prepositions is overwhelmingly like in Standard English with just very few cases indicating variation from Standard English, although the three indigenous languages have very few prepositions in comparison to the English language. The use of the progressive illustrates variation among English speakers with the three first languages indicating that Ugandan English is not homogenous.
A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The periodical Yearbook of Morphology, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, and has shown that morphology is central to present-day linguistic theorizing. In the Yearbook of Morphology 2005 a number of important theoretical issues are discussed: the role of inflectional paradigms in morphological analysis, the differences between words and affixes, and the adequacy of competing models of word structure. In addition, the role of phonological factors in shaping complex words is discussed. Evidence for particular positions defended in this volume is taken from a wide variety of languages. This volume is of interest to those working in theoretical, descriptive and historical linguistics, morphologists, phonologists, computational linguists, and psycholinguists. Beginning with Volume 16 (2006) the Yearbook of Morphology continues as a journal with the title: Morphology. This is the only journal entirely devoted to the study of linguistic morphology. The journal is available online as well as in print. Visit the journal at: www.springer.com/11525 or click on the link in the top right hand corner.
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.
This book applies the theory of cognitive linguistics to the analysis of a variety of grammatical phenomena in non-Indo-European languages. In previous studies of languages from non-Indo-European families, cognitive linguistics has been remarkably useful in explaining non-prototypical structures as well as more common ones. The book expands that effort into a new set of families and languages.
A Grammar of Mina is a reference grammar of a hitherto undescribed and endangered Central Chadic language. The book contains a description of the phonology, morphology, syntax, and all the functional domains encoded by this language. For each hypothesis regarding a form of linguistic expression and its function, ample evidence is given. The description of formal means and of the functions coded by these means is couched in terms accessible to all linguists regardless of their theoretical orientations. The outstanding characteristics of Mina include: vowel harmony; use of phonological means, including vowel deletion and vowel retention, to code phrasal boundaries; two tense and aspectual systems, each system carrying a different pragmatic function; a lexical category 'locative predicator' hitherto not observed in other languages; some tense, aspect, and mood markers that occur before the verb, and others that occur after the verb; the markers of interrogative and negative modality that occur in clause-final position; the conjunction used for a conjoined noun phrase in the subject function that differs from the conjunction used for a conjoined noun phrase in all other functions.In addition to the coding of argument structure, adjuncts, tense, aspect, and mood categories, Mina also codes the category point-of-view. The language has a clausal category 'comment clause' used in both simple and complex sentences, which overtly marks the speaker's comment on the proposition. The discourse structure has the principle of unity of place. If one of the participants in a described event changes scene, that is coded by a special syntactic construction in addition to any verb of movement that may be used. Because of these unusual linguistic characteristics, the Grammar of Mina will be of interest to a wide range of linguists.
This book proposes a new model of phonology that integrates rules and repairs triggered by markedness constraints in a classical derivational model. In developing this theory, the book offers new solutions to many long-standing problems involving syllabic and segmental phonology with analyses of natural language data, both well-known and relatively unknown. The book also includes a new treatment of Palatalization and Affrication processes, a novel theory of feature visibility as an alternative to feature underspecification and an extensive critique of Optimality Theory.
Language documentation is a rapidly emerging new field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language. This volume presents in-depth introductions to major aspects of language documentation, including overviews on fieldwork ethics and data processing, guidelines for the basic annotation of digitally-stored multimedia corpora and a discussion on how to build and maintain a language archive. It combines theoretical and practical considerations and makes specific suggestions for the most common problems encountered in language documentation. Key features textbook introduction to Language Documentation considers all common problems
This volume provides general linguists with new data and analysis on languages spoken in China regarding various aspects of space and quantification, using different approaches. Contributions by researchers from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Europe, the United States and Australia offer insights on aspects of language ranging from phonology and morphology to syntax and semantics, while the approaches vary from formal, historical, areal, typological, and cognitive linguistics to second language acquisition. After separate volumes on space and quantification in languages of China, the studies in this volume combine space and quantification to allow readers a view of the intersection of the two topics. Each article contributes to general linguistic knowledge while discussing a particular aspect of space or quantification in a particular language/dialect, offering new data and analysis from languages that are spoken in the same geographical area, and that belong to various language families that exist and evolve in close contact with one another.
Originally published in 1986, this volume deals with various aspects of the life of the pastoralists who live in the area between what was Senegambia and Cameroon. It analyses the changing relations between pastoralists and agricultural peoples, and the changes that pastoral societies are undergoing with urbanisation, increased central government control and the spread of market relations. The papers are in both English and French and include historical studies of aspects of the history of Adamawa, the Fulani, the Twareg, the Shuwa Arabs and the Koyam in pre-colonial times. There is also a survey of the state of Fula language studies and the variety of Fula literature; discussions of the changing nature of pastoralism and the nomadic way of life in Cameroon, Senegal and Nigeria, including the effects of drought.
The structural and semantic properties of adverbials represent a still poorly understood area of sentential syntax and semantics in Germanic languages. In particular, it is an open question which different adverbial usages need to be distinguished, which usages are tied to which syntactic positions, and how these different usage can be formally analyzed. Focussing on adverbial adjectives in German, this study provides detailed answers to these questions. By distinguishing between verb-related adverbials and event-related adverbials, the author provides a new analysis of the large class of adverbials traditionally labelled as manner adverbials. It is shown that the two different classes are linked to different syntactic positions, and formal analyses and derivations for the two different usages are developed. The book is therefore of interest not only to anyone working on the linguistics of German but also to all linguists working on the syntax-semantics interface and the formal analysis of adverbials. |
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