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Author: Marja-Liisa Helasvuo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027247927
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
The papers of this volume investigate how grammar codes the subjective viewpoint of human language users, that is, how grammar reflects human conceptualization. Some of the articles deal with spatial relations and locations. They discuss how basic attributes of human conceptualization are encoded in the grammatical expression of spatial relations. Other articles concern embodiment in language, showing how conceptualization is mediated by one's embodied experience of the world and ourselves. Finally, some of the articles discuss coding of person focusing on the subjectivity of conceptualization and how it is reflected in grammar. The articles show that conceptualization reflects the speaker's construal of the situation, and furthermore, that it is intersubjective because it reflects the speaker's understanding of the relations between the speech act participants. The papers deal with Finnish, utilizing the rich resources of Finnish grammar to contribute to issues in contemporary linguistics and in particular to Cognitive Grammar.
Author: Martin J. Endley
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1617351709
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
The proposed book is best described as a linguistically oriented textbook taking the grammar of English as its subject matter. It is directed to professional teachers of English (ESL and EFL) and their students, as well as those currently training to become teachers of English. The book is also likely to be of interest to interpreters, translators and other English language professionals. It will explore selected aspects and problem areas of English from a broadly “functional” linguistic perspective. My experience as a teacher and teacher trainer has shown me that this perspective has the potential to inspire teachers and students with a genuine enthusiasm for the grammatical features of English and that it often enables them to “make sense” of the grammar in a way that all too often other approaches signally fail to do. An important focus of the book is on understanding grammar as a series of conventionalized patterns rather than a set of rules (which is how grammar has traditionally been presented). Moreover, unlike many other grammar books, this book emphasizes how the grammatical constructions under consideration are employed in various types of communicative situation, attention being given to the importance of discourse context in interpreting the target forms. In line with contemporary linguists generally, the approach adopted is descriptive rather than prescriptive. While the main focus is on English, I offer occasional comments on how the issue under discussion is expressed in languages other than English. Apart from the inherent interest which I hope such comparisons may have for the reader, I take the view that these can be helpful in casting further light on the grammar of English.
Author: Joanne Scheibman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027226211
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
This book proposes that subjective expression shapes grammatical and lexical patterning in American English conversation. Analyses of structural and functional properties of English conversational utterances indicate that the most frequent combinations of subject, tense, and verb type are those that are used by speakers to personalize their contributions, not to present unmediated descriptions of the world. These findings are informed by current research and practices in linguistics which argue that the emergence, or conventionalization, of linguistic structure is related to the frequency with which speakers use expressions in discourse. The use of conversational data in grammatical analysis illustrates the local and contingent nature of grammar in use and also raises theoretical questions concerning the coherence of linguistic categories, the viability of maintaining a distinction between semantic and pragmatic meaning in analytical practice, and the structural and social interplay of speaker point of view and participant interaction in discourse.
Author: Mirjam Fried
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027218223
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This volume gives an easily accessible, yet comprehensive, sophisticated, and example-rich introduction to Construction Grammar as it has been developed from the early 1980's by Charles J. Fillmore and his associates. It also provides a succinct account of the historical and intellectual background of the model and shows how Construction Grammar can easily be applied to typologically very different languages and to a variety of language-specific phenomena. All of the contributors to the volume came out of the Fillmorean school at UC-Berkeley and have worked consistently on applying and further developing the model in various domains of linguistic analysis.The 'Thumbnail sketch' by Fried & Östman is the only extensive introduction published so far to Fillmorean Construction Grammar.
Author: Christopher Woods
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004148043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
The so-called Sumerian conjugation prefixes are the most poorly understood and perplexing elements of Sumerian verbal morphology. Approaching the problem from a functional-typological perspective and basing the analysis upon semantics, Professor Woods argues that these elements, in their primary function, constitute a system of grammatical voice, in which the active voice is set against the middle voice. The latter is represented by heavy and light markers that differ with respect to focus and emphasis. As a system of grammatical voice, the conjugation prefixes provided Sumerian speakers with a linguistic means of altering the perspective from which events may be viewed, giving speakers a series of options for better approximating in language the infinitely graded spectrum of human conceptualization and experience.
Author: Alan Huffman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027281971
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
This book offers an analysis of the French clitic object pronouns lui and le in the radically functional Columbia school framework, contrasting this framework with sentence-based treatments of case selection. It suggests that features of the sentence such as subject and object relations, normally taken as pretheoretical categories of observation about language, are in fact part of a theory of language which does not withstand empirical testing. It shows that the correct categories are neither those of structural case nor those of lexical case, but rather, semantic ones. Traditionally, anomalies in the selection of dative and accusative case in French, such as case government, use of the dative for possession and disadvantaging, its use in the faire-causative construction, and other puzzling distributional irregularities have been used to support the idea of an autonomous, non-functional central core of syntactic phenomena in language. The present analysis proposes semantic constants for lui and le which render all their occurrences explicable in a straightforward way. The same functional perspective informs issues of cliticity and pronominalization as well. The solution offered here emerges from an innovative instrumental view of linguistic meaning, an acknowledgment that communicative output is determined only partially and indirectly by purely linguistic input, with extralinguistic knowledge and human inference bridging the gap. This approach entails identification of the pragmatic factors influencing case selection and a reevaluation of thematic-role theory, and reveals the crucial impact of discourse on the structure as well as the functioning of grammar. One remarkable feature of the study is its extensive and varied data base. The hypothesis is buttressed by hundreds of fully contextualized examples and large-scale counts drawn from modern French texts.
Author: Marja-Liisa Helasvuo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027269181
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
This volume analyzes constructions with non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, drawing on insights from cognitive and discourse-functional linguistics. Prototypical subjects have often been characterized in terms of their semantic, syntactic and discourse features, such as animacy, agentivity, topicality, referentiality, definiteness and autonomy of existence of the subject referent. A non-canonical subject is one that lacks some of these features. This may be reflected in its meaning, grammatical coding, and/or discourse function. In discussing non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, the chapters in the volume address the following more general topics: What kinds of grammatical, semantic and discourse criteria can be used to distinguish subjects from non-subjects? To what extent are subject criteria construction-specific? What kinds of constructions have non-canonical subjects? What are the semantic and discourse functions of constructions with non-canonical subjects? Are subjects which are grammatically non-canonical also atypical in terms of their discourse features?
Author: María de los Ángeles Gómez González
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289689
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
This book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.
Author: Wolfram Hinzen
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199654832
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
This interdisciplinary book considers the relationship between language and thought from a philosophical perspective, drawing both on the philosophical study of language and the purely formal study of grammar, and arguing that the two should align. The claim is that grammar provides homo sapiens with the ability to think in certain grammatical ways and that this in turn explains the vast cognitive powers of human beings. Evidence is considered from biology, theevolution of language, language disorders, and linguistic phenomena.
Author: Theresa Biberauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886953
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. This book is a defence of the parametric approach to linguistic variation, set within the framework of the Minimalist Program.
Author: Fernando Zúñiga
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027206732
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
Preface -- List of contributors -- Introduction: benefaction and malefaction from a cross-linguistic perspective / Seppo Kittilä & Fernando Zúñiga -- Benefactive applicative periphrases: A typological approach / Denis Creissels -- Cross-linguistic categorization of benefactives by event structure: A preliminary -- Framework for benefactive typology / Tomoko Yamashita Smith -- An areal and cross-linguistic study of benefactive and malefactive constructions / Paula Radetzky & Tomoko Smith -- The role of benefactives and related notions in the typology of purpose clauses / Karsten Schmidtke-Bode -- Benefactive and malefactive uses of Salish applicatives / Kaoru Kiyosawa & Donna B. Gerdts -- Beneficiaries and recipients in Toba (Guaycurú) / Marisa Censabella -- Benefactive and malefactive applicativization in Mapudungun / Fernando Zúñiga -- The benefactive semantic potential of 'caused reception' constructions: A case study of English, German, French, and Dutch / Timothy Colleman -- Beneficiary coding in Finnish / Seppo Kittilä -- Benefactives in Laz / René Lacroix -- Benefactive and malefactive verb extensions in the Koalib verb system / Nicolas Quint -- Benefactives and malefactives in Gumer (Gurage) / Sascha Völlmin -- A 'reflexive benefactive' in Chamba-Daka (Adamawa branch, Niger-Congo family) / Raymond Boyd -- Beneficiary and other roles of the dative in Taqshelhiyt / Christian J. Rapold -- Benefactive strategies in Thai / Mathias Jenny -- Korean benefactive particles and their meanings / Jae Jung Song -- Malefactivity in Japanese / Eijiro Tsuboi -- General index (names, languages, subjects)
