Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage PDF Author: Andrej Malchukov
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191780158
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This volume examines the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules in language, which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves and when trying to comprehend messages. Chapters examine adult language, first and second language acquisition, and the motivations behind historical change.

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage PDF Author: Andrej Malchukov
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191780158
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume examines the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules in language, which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves and when trying to comprehend messages. Chapters examine adult language, first and second language acquisition, and the motivations behind historical change.

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage PDF Author: Brian MacWhinney
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198709846
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
This volume examines the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules in language usage. Speakers and addressees need to contend with these rules when expressing themselves and when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on-going competitions between the speaker's interests and the addressee's needs, or between constraints imposed by grammar and those imposed by online processing. These competitions influence a wide variety of systems, including case marking, agreement and word order, politeness forms, lexical choices, and the position of relative clauses. Chapters in the book analyse grammar and usage in adult language as well as first and second language acquisition, and the motivations that drive historical change. Several of the chapters seek explanations for the competitions involved, based on earlier accounts including the Competition Model, Natural Morphology, the functional-typological tradition, and Optimality Theory. The book will be of interest to linguists from a wide variety of backgrounds, particularly those interested in psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage PDF Author: Brian MacWhinney
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191019771
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
This volume examines the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules in language usage. Speakers and addressees need to contend with these rules when expressing themselves and when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on-going competitions between the speaker's interests and the addressee's needs, or between constraints imposed by grammar and those imposed by online processing. These competitions influence a wide variety of systems, including case marking, agreement and word order, politeness forms, lexical choices, and the position of relative clauses. Chapters in the book analyse grammar and usage in adult language as well as first and second language acquisition, and the motivations that drive historical change. Several of the chapters seek explanations for the competitions involved, based on earlier accounts including the Competition Model, Natural Morphology, the functional-typological tradition, and Optimality Theory. The book will be of interest to linguists from a wide variety of backgrounds, particularly those interested in psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

The Handbook of Language Emergence

The Handbook of Language Emergence PDF Author: Brian MacWhinney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119075386
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 651

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Book Description
This authoritative handbook explores the latest integrated theory for understanding human language, offering the most inclusive text yet published on the rapidly evolving emergentist paradigm. Brings together an international team of contributors, including the most prominent advocates of linguistic emergentism Focuses on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraints Examines forces on widely divergent timescales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolution Addresses key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this handbook the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever

Empirical Translation Studies

Empirical Translation Studies PDF Author: Gert De Sutter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110457296
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The present volume is devoted to the study of language use in translated texts as a function of various linguistic, contextual and cognitive factors. It contributes to the recent trend in empirical translation studies towards more methodological sophistication, including mixed methodology designs and multivariate statistical analyses, ultimately leading to a more accurate understanding of language use in translations.

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings PDF Author: Bertus van Rooy
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027246963
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings explores an innovative proposal: that linguistic similarities identified in different forms of contact-influenced varieties of language use (including translation, native and non-native varieties of English, and language use of bilinguals more generally) can be accounted for in a coherent framework grounded in the notion of ‘constrained communication’. These varieties have hitherto been studied in independent scholarly traditions, especially translation studies and world Englishes, leaving the potential underlying unity underexplored, both conceptually and empirically. The chapters collected in this volume aim to develop such a unified perspective by drawing on corpus data across a range of languages and language varieties, with a focus on written language, a neglected data source in research on multilingual contact settings. The findings point to shared general characteristics across individual contact settings, which result from (probabilistically conditioned) manifestations of the same deeper regularities – constraints – present in diverse language-contact settings.

Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics PDF Author: Ewa Dabrowska
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393808
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 839

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Book Description
Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on the assumptions that our linguistic abilities are firmly rooted in our cognitive abilities, that meaning is essentially conceptualization, and that grammar is shaped by usage. The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides state-of-the-art overviews of the numerous subfields of cognitive linguistics written by leading international experts which will be useful for established researchers and novices alike. It is an interdisciplinary project with contributions from linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, and computer scientists which will emphasise the most recent developments in the field, in particular, the shift towards more empirically-based research. In this way, it will, we hope, help to shape the field, encouraging methodologically more rigorous research which incorporates insights from all the cognitive sciences. Editor Ewa Dąbrowska was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship 2018.

The Grammar of Interactives

The Grammar of Interactives PDF Author: Bernd Heine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192699326
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
This book explores a domain of discourse processing referred to as 'interactive grammar', based on an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 100 languages spoken across the world. While much previous work has treated interactive grammar as a fairly marginal part of language, Bernd Heine describes it here as a distinct category that contrasts with sentence grammar both in its functions and its structural behavior. He identifies ten types of interactives - i.e. extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse: attention signals, directives, discourse markers, evaluatives, ideophones, interjections, response elicitors, response signals, social formulae, and vocatives. The analysis reveals that speakers make use of two contrasting modes for structuring their discourses, both of which are needed for successful communication: one is sentence grammar, which has a propositional format and analytic organization; the other is interactive grammar, which has a holophrastic organization and a focus on social communication. While the argument structure of sentence grammar is shaped by the propositional format of sentences, that of interactive grammar is shaped by the indexical nature of the situation of discourse. This distinction shows interesting correlations both with findings from neurolinguistic studies on differential activity in the two hemispheres of the human brain, and with observations from social psychology on the differences between systems of reasoning and judgment.

Communicative Efficiency

Communicative Efficiency PDF Author: Natalia Levshina
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108840795
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Illustrated with rich examples, this book shows how language users can save effort by choosing efficient structures and word order.

Explain Me This

Explain Me This PDF Author: Adele E. Goldberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183953
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Why our use of language is highly creative yet also constrained We use words and phrases creatively to express ourselves in ever-changing contexts, readily extending language constructions in new ways. Yet native speakers also implicitly know when a creative and easily interpretable formulation—such as “Explain me this” or “She considered to go”—doesn’t sound quite right. In this incisive book, Adele Goldberg explores how these creative but constrained language skills emerge from a combination of general cognitive mechanisms and experience. Shedding critical light on an enduring linguistic paradox, Goldberg demonstrates how words and abstract constructions are generalized and constrained in the same ways. When learning language, we record partially abstracted tokens of language within the high-dimensional conceptual space that is used when we speak or listen. Our implicit knowledge of language includes dimensions related to form, function, and social context. At the same time, abstract memory traces of linguistic usage-events cluster together on a subset of dimensions, with overlapping aspects strengthened via repetition. In this way, dynamic categories that correspond to words and abstract constructions emerge from partially overlapping memory traces, and as a result, distinct words and constructions compete with one another each time we select them to express our intended messages. While much of the research on this puzzle has favored semantic or functional explanations over statistical ones, Goldberg’s approach stresses that both the functional and statistical aspects of constructions emerge from the same learning mechanisms.