Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology

Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027227669
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This book takes up a variety of general syntactic topics, which either yield different solutions in German, in particular, or which lead to different conclusions for theory formation. One of the main topics is the fact that languages that allow for extensive scrambling between the two verbal poles, V-2 and V-last, need to integrate discourse functions like thema and rhema into the grammatical description. This is attempted, in terms of Minimalism, thus extending the functional domain. Special attention is given to the asymmetrical scrambling behavior of indefinites vs. definites and their semantic interpretation. Related topics are: Transitive expletive sentences, types of existential sentences with either BE or HAVE, the that-trace phenomenon and its semantics, negative polarity items, ellipsis and gapping, passivization, double negation — all of which have extensive effects both on distributional behavior and semantic disambiguation, reaching far beyond effects observable in English with its rigid, 'un-scrambable' word order.

Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology

Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027227669
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book takes up a variety of general syntactic topics, which either yield different solutions in German, in particular, or which lead to different conclusions for theory formation. One of the main topics is the fact that languages that allow for extensive scrambling between the two verbal poles, V-2 and V-last, need to integrate discourse functions like thema and rhema into the grammatical description. This is attempted, in terms of Minimalism, thus extending the functional domain. Special attention is given to the asymmetrical scrambling behavior of indefinites vs. definites and their semantic interpretation. Related topics are: Transitive expletive sentences, types of existential sentences with either BE or HAVE, the that-trace phenomenon and its semantics, negative polarity items, ellipsis and gapping, passivization, double negation — all of which have extensive effects both on distributional behavior and semantic disambiguation, reaching far beyond effects observable in English with its rigid, 'un-scrambable' word order.

Germanic syntax

Germanic syntax PDF Author: Stefan Müller
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104085
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book is an introduction to the syntactic structures that can be found in the Germanic languages. The analyses are couched in the framework of HPSG light, which is a simplified version of HPSG that uses trees to depict analyses rather than complicated attribute value matrices. The book is written for students with basic knowledge about case, constituent tests, and simple phrase structure grammars (advanced BA or MA level) and for researchers with an interest in the Germanic languages and/or an interest in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar/Sign-Based Construction Grammar without having the time to deal with all the details of these theories.

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages PDF Author: Kristin Bech
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270465
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

Grammatical theory

Grammatical theory PDF Author: Stefan Müller
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961102732
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 879

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Book Description
This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.

Studies on German-language Islands

Studies on German-language Islands PDF Author: Michael T. Putnam
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205906
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
The contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands, or "Sprachinseln," throughout the world. The individual topics of study in this volume focus on various aspects of these German-language islands such as (but not limited to) phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of these languages under investigation. Collectively, the body of research contained in this volume explores significantly under-researched topics in the fields of language contact and language attrition and illustrates how this on-going research can be enhanced through the application of formal theoretical frameworks and structural analyses.

Featural Relations in the Brain: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives on Grammatical Agreement, 2nd Edition

Featural Relations in the Brain: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives on Grammatical Agreement, 2nd Edition PDF Author: Simona Mancini
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889718441
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Successful speaking and understanding hinges on the almost effortless capacity of speakers to decode and build dependencies among words in a sentence, based on covariance in some specific feature(s). Whenever two features covary, an agreement relation is established. Agreement is a widespread and varied phenomenon: its pervasiveness in some languages contrasts with its near absence in others, which poses a challenge for linguists and psycholinguists that attempt to explain the mechanics of its representation, processing and acquisition. Agreement has been extensively investigated from a theoretical perspective, but also from the point of view of psycholinguistics and the cognitive neuroscience of language. Theoretical linguistics has provided an articulated system of structural representations and computations on which the establishment of agreement relations hinges, while psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience have aimed at unveiling the algorithms that underlie the use of these computations and their behavioral and neuro-physiological bases. The goal of this Research Topic is to draw together multiple and interdisciplinary work to highlight the state of the art in the study of agreement and propose new perspectives on this research topic. Publisher’s note: In this 2nd edition, the following article was added: Mancini S, Caffarra S and Nevins A (2021) Editorial: Featural Relations in the Brain: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives on Grammatical Agreement. Front. Psychol. 12:754430. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.754430

Studies in the Morpho-Syntax of Greek

Studies in the Morpho-Syntax of Greek PDF Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443808253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The volume presents a collection of papers of recent generative work on Modern Greek morpho-syntax. The book is divided into three parts. Part I of the book deals with argument alternations, part II with clitics and part III with the syntax and semantics of free relatives. The book will be interesting for scholars working on Greek but also in theoretical linguistics, as it exemplifies how the study of Greek feeds the development of generative theory. The issues discussed in the book are currently highly relevant for the develop­ment of a satisfactory theory of comparative syntax as well as the interface between syntax and morphology and syntax and semantics. Thus the analyses put forth here will contribute to the elaboration of such a theory and to our understanding of cross-linguistic variation.

Morphology and its Interfaces

Morphology and its Interfaces PDF Author: Alexandra Galani
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287015
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
One of the most striking trends across linguistic research in recent years has been the examination of the interfaces between the various subcomponents of the language faculty. Yet, approaches to these interfaces across different theoretical frameworks differ substantially. This volume pulls together research into Morphology and its interfaces from researchers employing a variety of different theoretical and methodological perspectives: Morphology is a diverse field, and rather than aiming to collect works sharing a particular approach or framework of assumptions, this collection instead captures the diversity and provides an overview of the state of the research field while also addressing particular empirical phenomena with up-to-date analyses. The articles collected provide case studies from a diverse variety of languages revealing properties of the interfaces that morphology shares with syntax, semantics, phonology, and the lexicon, while the volume's inclusive cross-theoretical approach will serve to introduce readers to the findings of alternative frameworks and methodologies.

The Composition of Meaning

The Composition of Meaning PDF Author: Alice ter Meulen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027295107
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In the modular design of generative theory the syntax–semantics interface has accounted all along for meanings at the level of Logical Form. The syntax–pragmatics interface, on the other hand, is the result of what one may call the ‘pragmatic turn’ in the linguistic theory, where content is partitioned into given and new information. In other words, the structural division of the clause has been subjected to criteria of information, or discourse structure. Both interfaces require a structurally descriptive inventory whose specific shapes can be motivated on theory-internal grounds only. The present collection of original articles develops the concept of these interfaces further. The papers in the first section focus on the syntax–semantics interface, those in the second section on the syntax–pragmatics interface.

Theory of Language

Theory of Language PDF Author: Karl Bühler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027286868
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
Karl Bühler (1879–1963) was one of the leading theoreticians of language of the twentieth century. Although primarily a psychologist, Bühler devoted much of his attention to the study of language and language theory. His masterwork Sprachtheorie (1934) quickly gained recognition in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and the psychology of language. This new edition of the English translation of Bühler’s theory begins with a survey on ‘Bühler’s legacy’ for modern linguistics (Werner Abraham), followed by the Theory of Language, and finally with a special ‘Postscript: Twenty-five Years Later ...’ (Achim Eschbach). Bühler’s theory is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the four axioms or principles of language research, the most famous of which is the first, the organon model, the base of Bühler's instrumental view of language. Part II treats the role of indexicality in language and discusses deixis as one determinant of speech. Part III examines the symbolic field, dealing with context, onomatopoeia and the function of case. Part IV deals with the elements of language and their organization (syllabification, the definition of the word, metaphor, anaphora, etc).The text is accompanied by an Introduction (Achim Eschbach); Translator's preface (Donald Fraser Goodwin); Glossary of terms; and a Bibliography of cited works.