Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions PDF Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205914
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions PDF Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205914
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

Middle English Verbs of Emotion and Impersonal Constructions

Middle English Verbs of Emotion and Impersonal Constructions PDF Author: Ayumi Miura
Publisher: Oxford Studies in the History
ISBN: 0199947155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Impersonal constructions in the history of English form a puzzling category, in that there has been uncertainty as to why some verbs are attested in such constructions while others are not, even though they look almost synonymous. This book tackles this under-discussed question in one of the most popular topics of English historical syntax, with special reference to verbs of emotion in Middle English.

The Early English Impersonal Construction

The Early English Impersonal Construction PDF Author: Ruth Möhlig-Falke
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199777721
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries-their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English-have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. Möhlig-Falke offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. She focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. Her research comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses. It is thus the most comprehensive investigation of the impersonal construction in early English available to date.

Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions PDF Author: Andrej Malchukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287163
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
This volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages, but also includes considerations of several African, American, South-East Asian, Australian, and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive, or from active to passive, or participant-to event-centered construction.

A Diachronic Analysis of English Impersonal Constructions with an Experiencer

A Diachronic Analysis of English Impersonal Constructions with an Experiencer PDF Author: Jerzy Krzyszpień
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description


Impersonal "si" constructions

Impersonal Author: Roberta D'Alessandro
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110207516
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.

Agency and Impersonality

Agency and Impersonality PDF Author: Mutsumi Yamamoto
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027230889
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.

Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature

Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature PDF Author: Osamu Imahayashi
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631609668
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
"The first international conference was held at Chiba University in 1-3 September 2005, the second one at Nagoya University in 7-9 September 2007, and the third one at Hiroshima University in 28-30 August 2009"--P. [v].

Advances in English Historical Linguistics (1996)

Advances in English Historical Linguistics (1996) PDF Author: Jacek Fisiak
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110161519
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Comprising a selection of papers presented at the Ninth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held in Poznan in August 1996, this volume contains 28 contributions addressing a range of topics, but with an emphasis on morphological and syntactical studies on word-formation, modality and negation, and clause structure in the history of the English language. A more theoretically-oriented strain is represented by contributions treating grammaticalization or lexical diffusion in language change. There are also contributions addressing the historiography of historical linguistics including discussion of past grammarians such as Buchanan or Huish, as well as phonological studies and discussion of the development of Early Modern English. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A History of English Reflexive Pronouns

A History of English Reflexive Pronouns PDF Author: Elly van Gelderen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027227607
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This book brings together a number of seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop, and the disappearance of morphological Case. It provides vast numbers of examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first, second, and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart & Reuland, the author argues that the 'strength' of certain pronominal features (Case, person, number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English. The framework used is Minimalist, and Interpretable and Uninterpretable features are seen as the key to explaining the change from a synthetic to an analytic language.