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Author: Lena Karssenberg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110586436
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties. In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts, the strength of the study lies in the critical approach it develops to the common definition of clefts. Several commonly used criteria for clefts are applied to the corpus data, revealing that these criteria often lead to ambiguous results. The reasons for this ambiguity are explored, thus leading to a better understanding of what constitutes a cleft. In this sense, the analysis will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.
Author: Lena Karssenberg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110586436
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties. In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts, the strength of the study lies in the critical approach it develops to the common definition of clefts. Several commonly used criteria for clefts are applied to the corpus data, revealing that these criteria often lead to ambiguous results. The reasons for this ambiguity are explored, thus leading to a better understanding of what constitutes a cleft. In this sense, the analysis will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.
Author: Ying Liu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000821129
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Exhaustivity, Contrastivity, and the Semantics of Mandarin Cleft-related Structures investigates the semantics of the cleft and cleft-related structures in Mandarin, which, over several decades, have presented analytical challenges for semantic theory. The goal of this book, in broad terms, is three-fold: (i) to figure out what clefting adds to the semantics of a sentence; (ii) to set apart the meaning and the discourse function of each type of cleft-related structure; and (iii) to provide a uniform analysis of Mandarin clefts and their related structures. More specifically, it addresses the following questions: (i) what is the semantics of Mandarin clefts? (ii) what do exhaustivity and contrastivity contribute to the meaning of clefts? (iii) what are the semantic (or pragmatic) factors that determine the variation of clefts, related structures, and canonical sentences? and (iv) cross-linguistically speaking, how do Mandarin shi...de cleft and its related structures differ from similar constructions such as English it-cleft, French c’est cleft, and German es-cleft? This book will be informative for linguists who are working on cleft constructions and focus on sensitive structures cross-linguistically, and those interested in experimental semantics and pragmatics.
Author: Kristin Davidse
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031322703
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
This book proposes a radically new account of clefts in English. Since the 1960s, functional as well as formal linguists have generally restricted clefts to constructions with an identifying matrix (it-clefts) and have claimed that they only code information structure. Clefts are assumed to unpack a simple proposition into a focus – presupposition structure. In this book, the authors reject these theoretical-descriptive assumptions, arguing instead that clefts form a field comprising it-clefts, there-clefts and ‘have’-clefts. They show that, like any other construction, clefts compositionally code propositional semantics, onto which a great variety of prosodically coded focus patterns may be mapped. The authors fundamentally challenge the existing approach by entering the debate with an in-depth account of the neglected specificational and presentational there-clefts, offering the first systematic data-based study of their grammatical and prosodic features. While the study is restricted to English, its findings have significant cross-linguistic relevance. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Functional, Cognitive and Formal Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and usage-based study of grammar and prosody.
Author: Caterina Bonan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110734249
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed. The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume. Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more. The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles. Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.
Author: Davide Garassino
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027258155
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.
Author: Marco García García
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263485
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages, and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact, this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody, syntax, and pragmatics, the typology of word order and intonation languages, the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality, and the role of synchronic variation and change. The studies presented in this volume cover a broad range of Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, and different varieties of Spanish. Moreover, the book also offers new insights into non-Romance languages such as English, German, and Quechua.
Author: Laure Sarda
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027252882
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction), and investigates (ii) the relationships between locative, existential, and information structure, (iii) the quantification of the pivot and (iv) the issue of negative existentials. It brings together different and complementary approaches (functional, cognitive, pragmatic, typological, comparative, diachronic, philosophical) based on a wide variety of data sources. The contributions illustrate how the so-called existential construction can take a variety of forms – more or less grammaticalized – and functions – ranging from the expression of literal existence to that of localization and discursive focus – in a wide range of languages. The book will be valuable for linguists, researchers or students, interested in the cross-linguistic manifestations of existential constructions at the interface between syntax, semantics and information structure.
Author: Andreas Dufter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393425
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1104
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Book Description
This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.
Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260877
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role, i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with subject inversion, subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text beginnings, jokes, stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives, thus speech acts without communicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contributions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences, but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which, in contrast to German and English, sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.
Author: Anna-Maria De Cesare
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311039474X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).
