Micro-syntactic Variation in North American English

Micro-syntactic Variation in North American English PDF Author: Raffaella Zanuttini
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199367213
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Comparative work on linguistic varieties that are overall very similar can help us determine where and how exactly grammatical systems differ from one another, and how they change over time. This book explores a range of data on unfamiliar constructions across regional and social dialects, thereby shedding light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally.

Micro-syntactic Variation in North American English

Micro-syntactic Variation in North American English PDF Author: Raffaella Zanuttini
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199367213
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Comparative work on linguistic varieties that are overall very similar can help us determine where and how exactly grammatical systems differ from one another, and how they change over time. This book explores a range of data on unfamiliar constructions across regional and social dialects, thereby shedding light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally.

On looking into words (and beyond)

On looking into words (and beyond) PDF Author: Claire Bowern
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234925
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 629

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Book Description
While linguistic theory is in continual flux as progress is made in our ability to understand the structure and function of language, one constant has always been the central role of the word. On looking into words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word-based morphology, morphosyntax, the phonology-morphology interface, and related areas of theoretical and empirical linguistics. The 26 papers that constitute this volume extend morphological and grammatical theory to signed as well as spoken language, to diachronic as well as synchronic evidence, and to birdsong as well as human language.

The Oxford Handbook of African American Language

The Oxford Handbook of African American Language PDF Author: Sonja Lanehart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199795509
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 928

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Book Description
The goal of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language is to provide readers with a wide range of analyses of both traditional and contemporary work on language use in African American communities in a broad collective. The Handbook offers a survey of language and its uses in African American communities from a wide range of contexts organized into seven sections: Origins and Historical Perspectives; Lects and Variation; Structure and Description; Child Language Acquisition and Development; Education; Language in Society; and Language and Identity. It is a handbook of research on African American Language (AAL) and, as such, provides a variety of scholarly perspectives that may not align with each other -- as is indicative of most scholarly research. The chapters in this book "interact" with one another as contributors frequently refer the reader to further elaboration on and references to related issues and connect their own research to related topics in other chapters within their own sections and the handbook more generally to create dialogue about AAL, thus affirming the need for collaborative thinking about the issues in AAL research. Though the Handbook does not and cannot include every area of research, it is meant to provide suggestions for future work on lesser-studied areas (e.g., variation/heterogeneity in regional, social, and ethnic communities) by highlighting a need for collaborative perspectives and innovative thinking while reasserting the need for better research and communication in areas thought to be resolved.

Variation in P

Variation in P PDF Author: Jacopo Garzonio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190931272
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Variation in P is an essential follow-up to the seminal proposals of the generative tradition regarding prepositional syntax. Recent research shows that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in universal grammar. The papers collected in the first part of this volume not only test these proposals against new comparative data, but also shed light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume explores the role of prepositions in non-spatial environments as well as in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation. By drawing on evidence from less studied languages, and by considering prepositional syntax in interaction with clausal syntax as well as within prepositional phrases, Variation in P refines and develops theories introduced by previous generative studies.

Nominal Arguments and Language Variation

Nominal Arguments and Language Variation PDF Author: Li Julie Jiang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190084189
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Nominal Arguments in Language Variation investigates nominal arguments in classifier languages, refuting the long-held claim that classifier languages do not have overt article determiners. Li Julie Jiang brings the typologically unique Nuosu Yi, a classifier language that has an overt definite determiner (D), to the forefront of the theoretical investigation. By comparing nominal arguments in Nuosu Yi to those in Mandarin, a well-studied classifier language that has no overt evidence of an article determiner, Jiang provides new accounts of variation among classifier languages and extends the parameters to argument formation in general. In addition to paying particular attention to these two classifier languages, the discussion of nominal arguments also covers a wider range of classifier languages and number marking languages from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic to Hindi. Using a broad cross-linguistic perspective and detailed empirical analysis, Nominal Arguments in Language Variation is an important contribution to research on classifier languages and the fields of theoretical syntax, semantics, language variation, and linguistic typology.

Negative Inversion, Social Meaning, and Gricean Implicature

Negative Inversion, Social Meaning, and Gricean Implicature PDF Author: William Salmon
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 150151234X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Relying on a wealth of new data, this book argues that long-standing puzzles of Negative Inversion (NI) syntax are not puzzles at all when viewed through the lenses of Gricean pragmatics and Labovian sociolinguistics. Focusing on sentences such as "Can't nobody lift that rock" in African American, Anglo, and Chicano Englishes in Texas, the book provides tidy solutions to problems such as: the NI’s relationship to its non-inverted counterpart, its relationship to existential “there” sentences, to modal existential sentences, to the definiteness effects surrounding its NP subject, the emphatic meaning with which it seems to be associated, and more. The book argues that such issues, which have been explored in the syntax and semantics literature since the late 1960s, are handled more fruitfully via Gricean reasoning, demographics of use, and a simple semantics. As such, the book argues that NI can be freed from the “syntactico-semantic straitjacket” into which it has often been forced. It also demonstrates ways in which pragmatic and sociolinguistic thought can be brought together to inform larger linguistic analyses.

Questions of Syntax

Questions of Syntax PDF Author: Richard S. Kayne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190863617
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
There are far more syntactically distinct languages than we might have thought; yet there are far fewer than there might have been. Questions of Syntax collects sixteen papers authored by Richard S. Kayne, a preeminent theoretical syntactician, who has sought over the course of his career to understand why both these facts are true. With a particular emphasis on comparative syntax, these chapters collectively consider how wide a range of questions the field of syntax can reasonably attempt to ask and then answer. At issue, among other topics, are the relation between syntax and (certain aspects of) semantics, the relation between syntax and what appear to be lexical questions, the relation between syntax and morphology, the relation between syntax and certain aspects of phonology (insofar as silent elements and their properties play a substantial role), and the extent to which comparative syntax can provide new and decisive evidence bearing on these different kinds of questions. To Kayne, comparative syntax can shed light on what may initially seem lexical questions, and antisymmetry on the evolution of human language itself. Taken as a whole, these essays elucidate the theoretical contributions of one the most influential scholars in linguistics.

New England English

New England English PDF Author: James N. Stanford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019062566X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and "New England accents" are very well known in the popular imagination. While other projects have studied various dialect regions of New England, this is the first large-scale academic project since the 1930s to focus specifically on New England English as a whole. In New England English, James N. Stanford presents new variationist sociolinguistic research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, acoustic phonetic, and statistical analyses of recently collected data from over 1,600 New Englanders. Stanford and his team of Dartmouth students built this dataset over 8 years of face-to-face fieldwork and online audio recordings and questionnaires. Using acoustic phonetics, computational processing, and dialect maps, the book systematically documents major traditional New England dialect features and their current usage in terms of geography, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and other factors. This dataset is interpreted in terms of William Labov's outward orientation of the language faculty, dialect levelling, convergence and divergence, and "Hub social geometry." The result is a wide-ranging empirical analysis and theoretical overview of this influential English dialect region.

Syntactic Structures after 60 Years

Syntactic Structures after 60 Years PDF Author: Norbert Hornstein
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501506927
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
This volume explores the continuing relevance of Syntactic Structures to contemporary research in generative syntax. The contributions examine the ideas that changed the way that syntax is studied and that still have a lasting effect on contemporary work in generative syntax. Topics include formal foundations, the syntax-semantics interface, the autonomy of syntax, methods of data analysis, and detailed discussions of the role of transformations. New commentary from Noam Chomsky is included.

Smuggling in Syntax

Smuggling in Syntax PDF Author: Adriana Belletti
Publisher:
ISBN: 019750986X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
One of the fundamental properties of human language is movement, where a constituent moves from one position in a sentence to another position. Syntactic theory has long been concerned with properties of movement, including locality restrictions. Smuggling in Syntax investigates how different movement operations interact with one another, focusing on the special case of smuggling. First introduced by volume editor Chris Collins in 2005, the term 'smuggling' refers to a specific type of movement interaction. The contributions in this volume each describe different areas where smuggling derivations play a role, including passives, causatives, adverb placement, the dative alternation, the placement of measure phrases, wh-in-situ, and word order in ergative languages. The volume also addresses issues like the freezing constraint on movement and the acquisition of smuggling derivations by children. In this work, Adriana Belletti and Chris Collins bring together leading syntacticians to present a range of contributions on different aspects of smuggling. Tackling fundamental theoretical questions with empirical consequences, this volume explores one of the least understood types of movement and points the way toward new research.