Author : Anna Bondaruk
Publisher :
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 47,6 MB
Release : 2013
Category : English language
ISBN : 9788377026410
Author : María J. Arche
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 50,46 MB
Release : 2019-01-03
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0192565427
This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.
Author : Daniel J. Wilson
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 10,72 MB
Release : 2020-07-16
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027260966
This book presents a novel account of syntactic and semantic variation in copular and existential sentences in Classical Hebrew. Like many languages, the system of Classical Hebrew copular sentences is quite complex, containing zero, pronominal, and verbal forms as well as eventive and inchoative semantics. Approaching this subject from the framework of Distributed Morphology provides an elegant and comprehensive explanation for both the syntactic and semantic variation in these sentences. This book also presents a theoretical model for analyzing copular sentences in other languages included related phenomena– such as pseudo-copulas. It is also a demonstration of what can be gained by applying modern linguistic analyses to dead languages. Citing and building off previous studies on this topic, this book will be of interest to those interested in the theoretical examination of copular and existential sentences and to those interested in Classical Hebrew more specifically.
Author : Line Mikkelsen
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 25,22 MB
Release : 2005-10-13
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027294135
This book is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses, and its relation to other kinds of copular structures, predicational and equative clauses in particular. Based on evidence from Danish and English, I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses — one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit — but differ in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization, where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position, the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse. Equative clauses are argued to be fundamentally different.
Author : Jacopo Saturno
Publisher : Language Science Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 49,90 MB
Release :
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3961102619
This work is devoted to morphosyntactic processing in the earliest stages of L2 Polish. The target structure taken into consideration is the morphosyntactic opposition between the nominative and accusative case, respectively corresponding to the subject and object function. This is the first book-length work devoted to the VILLA project, a large multi-national initiative within which 90 adult learners took part in a first-exposure, 14-hour Polish course under controlled input conditions. As participants had never been exposed to Polish or other Slavic languages, the experiment portrays the very first contact with a completely new target language; moreover, since the learners were evenly distributed among five L1 groups, L1 interference can also be investigated in depth. In addition to an in-depth analysis of the effect of input properties on morpho-syntactic processing, the book discusses sensitive methodological points such as the role of semantics in semi-spontaneous production as well as the impact of elicitation techniques.
Author : Łukasz Jędrzejowski
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 498 pages
File Size : 47,47 MB
Release : 2021-04-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027260176
This volume presents novel cross-linguistic insights into how olfactory experiences are expressed in typologically (un-)related languages both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective. It contains a general introduction to the topic and fourteen chapters based on philological investigation and thorough fieldwork data from Basque, Beja, Fon, Formosan languages, Hebrew, Indo-European languages, Japanese, Kartvelian languages, Purepecha, and languages of northern Vanuatu. Topics discussed in the individual chapters involve, inter alia, lexical olfactory repertoires and naming strategies, non-literal meanings of olfactory expressions and their semantic change, reduplication, colexification, mimetics, and language contact. The findings provide the reader with a range of fascinating facts about perception description, contribute to a deeper understanding of how olfaction as an understudied sense is encoded linguistically, and offer new theoretical perspectives on how some parts of our cognitive system are verbalized cross-culturally. This volume is highly relevant to lexical typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anthropologists.
Author : Bożena Rozwadowska
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 38,70 MB
Release : 2020-12-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027260761
This book sheds new light on the puzzle of psychological predicates in a cross-linguistic perspective by looking at them from a variety of angles at the interfaces between event structure, lexical and viewpoint aspect, syntax and information structure. The individual chapters focus on Polish and Spanish psych verbs, which manifest new overt contrasts that often remain covert in languages such as English, e.g., aspectual distinctions, the peculiarities of dative constructions, or the role of information structure in determining the word order. One of the main contributions of the book lies in positing a new typology of basic event types enriched with the initial boundary events. Moreover, due attention is devoted to dative experiencers as compared to accusative experiencers. Although couched in the generative tradition, the main insights presented in this collection are theory neutral and may be of interest to linguists of all persuasions.
Author : Nagarajan Selvanathan
Publisher :
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 44,71 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
ISBN :
In this dissertation, I investigate specificational copular clauses (Higgins 1973). My aim is to not only propose an analysis for how such specificational copular clauses are derived but also to use such constructions as a testing ground for evaluating and/ or revising different aspects of linguistic theory. The language I primarily use towards these ends is Tamil (Dravidian) although English (among others) plays a significant role. With respect to the analysis of specificational copular clauses, I use subject-verb agreement data from Tamil specificational copular clauses in order to support the claim that specificational copular clauses are inverted predications (Moro 1997, Mikkelsen 2004, den Dikken 2006). However, this is not to negate the claim that specificational copular clauses are equations (Jacobson 1994, Heycock & Kroch 1999, Sharvit 1999, Heller 2004). I propose that syntactic predication can be unified with semantic equation using somewhat standard notions of type-shifting (Partee 1987). I also exploit the fact that specificational copular clauses have a fixed Topic-Focus order (Heycock & Kroch 2002). In this respect, the general idea is similar to Mikkelsen (2004) but differs from her as I propose a semantic account of the facts that is compatible with her syntactic approach. I also investigate the behavior of (relatively neglected) specificational copular clauses with indefinite subjects and propose an analysis which is uniform with the analysis proposed for specificational copular clauses with definite and possessive subjects. In this dissertation, I also investigate what inverted constructions such as specificational copular clauses tell us about the way languages syntactically combine nodes. A recent theoretical advance with respect to this question is the Labeling Algorithm (Chomsky 2013, 2014) and I argue that inversion structures such as specificational copular clauses, and OVS reversals (like that found in Kirundi and Russian). In order to support this, I reanalyze Kirundi OVS reversal (Ura 1996, Ndayiragije 1999) where the richest evidence is found. Perhaps one of the most famous/ important properties of specificational copular clauses is that they exhibit connectivity. Here, I illustrate two different types of Tamil specificational copular clauses. Interestingly, one specificational copular clause exhibits only a proper subset of the connectivity effects exhibited by the other. I propose that this can be attributed to their different syntactic derivations which is independently motivated. I use these facts to investigate reflexive binding and propose that a comparison of English and Tamil reflexive connectivity suggests that the types of interpretations that reflexive pronouns have in English and Tamil differs.
Author : Anna Bondaruk
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 455 pages
File Size : 38,42 MB
Release : 2015-06-18
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1443879851
This is the first volume in a series of three books called Within Language, Beyond Theories, which focuses on current linguistic research surpassing the limits of contemporary theoretical frameworks in order to gain new insights into the structure of the language system and to offer more explanatorily adequate accounts of linguistic phenomena from a number of the world's languages. This volume brings together twenty-five papers pertaining to theoretical linguistics, and consists of three par ...
Author : Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 688 pages
File Size : 35,90 MB
Release : 2008-09-25
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3110207494
The goal of this book is twofold. On the one hand we want to offer a discussion of some of the more important properties of the nominal projection, on the other hand we want to provide the reader with tools for syntactic analysis which apply to the structure of DP but which are also relevant for other domains of syntax. In order to achieve this dual goal we will discuss phenomena which are related to the nominal projection in relation to other syntactic phenomena (e.g. pro drop will be related to N-ellipsis, the classification of pronouns will be applied to the syntax of possessive pronouns, N-movement will be compared to V-movement, the syntax of the genitive construction will be related to that of predicate inversion etc.). In the various chapters we will show how recent theoretical proposals (distributed morphology, anti-symmetry, checking theory) can cast light on aspects of the syntax of the NP. When necessary, we will provide a brief introduction of these theoretical proposals. We will also indicate problems with these analyses, whether they be inherent to the theories as such (e.g. what is the trigger for movement in antisymmetric approaches) or to the particular instantiations. The book cannot and will not provide the definitive analysis of the syntax of noun phrases. We consider that this would not be possible, given the current flux in generative syntax, with many new theoretical proposals being developed and explored, but the book aims at giving the reader the tools with which to conduct research and to evaluate proposals in the literature. In the discussion of various issues, we will apply the framework that is most adequate to deal with problems at hand. We will therefore not necessarily use the same approach throughout the discussion. Though proposals in the literature will be referred to when relevant, we cannot attempt to provide a critical survey of the literature. We feel that such a survey would be guided too strongly by theoretical choices, which would not be compatible with the pedagogical purposes this book has. The book is comparative in its approach, and data from different languages will be examined, including English, German, Dutch (West-Flemish), Greek, Romance, Semitic, Slavic, Albanian, Hungarian, Gungbe.
