The Cognitive System of the French Verb


Book Description

This study is based on the writings and teaching of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), one of the earliest proponents of what is today called Cognitive Linguistics. It offers (1) a much needed presentation in English of Guillaume's view of the French system, (2) the clarifications added by his successors, and (3) much empirical detail added by the author from his own extensive experience with the material.The word "system" in this work, as explained in the very first chapter, is intended in the Saussurian sense of a closed set of contrasts. The method is first briefly applied to English, in order to familiarize the reader with the methodological concepts and terminology, and comparisons are made with the general outline of the French system.The major sub-systems of the French verb are analysed in the four central chapters (4-7) entitled Aspect, Voice, Tense, Mood, followed by a chapter on systemic comparison, and two final chapters of detailed analysis of the verbal morphology and its relevance to the cognitive system.




Bibliography of Semiotics, 1975–1985


Book Description

This bibliography of semiotic studies covering the years 1975-1985 impressively reveals the world-wide intensification in the field. During this decade, national semiotic societies have been founded allover the world; a great number of international, national, and local semiotic conferences have taken place; the number of periodicals and book series devoted to semiotics has increased as has the number of books and dissertations in the field. This bibliography is the result of a dedicated effort to approach complete coverage.




Constructions in Contact 2


Book Description

The last few years have seen a steadily increasing interest in constructional approaches to language contact. This volume builds on previous constructionist work, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) and the volume Constructions in Contact (2018) and extends its methodology and insights in three major ways. First, it presents new constructional research on a wide range of language contact scenarios including Afrikaans, American Sign Language, English, French, Malayalam, Norwegian, Spanish, Welsh, as well as contact scenarios that involve typologically different languages. Second, it also addresses other types of scenarios that do not fall into the classic language contact category, such as multilingual practices and language acquisition as emerging multilingualism. Third, it aims to integrate constructionist views on language contact and multilingualism with other approaches that focus on structural, social, and cognitive aspects. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar is a framework particularly well suited for analyzing a wide variety of language contact phenomena from a usage-based perspective.




Light Verb Constructions as Complex Verbs


Book Description

The notion of light verb constructions has been traditionally related to the ‘insignificance’ of the verb, which is described as a grammatical item only codifying TAM system and φ-features, whereas the whole predicative content is thought to be conveyed by the noun. This book deals with the light verb constructions as instances of complex verbs, intended as multi-predicational but monoclausal structures. This allows to deepen the actual verb lightness, the effective noun predicativity, as well as their effect on the cohesion of the construction. The papers in this volume reflect on the concrete contribution of noun and verb to the event and argument structure, and on the relevance of semantically different noun classes for the verb selection. From different theoretical approaches, data of a great variety of languages are investigated, such as Indo-European languages – both modern (Germanic, Slavic, Romance and Iranian languages) and ancient (Latin and Ancient Greek) – but also Mandarin Chinese, and different polysynthetic languages (e.g. Ket, Nivkh, Murrinh-Patha, Kiowa, Bininj Gun-wok, Ainu). The range of topics, languages and perspectives presented in this book make it of great interest to both theoretical and applied linguists.




Readings in Linguistics I & II


Book Description

This volume, consisting of nineteen articles from Readings in Linguistics I and twenty articles from Readings in Linguistics II, constitutes an invaluable collection of papers in English, German, and French on subjects of continuing interest to linguists of all schools. Complete with a new preface explaining the editors' principles of selection and bibliographical citations, Readings in Linguistics I & II includes the influential work of Bloomfield, Trubetzkoy, Firth, Harris, and Kurylowicz, as well as important but less accessible articles by Vachek, Bazell, Chao, Fischer-Jorgensen, and Tesniere.




Syntactic architecture and its consequences II


Book Description

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions in comparative morphosyntax, including the modelling of syntactic categories, relative clauses, and demonstrative systems. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in morphosyntax and morphosyntactic variation.




Foundations for a Science of Language


Book Description

This volume presents, for the first time in English, a representative view of Gustave Guillaume's thought. The texts, drawn mainly from his manuscript notes for lectures at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, were selected as far as possible for their accessibility, as requiring no prior knowledge of his work. The result is a panorama of the far-ranging and often provocative thought of one of the twentieth century's most original linguists.




French Today


Book Description

French Today is a profile of the French language in its social context. British and French linguists examine trends in French throughout the French-speaking world, and address issues around prescriptivism, gender and language, and regional languages and dialects. The collection includes overviews of work done in particular areas and deeper analyses of sociolinguistic questions. One theme is how to represent and interpret data relating to language varieties that have been marginalised. Another concerns the ways in which French is adapting to the future, whether as a language of new technology, or as a vehicular language on the continent. All chapters of this book are in English, with examples and quotations in French, and a mixture of references given in both languages. At the end of each chapter, there are also texts in French, serving as illustration and as pointers to further reading.




Negation and Clausal Structure


Book Description

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker's syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategies for the expression of the same semantic function of negating a sentence. Zanuttini's goal here is to characterize the range of such variation by comparing the different syntactic means for expressing sentential negation exhibited by the members of one language family--the Romance languages--and by reducing the differences we witness to a constrained set of choices available to the particular grammars of these languages. This sort of analysis is a first step towards the ultimate goal of determining and understanding what limits there are on the syntactic options that universal grammar imposes on the expression of sentential negation.




Type Noun Constructions in Slavic, Germanic and Romance Languages


Book Description

This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.