Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan PDF Download
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Author: Uta Reinöhl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191056375
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinöhl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.
Author: Uta Reinöhl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191056375
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinöhl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.
Author: Walter Bisang
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110563142
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 670
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Book Description
This volume intends to fill the gap in the grammaticalization studies setting as its goal the systematic description of grammaticalization processes in genealogically and structurally diverse languages. To address the problem of the limitations of the secondary sources for grammaticalization studies, the editors rely on sketches of grammaticalization phenomena from experts in individual languages guided by a typological questionnaire.
Author: Heiko Narrog
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192515357
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 493
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Book Description
This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processes - whereby lexical words eventually become markers of grammatical categories - converge and differ across various types of language. While grammaticalization at its core is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which the same pathways of change are replicated across languages, certain language types and language areas have distinct preferences with respect to what they grammaticalize and how. Previous work has principally addressed this question with specific reference to languages of Southeast and East Asia that do not seem to grammaticalize paradigms of categories in the same manner as Indo-European languages, or form extensive grammaticalization chains. This volume takes a broader approach and proceeds systematically area by area: specialists in the field address the processes of grammaticalization in languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages. The studies reveal a number of unique pathways of grammaticalization in each language area, as well as identifying the universal shared features of the phenomenon.
Author: Chiara Zanchi
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 382330125X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
The book investigates multiple preverbs (PVs) in some ancient IE languages (Vedic, Homeric Greek, Old Church Slavic, and Old Irish). After an introduction, it opens with the theoretical framework and a typologically-oriented overview of PVs. It then gives quantitative data about multiple PV composites and carries out philological, formal, semantic, and syntactic analyses on them. The comparison among these languages suggests that a process of accumulation lies behind multiple PV composites. Also, PV ordering is explained by different factors: semantic solidarity between PVs and verbs PVs tendency to be specified by event participants, PVs etymologies, influence from other languages. The book also contributes to casting light on the reasons for PVs grammaticalization and lexicalization. These are two distinct reanalyses triggered by the same factor, i.e. the mentioned semantic solidarity, which makes PVs be felt as redundant. They are thus reassigned salient pieces of information as actional markers (grammaticalization) or reinterpreted as part of the verb (lexicalization).
Author: John Jeffrey Lowe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019879357X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives, a rare linguistic phenomenon. The data is set in the wider historical context, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan, and analysed from diachronic, typological, and theoretical perspectives.
Author: Eleanor Coghill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198723806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative aligment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative aligment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. These dialects therefore show an entire cycle of alignment change, something which had previously been considered unlikely. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through which this alignment change took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as 'see' and 'hear', which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.
Author: Virginia Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192654098
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the origins, development, and stabilization of differential object marking (DOM) in Romanian. DOM, a means by which a grammar distinguishes between objects based on semantic features such as animacy or definiteness, has been a fruitful area of research in syntax, historical linguistics, and typology. In this volume, Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale demonstrate that Romanian DOM reflects a typological mix of Balkan and Romance patterns, and is in fact composed of three distinct mechanisms. Their analysis of these mechanisms reveals that DOM triggers in Romanian are located in the nominal domain, in contrast to languages such as Spanish, where they are located in the verbal domain. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted in the volume sheds light on existing typologies of DOM, particularly in relation to the variation observed in the merging location of the DOM particle and of the doubling pronominal clitic.
Author: Michele Loporcaro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199656541
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. Michele Loporcaro investigates the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard; he draws on data from the Middle Ages to the present from all the Romance languages and dialects, discussing examples from Romanian to Portuguese and crucially also focusing on less widely-studied varieties such as Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian. The investigation first reveals that several varieties display more complex systems than the binary masculine/feminine contrast familiar from modern French or Italian. Moreover, it emerges that traditional accounts, whereby neuter gender was lost in the spoken Latin of the late Empire, cannot be correct: instead, the neuter gender underwent a range of different transformations from Late Latin onwards, which are responsible for the different systems that can be observed today across the Romance languages. The volume provides a detailed description of many of these systems, which in turns reveals a wealth of fascinating data, such as varieties where 'husbands' are feminine and others where 'wives' are masculine; dialects in which nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and one Romance variety (Asturian) in which it appears that grammatical gender has split into two concurrent systems. The volume will appeal to linguists from a range of backgrounds, including Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax, and is also of relevance to those working in sociology, gender studies, and psychology.
Author: Lieven Danckaert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191077410
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
This book examines Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects (OV vs VO) and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs AuxV). In Latin these elements can freely be ordered with respect to each other, whereas the present-day Romance languages only allow for the head-initial orders VO and AuxV. Lieven Danckaert offers a detailed, corpus-based description of these two word order alternations, focusing on their diachronic development in the period from c. 200 BC until 600 AD. The corpus data reveal that some received wisdom needs to be reconsidered: there is in fact no evidence for any major increase in productivity of the order VO during the eight centuries under investigation, and the order AuxV only becomes more frequent in clauses with a modal verb and an infinitive, not in clauses with a BE-auxiliary and a past participle. The book also explores a more fundamental question about Latin syntax, namely whether or not the language is configurational, in the sense that a phrase structure grammar (with 'higher-order constituents' such as verb phrases) is needed to describe and analyse Latin word order patterns. Four pieces of evidence are presented that suggest that Latin is indeed a fully configurational language, despite its high degree of word order flexibility. Specifically, it is shown that there is ample evidence for the existence of a verb phrase constituent. The book thus contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the status of configurationality as a language universal.
Author: Gard B. Jenset
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198718179
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
This book is an innovative guide to quantitative, corpus-based research in historical and diachronic linguistics. Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray argue that, although historical linguistics has been successful in using the comparative method, the field lags behind other branches of linguistics with respect to adopting quantitative methods. Here they provide a theoretically agnostic description of a new framework for quantitatively assessing models and hypotheses in historical linguistics, based on corpus data and using case studies to illustrate how this framework can answer research questions in historical linguistics. The authors offer an in-depth explanation and discussion of the benefits of working with quantitative methods, corpus data, and corpus annotation, and the advantages of open and reproducible research. The book will be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, as well as for all those working with linguistic corpora.
