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Author: Cornelia Ebert
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400753101
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research into these markers, the vast differences between the markers across languages and even within single languages have been less acknowledged. Commonly regarded specific indefinites are by no means a homogenous class, and so this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites. The papers explore differences and similarities among these specificity markers, concentrating on the following issues: whether specificity is a purely semantic or also a pragmatic notion; whether the contribution of specificity markers is located on the level of the at-issue content; whether some kind of speaker-listener asymmetry concerning the identification of the referent is involved; and the behavioral scope of these indefinites in the context of other quantifiers, negation, attitude verbs, and intensional/modal operators.
Author: Cornelia Ebert
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400753101
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research into these markers, the vast differences between the markers across languages and even within single languages have been less acknowledged. Commonly regarded specific indefinites are by no means a homogenous class, and so this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites. The papers explore differences and similarities among these specificity markers, concentrating on the following issues: whether specificity is a purely semantic or also a pragmatic notion; whether the contribution of specificity markers is located on the level of the at-issue content; whether some kind of speaker-listener asymmetry concerning the identification of the referent is involved; and the behavioral scope of these indefinites in the context of other quantifiers, negation, attitude verbs, and intensional/modal operators.
Author: Ana Aguilar-Guevara
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101922
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 502
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Book Description
Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.
Author: Ana Arregui
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191028037
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.
Author: Jeanette Gundel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191510963
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 593
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Book Description
This handbook presents an overview of the phenomenon of reference - the ability to refer to and pick out entities - which is an essential part of human language and cognition. In the volume's 21 chapters, international experts in the field offer a critical account of all aspects of reference from a range of theoretical perspectives. Chapters in the first part of the book are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker - including speaker intentions - and of the addressee, as well as the role played by the semantics of the linguistic forms themselves in establishing reference. This part also explores the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity, and the conditions under which reference may fail. The second part of the volume looks at implications and applications, with chapters covering such topics as the acquisition of reference by children, the processing of reference both in the human brain and by machines. The volume will be of interest to linguists in a wide range of subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics, as well as scholars in related fields such as philosophy and computer science.
Author: A. Falaus
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137317248
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
This volume offers a survey of the use of alternatives in semantics and pragmatics, and an overview of current approaches and applications of alternative-based semantics, from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.
Author: Luis Alonso-Ovalle
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191643106
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German irgendein and Spanish algún: the sentence María se casó con algún medico ('Maria married some doctor or other') both makes an existential statement that there is a doctor that Maria married and signals the speaker's inability or unwillingness to identify the doctor in question. Although epistemic indefinites have featured in recent semantic literature, a full understanding of the phenomenon is still lacking: there is currently no agreement on the source of their epistemic component; there is insufficient cross-linguistic data to develop a semantic typology of these items; and the parallelisms and differences between epistemic indefinites and other expressions that convey epistemic modality have not been explored in depth. In this volume, a team of experts in the field offer novel empirical observations and important theoretical insights on epistemic indefinites and related topics such as modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals. They provide a coherent overview of the issues that shape the subject as well as placing them in the context of current semantic research, moving towards the development of a semantic typology of epistemic indefinites that explores the place of these expressions within a general typology of modal items.
Author: Jacqueline Guéron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019105982X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.
Author: Samuel Gyasi Obeng
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961102120
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Since the hiring of its first Africanist linguist Carleton Hodge in 1964, Indiana University’s Department of Linguistics has had a strong and continuing presence in the study of African languages and linguistics through the work of its faculty and of its graduates on the faculties of many other universities. Research on African linguistics at IU has covered some of the major language groups spoken on the African continent. Carleton Hodge’s work on Ancient Egyptian and Hausa, Paul Newman’s work on Hausa and Chadic languages, and Roxanna Ma Newman’s work on Hausa language structure and pedagogy have been some of the most important studies on Afro-Asiatic linguistics. With respect to Niger-Congo languages, the work of Charles Bird on Bambara and the Mande languages, Robert Botne’s work on Bantu structure (especially tense and aspect), Samuel Obeng and Colin Painter’s work on Ghanaian Languages (phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics), Robert Port’s studies on Swahili, and Erhard Voeltz's studies on Bantu linguistics are considered some of the most influential studies in the sub-field. On Nilo Saharan languages, the work of Tim Shopen on Songhay stands out. IU Linguistics has also forwarded theoretical work on African languages, such as John Goldsmith’s seminal research on tone in African languages. The African linguistics faculty at IU have either founded or edited important journals in African Studies, African languages, and African linguistics, including Africa Today, Studies in African Linguistics, and Journal of African Languages and Linguistics. In 1972, the Indiana University Department of Linguistics hosted the Third Annual Conference of African Linguistics. Proceedings of that conference were published by Indiana University Publications (African Series, vol. 7). In 1986, IU hosted the Seventeenth Annual Conference of African Linguistics with Paul Newman and Robert Botne editing the proceedings in a volume entitled Current Approaches to African Linguistics, vol. 5. In 2016, Indiana University hosted the 48th Annual Conference on African Linguistics with the theme African Linguistics Across the Disciplines. Proceedings of that meeting are published in this volume. The papers presented in this volume reflect the diversity of opportunities for language study in Africa. This collection of descriptive and theoretical work is the fruit of data gathering both in-country and abroad by researchers of languages spoken across the continent, from Sereer-sin in the west to Somali in the northeast to Ikalanga in the south. The range of topics in this volume is also broad, representative of the varied field work in country and abroad that inspires research in African linguistics. This collection of papers spans the disciplines of phonology (both segmental and suprasegmental), morphology (both morphophonological and morphosyntactic), syntax, semantics, and language policy. The data and analyses presented in this volume offer a cross-disciplinary view of linguistic topics from the many under-resourced languages of Africa.
Author: Kata Balogh
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3961102856
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
The papers in this volume address to different degrees issues on the relationship of articles systems and the pragmatic notions of definiteness and specificity in typologically diverse languages: Vietnamese, Siwi (Berber), Russian, Mopan (Mayan), Persian, Danish and Swedish. The main questions that motivate this volume are: (1) How do languages with and without an article system go about helping the hearer to recognize whether a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific? (2) Is there clear-cut semantic definiteness without articles or do we find systematic ambiguity regarding the interpretation of bare noun phrases? (3) If there is ambiguity, can we still posit one reading as the default? (4) What exactly do articles in languages encode that are not analyzed as straightforwardly coding (in)definiteness? (5) Do we find linguistic tools in these languages that are similar to those found in languages without articles? Most contributions report on research on different corpora and elicited data or present the outcome of various experimental studies. One paper presents a diachronic study of the emergence of article systems. On the issue of how languages with and without articles guide the hearer to the conclusion that a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific, the studies in this paper argue for similar strategies. The languages investigated in this volume use constructions and linguistic tools that receive a final interpretation based on discourse prominence considerations and various aspects of the syntax-semantics interface. In case of ambiguity between these readings, the default interpretation is given by factors (e. g., familiarity, uniqueness) that are known to contribute to the salience of phrases, but may be overridden by discourse prominence. Articles that do not straightforwardly mark (in)definiteness encode different kinds of specificity. In the languages studied in this volume, whether they have articles or do not have an article system, we find similar factors and linguistic tools in the calculation process of interpretations. The volume contains revised selected papers from the workshop entitled Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages held at the 40th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), 7-9 March, 2018 at the University of Stuttgart.
Author: Melvin González-Rivera
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144383940X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
This book is a compilation of articles on different aspects of Spanish grammar in the areas of current theoretical syntax and semantics. The issue brings together scholars working on some formal aspects of Spanish predicative complementation (e.g., dequeísmo), neuter demonstrative pronouns, the subject of Psych verbs, the nature of non-verbal predication, and the internal structure of the Determiner Phrase (DP), cf. gender variation, among other topics. Linguists and philologists with interests in Spanish and/or in other Romance languages are the main target audience. The book will appeal also to researchers and students specializing in generative grammar, semantics and in the syntax/semantics interface. It will also be of interest to historical linguists and dialectologists addressing theoretical/formal issues (cf. Afro-Bolivian Spanish). The research in this book points to a cohesiveness in Spanish linguistics that lies in the integration of up-to-date empirically-based linguistic research with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of syntax and semantics.
