Author: John A. Hawkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317419723
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
First published in 1986, this book draws together analyses of English and German. It defines the contrasts and similarities between the two languages and, in particular, looks at the question of whether contrasts in one area of the grammar is systematically related to contrasts in another, and whether there is any ‘directionality’ or unity to contrast throughout grammar as a whole. It is suggested that there is, and that English and German can serve as a case study for a more general typology of languages than we now have. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, including students of Germanic languages; language typologists; generative grammarians attempting to ‘fix the parameters’ on language variation;’ historical linguists; and applied linguists.
Author: Luca Alfieri
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259941
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci, in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly, the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions, the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics, but also specialists in the philosophy of language, and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics, cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, anthropology).
Author: Alain Lemaréchal
Publisher: Peeters Leuven
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
The comparative grammar of the Austronesian languages underwent an unprecedented change immediately after World War 2, owing to the use of lexicostatistics, the appeal to migration theory and the like, and also because of the idea of Formosa being the cradle of the language family. The present book is essentially an attempt at answering the following question: What would the comparative grammar of Austronesian look like in the absence of speculation on speaker migrations, and in the absence of the so-called "data" produced by lexicostatistics and glottochronology? Whereas typology is unable to offer the proof that a given language belongs to a group or subgroup of languages, grammaticalization theory can say whether a given state A may have preceded a state B or the reverse, and solid arguments are needed to propose a relative chronology between events that would be improbable, or even exceptional, in terms of the typology of linguistic change. This book revisits central issues of the comparative grammar of Austronesian languages from this angle, such as the history of person markers, particularly in the 2nd person, the genesis of the so-called "focus" verbal voice system and the typology of sentence structures. There is nothing in these domains that supports the supposition that Proto-Austronesian was very similar to the Formosan languages.
Author: Karsten Schmidtke-Bode
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101477
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations. On this view, recurrent pathways of reanalysis and grammaticalization can lead to uniform synchronic results, obviating the need to postulate global forces like ambiguity avoidance, processing efficiency or iconicity, especially if there is no evidence for such motivations in the genesis of the respective constructions. On the other hand, the recent typological literature is equally ripe with talk of "complex adaptive systems", "attractor states" and "cross-linguistic convergence". One may wonder, therefore, how much room is left for traditional functional-adaptive forces and how exactly they influence the diachronic trajectories that shape universal distributions. The papers in the present volume are intended to provide an accessible introduction to this debate. Covering theoretical, methodological and empirical facets of the issue at hand, they represent current ways of thinking about the role of diachronic sources in explaining grammatical universals, articulated by seasoned and budding linguists alike.
Author: Alice Caffarel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588115591
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 726
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Book Description
This book is intended as a systemic functional contribution to language typology both for those who would like to understand and describe particular languages against the background of generalizations about a wide range of languages and also for those who would like to develop typological accounts that are based on and embody descriptions of the systems of particular languages (rather than isolated constructions). The book is a unique contribution in at least two respects. On the one hand, it is the first book based on systemic functional theory that is specifically concerned with language typology. On the other hand, the book combines the particular with the general in the description of languages: it presents comparable sketches of particular languages while at the same time identifying generalizations based on the languages described here as well as on other languages. The volume explores eight languages, covering seven language families: French, German, Pitjantjatjara, Tagalog, Telugu, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese.
Author: Spike Gildea
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027298564
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization theory both belong to the broader category of historical linguistics, yet few linguists practice both. The methods and goals of each group seem largely distinct: comparative linguists have by and large avoided reconstructing grammar, while grammaticalization theoreticians have either focused on explaining attested historical change or used internal reconstruction to formulate hypotheses about processes of change. In this collection, some of the leading voices in grammaticalization theory apply their methods to comparative data (largely drawn from indigenous languages of the Americas), showing not only that grammar can be reconstructed, but that the process of reconstructing grammar can yield interesting theoretical and typological insights.
Author: Masayoshi Shibatani
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198238669
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
Language typology is concerned with the construction of theoretical frameworks capable of delimiting the range of human languages and of capturing constraints on cross-linguistic variation. This text offers accounts of the theoretical foundations and findings of leading scholars in this field.
Author: Corinna Handschuh
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781013284816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Case-systems all over the world exhibit striking similarities. In most lan- guages intransitive subjects (S) receives less overt marking than one of the two transitive arguments (agent-like A or patient-like P); the other one of these two arguments is usually encoded by the same form as S. In some languages the amount of overt marking is identical between S, A, and P. But hardly ever does the S argument receive more overt marking than A or P. Yet there are some languages that do not follow this general pattern. This book is about those languages that behave differently, the marked-S languages. Marked-S languages are well-known to be found in East Africa, where they occur in two different language families, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Sa- haran. They can also be found in North-Western America and the Pacific region. This book is the first investigation of marked S-languages that treats the phenomenon on a global scale. The study examines the functional distribution of the two main case- forms, the form used for S (S-case) and the case-form of the transitive ar- gument which receives less marking (the zero-case). It offers a very fine- grained perspective considering a wide range of constructions. The con- texts in which the case-marking patterns are investigated include nom- inal, existential and locational predication, subjects in special discourse function (e. g. focused constituents), subjects of passives and dependent clauses, as well as the forms used for addressing someone (vocative form) and for using a noun in isolation (citation form). Apart from the functional distribution of case forms, the formal means of marking are also considered. The main focus is on the synchronic de- scription and comparison of marked-S languages, but historical explana- tions for the unusual case-marking pattern are also discussed. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
Author: Andreas Hölzl
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101027
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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Book Description
This study investigates the distribution of linguistic and specifically structural diversity in Northeast Asia (NEA), defined as the region north of the Yellow River and east of the Yenisei. In particular, it analyzes what is called the grammar of questions (GQ), i.e., those aspects of any given language that are specialized for asking questions or regularly combine with these. The bulk of the study is a bottom-up description and comparison of GQs in the languages of NEA. The addition of the phrase and beyond to the title of this study serves two purposes. First, languages such as Turkish and Chuvash are included, despite the fact that they are spoken outside of NEA, since they have ties to (or even originated in) the region. Second, despite its focus on one area, the typology is intended to be applicable to other languages as well. Therefore, it makes extensive use of data from languages outside of NEA. The restriction to one category is necessary for reasons of space and clarity, and the process of zooming in on one region allows a higher resolution and historical accuracy than is usually the case in linguistic typology. The discussion mentions over 450 languages and dialects from NEA and beyond and gives about 900 glossed examples. The aim is to achieve both a cross-linguistically plausible typology and a maximal resolution of the linguistic diversity of Northeast Asia.
Author: Bernard Comrie
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226114330
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Here, Comrie (linguistics, U. of Southern Cal.) is particularly concerned with syntactico-semantic universals, devoting chapters to word order, case marking, relative clauses, and causative constructions. This second edition takes full account of new research into generative grammatical theory. Acidic paper. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
