Language Change at the Interfaces

Language Change at the Interfaces PDF Author: Nicholas Catasso
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027257876
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

Language Change at the Interfaces

Language Change at the Interfaces PDF Author: Nicholas Catasso
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027257876
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface PDF Author: Chiara Gianollo
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110394928
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing together diachronic research from a variety of perspectives, notably typology, formal syntax and semantics, this volume focuses on the interplay of syntactic and semantic factors in language change - an issue so far largely neglected both in (mostly lexical) historical semantics as well as historical syntax, but recently brought into focus by grammaticalization theory as well as Minimalist diachronic syntax. The contributions draw on data from numerous Indo-European languages including Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic, Greek as well as English and German, and discuss a range of phenomena such as change in negation markers, indefinite articles, quantifiers, modal verbs, argument structure among others. The papers analyze diachronic evidence in the light of contemporary syntactic and semantic theory, addressing the crucial question of how syntactic and semantic change are linked, and whether both are governed by similar constraints, principles and systematic mechanisms. The volume will appeal to scholars in historical linguistics and formal theories of syntax and semantics.

Interfaces + Recursion = Language?

Interfaces + Recursion = Language? PDF Author: Uli Sauerland
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110207559
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies. The most radical version of this view has emerged from the Minimalist Program: The claim that language consists of only the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. On this view, all other properties of language must result from the interaction at the interfaces of that mechanism and other mental systems not exclusively devoted to language. Since language could then be described as the simplest recursive system satisfying the requirements of the interfaces, one can speak of the Minimalist Equation: Interfaces + Recursion = Language. The question whether all the richness of language can be reduced to that minimalist equation has already inspired several fruitful lines of research that led to important new results. While a full assessment of the minimalist equation will require evidence from many different areas of inquiry, this volume focuses especially on the perspective of syntax and semantics. Within the minimalist architecture, this places our concern with the core computational mechanism and the (LF-)interface where recursive structures are fed to interpretation. Specific questions that the papers address are: What kind of recursive structures can the core generator form? How can we determine what the simplest recursive system is? How can properties of language that used to be ascribed to the recursive generator be reduced to interface properties? What effects do syntactic operations have on semantic interpretation? To what extent do models of semantic interpretation support the LF-interface conditions postulated by minimalist syntax?

Synchrony and Diachrony

Synchrony and Diachrony PDF Author: Anna Giacalone Ramat
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027272077
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book Here

Book Description
The focus of this volume is on the relation between synchrony and diachrony. It is examined in the light of the most recent theories of language change and linguistic variation. What has traditionally been treated as a dichotomy is now seen rather in terms of a dynamic interface. The contributions to this volume aim at exploring the most adequate tools to describe and understand the manifestations of this dynamic interface. Thorough analyses are offered on hot topics of the current linguistic debate, which are all involved in the analysis of the synchrony-diachrony interface: gradualness of change, synchronic variation and gradience, constructional approaches to grammaticalization, the role of contact-induced transfer in language change, analogy. Case studies are discussed from a variety of languages and dialects including English, Welsh, Latin, Italian and Italian dialects, Dutch, Swedish, German and German dialects, Hungarian. This volume is of great interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including historical linguistics, typology, pragmatics, and areal linguistics.

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces PDF Author: Gillian Ramchand
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199247455
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 686

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces' explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. This book shows how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication.

Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance

Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance PDF Author: Susann Fischer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110394839
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 755

Get Book Here

Book Description
Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

Interfaces Between Second Language Acquisition and Language Testing Research

Interfaces Between Second Language Acquisition and Language Testing Research PDF Author: Lyle F. Bachman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521649633
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Second language acquisition (SLA) and language testing (LT) research have largely been viewed as distinct areas of inquiry in applied linguistics. This book provides a fresh look at areas of common interest to both SLA and LT research, and ways in which research in these two areas of applied linguistics can be fruitfully integrated.

Sign Language Phonology

Sign Language Phonology PDF Author: Diane Brentari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107113474
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
Surveys key findings and ideas in sign language phonology, exploring the crucial areas in phonology to which sign language studies has contributed.

Language Acquisition at the Interfaces

Language Acquisition at the Interfaces PDF Author: Jiyoung Choi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527509818
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 12th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference held at the University of Nantes, France, in 2015. Language acquisition, a field of inquiry that has witnessed continuous growth during the past four decades, is central to building a detailed understanding of the human amazing capacity to develop language. The papers gathered here reflect the current research in the field of first, second and heritage language acquisition, addressing a variety of topics in syntax, semantics, phonology and their interfaces, from a wide range of languages such as Tashlhiyt Berber, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, European Portuguese, Heritage Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Heritage Sign Language, and Yudja. This volume will thus serve as a valuable reference guide to all scholars interested in (first/second/bilingual) language acquisition, multilingualism, heritage languages, sign language, language pathology and impairment, and experimental research in linguistics.

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics PDF Author: Keith Allan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501895
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 967

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.