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Author: Sonia Cyrino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199659206
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
Leading scholars examine languages ranging from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans. They consider the insights parametric theory offers to understanding the dynamics of language change and test new hypotheses against an extensive array of data. In both the broad range of languages it discusses and its use of linguistic theory this is an outstanding book.
Author: Sonia Cyrino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199659206
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
Leading scholars examine languages ranging from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans. They consider the insights parametric theory offers to understanding the dynamics of language change and test new hypotheses against an extensive array of data. In both the broad range of languages it discusses and its use of linguistic theory this is an outstanding book.
Author: Þórhallur Eyþórsson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027233776
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
This book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at Rosendal, Norway, under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the volume is 'internal factors in grammatical change.' The papers focus on fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in different ways, but are generally critical of 'Grammaticalization Theory'. Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change, pinpointing both extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and more controversially internally driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on morphological change 'by itself.' A wide range of languages is covered, including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan), Zoque, and Athapaskan languages, in addition to Indo-European languages, both the more familiar ones and some less well-studied varieties.
Author: Nina Hyams
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400946384
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
This book is perhaps the most stunning available demonstration of the explanatory power of the parametric approach to linguistic theory. It is akin, not to a deductive proof, but to the discovery of a footprint in a far-off place which leaves an archeologist elated. The book is full of intricate reasoning, but the stunning aspect is that the reasoning moves between not only complex syntax and diverse languages, but it makes predictions about what two-year-old children will assume about the jumble of linguistic input that confronts them. Those predictions, Hyams shows, are supported by a discriminating analysis of acquisition data in English and Italian. Let us examine the linguistic context for a moment before we discuss her theory. The ultimate issue in linguistic theory is the explanation of how a child can acquire any human language. To capture this fact we must posit an innate mechanism which meets two opposite constraints: it must be broad enough to account for the diversity of human language, and narrow enough so that the child does not make irrelevant hypotheses about his own language, particularly ones from which there is no recovery. That is, a child must not posit a grammar which permits all of the sentences of a language as well as other sentences which are not in the language. In a word, the child must not create a language in which one cannot make adult discriminations between grammatical and ungrammatical.
Author: Nicholas Allott
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119598702
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 644
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Book Description
A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.
Author: Ian G. Roberts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199573778
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 673
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Book Description
This handbook provides a critical guide to the most central proposition in modern linguistics: the notion, generally known as Universal Grammar, that a universal set of structural principles underlies the grammatical diversity of the world's languages. Part I considers the implications of Universal Grammar for philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, and examines the history of the theory. Part II focuses on linguistic theory, looking at topics such as explanatory adequacy and how phonology and semantics fit into Universal Grammar. Parts III and IV look respectively at the insights derived from UG-inspired research on language acquisition, and at comparative syntax and language typology, while part V considers the evidence for Universal Grammar in phenomena such as creoles, language pathology, and sign language. The book will be a vital reference for linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists.
Author: Susan C. Herring
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027237026
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 474
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Book Description
Textual Parameters in Older Languages takes a contemporary approach to the inherent limitations of using older texts as data for linguistic analysis, drawing on methods of text analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics to supplement traditional historical and philological methods. The focus of the book is on the importance of controlling for textual parameters-defined by the editors as dimensions of variation associated with texts and their production, including text type, degree of poeticality, orality, and dialect-in the analysis of older language data. Failure to do so can result in invalid generalizations; recognizing the influence of textual parameters, conversely, raises a myriad of issues for the practice and theory of historical linguistics. The 12 essays in this collection apply this approach in analyses of anaphora, non-finite verbal forms, particles, punctuation, word order and other phenomena in a wide range of languages including Ancient Tamil, Sanskrit, Latin, Heian Japanese, Medieval Greek, Old French, Old Russian, Middle English, and Modern Danish. An in-depth introduction by the editors lays out the goals of the textual parameters approach, and considers the methodological and theoretical consequences of the evidence presented in the book as a whole.
Author: Charlotte Galves
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191634093
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
This book focuses on some of the most important issues in historical syntax. In a series of close examinations of languages from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans, leading scholars present new work on Afro-Asiatic, Latin and Romance, Germanic, Albanian, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, and Japanese. The book revolves around the linked themes of parametric theory and the dynamics of language change. The former is a key element in the search for explanatory adequacy in historical syntax: if the notion of imperfect learning, for example, explains a large element of grammatical change, it is vital to understand how parameters are set in language acquisition and how they might have been set differently in previous generations. The authors test particular hypotheses against data from different times and places with the aim of understanding the relationship between language variation and the dynamics of change. Is it possible, for example, to reconcile the unidirectionality of change predominantly expressed in the phenomenon of "grammaticalization", with the multidirectionality predicted by generativist approaches? In terms of the richness of the data it examines, the broad range of languages it discusses, and the use it makes of linguistic theory this is an outstanding book, not least in the contribution it makes to the understanding of language change.
Author: Adrian Battye
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195358791
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
The Principles-and-Parameters approach to linguistic theory has triggered an enormous amount of work in comparative syntax over the last decade or so. A natural consequence of the growth in synchronic comparative work has been a renewed interest in questions of diachronic syntax, and this collection testifies to that trend. These papers focus on questions of clause structure which have become a central theme of theoretical work since the pioneering work in the late 1980s by Chomsky, Pollock, and others. The languages studied by an international roster of contributors include all the major Romance and Germanic languages. This volume is of central importance for anyone working in theoretical, comparative, or historical syntax.
Author: Luis Eguren
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190613807
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 403
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Book Description
Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ("The nature of variation and parameters") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ("Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.
Author: Michel DeGraff
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262041683
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 592
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Book Description
Research on creolization, language change, and language acquisition has been converging toward a triangulation of the constraints along which grammatical systems develop within individual speakers--and (viewed externally) across generations of speakers. The originality of this volume is in its comparison of various sorts of language development from a number of linguistic-theoretic and empirical perspectives, using data from both speech and gestural modalities and from a diversity of acquisition environments. In turn, this comparison yields fresh insights on the mental bases of language creation.The book is organized into five parts: creolization and acquisition; acquisition under exceptional circumstances; language processing and syntactic change; parameter setting in acquisition and through creolization and language change; and a concluding part integrating the contributors' observations and proposals into a series of commentaries on the state of the art in our understanding of language development, its role in creolization and diachrony, and implications for linguistic theory.Contributors : Dany Adone, Derek Bickerton, Adrienne Bruyn, Marie Coppola, Michel DeGraff, Viviane D�prez, Alison Henry, Judy Kegl, David Lightfoot, John S. Lumsden, Salikoko S. Mufwene, Pieter Muysken, Elissa L. Newport, Luigi Rizzi, Ian Roberts, Ann Senghas, Rex A. Sprouse, Denise Tangney, Anne Vainikka, Barbara S. Vance, Maaike Verrips.
