The Syntax of Adjectives

The Syntax of Adjectives PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262014165
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
other language families. --

The Syntax of Adjectives

The Syntax of Adjectives PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262014165
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
other language families. --

The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking

The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking PDF Author: Michael Cysouw
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199254125
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book investigates paradigms of person - both independent pronouns as well as bound person marking. Based on empirical and theoretical grounds, the author argues that the notion 'number' has to be redefined to deal with the cross-linguistic variation of person marking. Equipped with a new definition, a typology of the paradigmatic structure of person marking is presented, incorporating data from around 400 languages. Nothing appears to be impossible for the paradigmatic structure, although some patterns are clearly more probable than others are. Starting from the more commonly occurring patterns, the diachronic dynamics of paradigmatic structure are investigated by comparing close relatives that differ slightly in the structure of their person paradigms.

Genders and Classifiers

Genders and Classifiers PDF Author: Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198842015
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
This volume offers a comprehensive account of the typology of noun classification across the world's languages. Following a detailed introduction to noun categorization, the chapters in the volume provide in-depth studies of genders and classifiers of different types in a range of South American and Asian languages and language families.

Lexical Categories

Lexical Categories PDF Author: Mark C. Baker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521001106
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Table of contents

Restructuring and Functional Heads

Restructuring and Functional Heads PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190292598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This volume collects the recent published articles of Guglielmo Cinque of the University of Venice, one of the world's top linguists. The book is divided into two sections, the first on restructuring, a central topic in Romance syntax and with connections to other language groups as well. The second part focuses on the consequences of treating clausal functional heads as members of a universal hierarchy in the domain of morphpsyntax, offering a new perspective on many intricate problems arising in a variety of natural languages.

Measuring Grammatical Complexity

Measuring Grammatical Complexity PDF Author: Frederick J. Newmeyer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191508446
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
This book examines the question of whether languages can differ in grammatical complexity and, if so, how relative complexity differences might be measured. The volume differs from others devoted to the question of complexity in language in that the authors all approach the problem from the point of view of formal grammatical theory, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics. Chapters investigate a number of key issues in grammatical complexity, taking phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic considerations into account. These include what is often called the 'trade-off problem', namely whether complexity in one grammatical component is necessarily balanced by simplicity in another; and the question of interpretive complexity, that is, whether and how one might measure the difficulty for the hearer in assigning meaning to an utterance and how such complexity might be factored in to an overall complexity assessment. Measuring Grammatical Complexity brings together a number of distinguished scholars in the field, and will be of interest to linguists of all theoretical stripes from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those working in the areas of morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics.

Catching Language

Catching Language PDF Author: Felix K. Ameka
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110197693
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 671

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Book Description
Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.

Reciprocal Constructions

Reciprocal Constructions PDF Author: Vladimir P. Nedjalkov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027291713
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 2249

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Book Description
This monograph constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of reciprocal constructions and related phenomena in the world’s languages. Reciprocal constructions (of the type The two boys hit each other, The poets admire each other’s poems) have often been the subject of language-particular studies, but it is only in this work that a truly global comparative picture emerges. Nine stage-setting chapters dealing with general and theoretical matters are followed by 40 chapters containing in-depth descriptions of reciprocals in individual languages by renowned specialists. The introductory papers provide a conceptual and terminological framework that allows the authors of the individual chapters to characterize their languages in comparable terms, making it easy for the reader to see points of commonality between languages and constructions that have never been compared before. This set of volumes is an indispensable starting point and will be a lasting reference work for any future studies of reciprocals.

Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles

Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles PDF Author: Seppo Kittilä
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027206805
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The chapters of this volume scrutinize the interplay of different combinations of case, animacy and semantic roles, thus contributing to our understanding of these notions in a novel way. The focus of the chapters lies on showing how animacy affects argument marking. Unlike previous studies, these chapters primarily deal with lesser studied phenomena, such as animacy effects on spatial cases and the differences between cases and adpositions in the coding of spatial relations. In addition, theoretical and diachronic issues related to case and semantic roles are also discussed; for example, what is case, how do cases develop and what are the functional differences between cases and adpositions? The chapters deal with a variety of different languages including Uralic languages, Indo-European languages, Basque, Korean and Vaeakau-Taumako. The book is appealing to anyone interested in case, animacy and/or semantic roles.

Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica

Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica PDF Author: Ernst Halbmayer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000023095
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo–Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica. It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades. Centering on relations between Chibchan groups and their neighbors, the contributions consider prevailing socio-cosmological principles and their relationship to Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism. Classical notions of area homogeneity are reconsidered and the book formulates an overarching proposal for how to make sense of the heterogeneity of the region’s indigenous groups. Drawing on original fieldwork and comparative analysis, the volume provides a valuable anthropological addition to archaeological and linguistic knowledge of the Isthmo・Colombian Area.