Parts and Wholes in Semantics


Book Description

This book develops a unified account of expressions involving the notions of "part" and "whole " in which principles of the individuation of part structures play a central role. Moltmann presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as as a whole, together, and alone, nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as completely and partly. She develops a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions.




Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics


Book Description

The first edition of ELL (1993, Ron Asher, Editor) was hailed as "the field's standard reference work for a generation". Now the all-new second edition matches ELL's comprehensiveness and high quality, expanded for a new generation, while being the first encyclopedia to really exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics. * The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field * An entirely new work, with new editors, new authors, new topics and newly commissioned articles with a handful of classic articles * The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics through the online edition * Ground-breaking and International in scope and approach * Alphabetically arranged with extensive cross-referencing * Available in print and online, priced separately. The online version will include updates as subjects develop ELL2 includes: * c. 7,500,000 words * c. 11,000 pages * c. 3,000 articles * c. 1,500 figures: 130 halftones and 150 colour * Supplementary audio, video and text files online * c. 3,500 glossary definitions * c. 39,000 references * Extensive list of commonly used abbreviations * List of languages of the world (including information on no. of speakers, language family, etc.) * Approximately 700 biographical entries (now includes contemporary linguists) * 200 language maps in print and online Also available online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit www.info.sciencedirect.com. The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics Ground-breaking in scope - wider than any predecessor An invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in the fields of: linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition, language pathology, cognitive science, sociology, the law, the media, medicine & computer science. The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field




Classifiers


Book Description

Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.




Athapaskan Linguistics


Book Description

No detailed description available for "Athapaskan Linguistics".




Number


Book Description

Number is the most underestimated of the grammatical categories. It is deceptively simple yet the number system which philosophers, logicians and many linguists take as the norm - namely the distinction between singular and plural (as in cat versus cats) - is only one of a wide range of possibilities to be found in languages around the world. Some languages, for instance, make more distinctions than English, having three, four or even five different values. Adopting a wide-ranging perspective, Greville Corbett draws on examples from many languages to analyse the possible systems of number. He reveals that the means for signalling number are remarkably varied and are put to a surprising range of special additional uses. By surveying some of the riches of the world s linguistic resources this book makes a major contribution to the typology of categories and demonstrates that languages are much more varied than is generally recognised.




Mechanisms of Language Acquisition


Book Description

First published in 1987. Three decades of intensive study of language development have led to an enormous accumulation of descriptive data. But there is still no over-arching theory of language development that can make orderly sense of this huge stockpile of observations. Grand structuralist theories such as those of Chomsky, Jakobson, and Piaget have kept researchers asking the right questions, but they seldom allow us to make detailed experimental predictions or to formulate detailed accounts. The papers collected in this volume attempt to address this gap between data and theory by formulating a series of mechanistic accounts of the acquisition of language.




Language and Identities


Book Description

Language and Identities offers a broad survey of our current state of knowledge on the connections between variability in language use and the construction, negotiation, maintenance and performance of identities at different levels - individual, group, regional and national. It brings together over 20 specially commissioned chapters, written by distinguished international scholars, on a range of topics around the language/identity nexus. The collection deals sequentially with identities at various levels, both social and personal. Using detailed, empirical evidence, the chapters illustrate how the multi-layered, dynamic nature of identities is realised through linguistic behaviour. Several chapters in the volume focus on contexts in which we might expect to observe a foregrounding of factors involved in the definition and delimitation of self and other: for example, cases in which identities may be disputed, changing, blurred, peripheral, or imposed. Such a focus on complex contexts allows clearer insight into the identity-making and -marking functions of language. The collection approaches these topics from a range of perspectives, with contributions from sociolinguists, sociophoneticians, linguistic anthropologists, clinical linguists and forensic linguists.




Themes in Arabic and Hebrew Syntax


Book Description

The aim of this enterprise is to assemble together in one volume works on various syntactic aspects of Arabic and Hebrew, in the hope that it will spur further comparative work within the Semitic family at the level of richness achieved in other language families such as Germanic and Romance. Although a substantial amount of work on the syntax of Arabic and Hebrew already exists in various forms, volumes of the type we have attempted are still practically non-existent. Moreover, apart from some notable exceptions, existing studies rarely take a systematic within-family comparative stance towards the phenomena they discuss, although cross-references between studies on Arabic and Hebrew are not uncommon. Obviously, we would ideally have preferred the volume to include papers on numerous other Semitic languages, including the languages of the Ethio Semitic branch as well as numerous spoken varieties of Arabic that have yet to be explored. Unfortunately, this was not possible due to circumstances beyond our control. We very much hope that the existence of this volume will make more inclusive volumes on the syntax of the Semitic languages only a matter of time.