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Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262260503
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular languages into account. Beginning in the mid-fifties and emanating largely form MIT, an approach was developed to linguistic theory and to the study of the structure of particular languages that diverges in many respects from modern linguistics. Although this approach is connected to the traditional study of languages, it differs enough in its specific conclusions about the structure and in its specific conclusions about the structure of language to warrant a name, "generative grammar." Various deficiencies have been discovered in the first attempts to formulate a theory of transformational generative grammar and in the descriptive analysis of particular languages that motivated these formulations. At the same time, it has become apparent that these formulations can be extended and deepened.The major purpose of this book is to review these developments and to propose a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes them into account. The emphasis in this study is syntax; semantic and phonological aspects of the language structure are discussed only insofar as they bear on syntactic theory.
Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262260503
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Get Book Here
Book Description
Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular languages into account. Beginning in the mid-fifties and emanating largely form MIT, an approach was developed to linguistic theory and to the study of the structure of particular languages that diverges in many respects from modern linguistics. Although this approach is connected to the traditional study of languages, it differs enough in its specific conclusions about the structure and in its specific conclusions about the structure of language to warrant a name, "generative grammar." Various deficiencies have been discovered in the first attempts to formulate a theory of transformational generative grammar and in the descriptive analysis of particular languages that motivated these formulations. At the same time, it has become apparent that these formulations can be extended and deepened.The major purpose of this book is to review these developments and to propose a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes them into account. The emphasis in this study is syntax; semantic and phonological aspects of the language structure are discussed only insofar as they bear on syntactic theory.
Author: John Hewson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027275971
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages. Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that verbal systems have a staged development of time representations (chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b) aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of the daughter languages. The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended from ancient forbears such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the work.
Author: Joan Bybee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226086658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.
Author: Igor Mel'cuk
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199866
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 633
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Book Description
The book is dedicated to linguistic morphology and it contains a sketch of a complete morphological theory, centered around a discussion of fundamental concepts such as morph vs. morpheme, inflectional category, voice, grammatical case, agreement vs. government, suppletion, relationships between linguistic signs, etc.: the hottest issues in modern linguistics! The book introduces rigorous and clear concepts necessary to describe morphological phenomena of natural languages. Among other things, it offers logical calculi of possible grammemes in a given category. The presentation is developed in a typological perspective, so that linguistic data from a large variety of languages are described and analyzed (about 100 typologically very different languages). The main method is deductive: the concepts proposed in Aspects of the Theory of Morphology are based on a small set of indefinibilia and each concept is defined in terms of these indefinibilia and/or other concepts defined previously; as a result, logical calculi can be constructed (similar to Mendeleev's Periodical Table of Elements in chemistry). Then the concept is applied to the actual linguistic data to demonstrate its validity and advantages. Thus, Aspects of the Theory of Morphology combines metalinguistic endeavor (a system of concepts for morphology) with typological and descriptive orientation. It reaches out to all students of language, including the border fields and applications.
Author: Henk J. Verkuyl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521564526
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Sentences may pertain to states or processes or events. They may express duration, frequency, habituality, and many other forms of temporality. How do they do this? It is the aspectual properties of sentences in natural languages which allow the user to express a temporal structure, and Henk Verkuyl presents a unified formal system to account for them. He explains aspectuality in terms of the opposition between terminative aspect and durative aspect, and describes the way in which terminative aspect is compositionally formed on the basis of semantic information expressed by different syntactic elements, in particular the verb and its arguments. The aim is to determine which semantic conditions make a sentence terminative; but at least ten different forms of durative aspectuality are also treated. All are drawn into a theory which can account for both terminative and durative aspectuality together. A Theory of Aspectuality draws together into a coherent whole the author's thinking on the subject over the last twenty years, and will interest all those working on aspect and the semantics of noun phrases. It promises to be a major new contribution to our understanding of the subject.
Author: Thom Huebner
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027224633
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
The term crosscurrent is defined as a current flowing counter to another. This volume represents crosscurrents in second language acquisition and linguistic theory in several respects. First, although the main currents running between linguistics and second language acquisition have traditionally flowed from theory to application, equally important contributions can be made in the other direction as well. Second, although there is a strong tendency in the field of linguistics to see theorists working within formal models of syntax, SLA research can contribute to linguistic theory more broadly defined to include various functional as well as formal models of syntax, theories of phonology, variationist theories of sociolinguists, etc. These assumptions formed the basis for a conference held at Stanford University during the Linguistic Institute there in the summer of 1987. The conference was organized to update the relation between second language acquisition and linguistic theory. This book contains a selection of (mostly revised and updated) papers of this conference and two newly written papers.
Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3112316002
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".
Author: Rob Pensalfini
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270910
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
This volume explores how linguistic theories inform the ways in which languages are described. Theories, as representations of linguistic categories, guide the field linguist to look for various phenomena without presupposing their necessary existence and provide the tools to account for various sets of data across different languages. A goal of linguistic description is to represent the full range of language structures for any given language. The chapters in this book cover various sub-disciplines of linguistics including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and anthropological linguistics, drawing upon theoretical approaches such as prosodic Phonology, Enhancement theory, Distributed Morphology, Minimalist syntax, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Kinship theory. The languages described in this book include Australian languages (Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan), Romance languages as well as English. This volume will be of interest to researchers in both descriptive and theoretical linguistics.
Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294623
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
From the refinement of general methodology, to new insights of synchronic and diachronic universals, to studies of specific phenomena, this collection demonstrates the crucial role that language data play in the evolution of useful, accurate linguistic theories. Issues addressed include the determination of meaning in typological studies; a refined understanding of diachronic processes by including intentional, social, statistical, and level-determined phenomena; the reconsideration of categories such as sentence, evidential or adposition, and structures such as compounds or polysynthesis; the tension between formal simplicity and functional clarity; the inclusion of unusual systems in theoretical debates; and fresh approaches to Chinese classifiers, possession in Oceanic languages, and English aspect. This is a careful selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories in Boulder, Colorado. The purpose of the Symposium was to confront fundamental issues in language structure and change with the rich variation of forms and functions observed across languages.
Author: Albert L. Lloyd
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902723003X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
The continuing debate over the existence or non-existence of formal verbal aspect in Gothic triggered the author to write this monograph whose aim is to provide a completely new foundation for a theory of aspect and related features. Gothic, with its limited corpus, representing a translation of the Greek, and showing interesting parallels with Slavic verbal constructions, serves and an illustrative model for the theory. In Part I the author argues that a unified theory of aspect, actional types, and verbal velocity presented there possesses an internal logic and is not at variance with observed facts in various Indo-European languages. In Part II an analysis is presented of the Gothic verb system which seeks to explain the much-disputed function of ga- and to solve the problem of Gothic aspect and actional types which does no violence either to the Gothic text or the Greek original.
