Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony

Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony PDF Author: Adam Ledgeway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192643819
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This volume brings together contributions from leading specialists in syntax and morphology to explore the complex relation between periphrasis and inflexion from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The chapters draw on data from across the Romance language family, including standard and regional varieties and dialects. The relation between periphrasis and inflexion raises questions for both syntax and morphology, and understanding the phenomena involved requires cooperation across these sub-domains. For example, the components that express many periphrases can be interrupted by other words in a way that is common in syntax but not in morphology, and in some contexts, a periphrastic form may be semantically equivalent to a single-word inflected form, with which it arguably forms part of a paradigmatic set. Patterns of this kind are found across Romance, albeit with significant local differences. Moreover, diachrony is essential in understanding these phenomena, and the rich historical documentation available for Romance allows an in-depth exploration of the changes and variation involved, as different members of the family may instantiate different stages of development. Studying these changes also raises important questions about the relation between attested and reconstructed patterns. Although the empirical focus of the volume is on the Romance languages, the analyses and conclusions presented shed light on the development and nature of similar structures in other language families and provide valuable insights relevant to linguistic theory more broadly.

Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony

Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony PDF Author: Adam Ledgeway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192643819
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together contributions from leading specialists in syntax and morphology to explore the complex relation between periphrasis and inflexion from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The chapters draw on data from across the Romance language family, including standard and regional varieties and dialects. The relation between periphrasis and inflexion raises questions for both syntax and morphology, and understanding the phenomena involved requires cooperation across these sub-domains. For example, the components that express many periphrases can be interrupted by other words in a way that is common in syntax but not in morphology, and in some contexts, a periphrastic form may be semantically equivalent to a single-word inflected form, with which it arguably forms part of a paradigmatic set. Patterns of this kind are found across Romance, albeit with significant local differences. Moreover, diachrony is essential in understanding these phenomena, and the rich historical documentation available for Romance allows an in-depth exploration of the changes and variation involved, as different members of the family may instantiate different stages of development. Studying these changes also raises important questions about the relation between attested and reconstructed patterns. Although the empirical focus of the volume is on the Romance languages, the analyses and conclusions presented shed light on the development and nature of similar structures in other language families and provide valuable insights relevant to linguistic theory more broadly.

A New Companion to the Romance Languages

A New Companion to the Romance Languages PDF Author: Martin Glessgen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311132933X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
The Romance languages offer unique potential for empirical analysis and methodological innovation within the vast field of linguistics, due to the survival of a large body of historical documentation, the rich diversity of dialects and languages, and the exceptional quality of the research undertaken to date. However, these same factors have led to an ever-increasing volume of material available for study, requiring the establishment of a shared canonical knowledge base. This companion offers a balanced overview of the core subjects and the methodology which make up the field of Romance linguistics. It provides a solid foundation in the discipline as well as easy and convenient access to highly-specialised areas of research by means of systematic references to the latest handbooks and encyclopedias. The companion is designed to be read from cover to cover or to be consulted for information on specific topics. Advanced students, early-career researchers, lecturers, specialists of other languages, philologists, and historians alike will all benefit from this accessible and up-to-date reference work, as it enables readers to contextualise any knowledge of the discipline they may already possess.

Alignment and Alignment Change in the Indo-European Family

Alignment and Alignment Change in the Indo-European Family PDF Author: Eystein Dahl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599771
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This volume brings together work from leading specialists in Indo-European languages to explore the macro- and micro-dynamic factors that contribute to variation and change in alignment and argument realization. Alignment is taken to include both basic alignment patterns associated with major construction types, as well as various valency-decreasing constructions such as passives, anticausatives, and impersonals. The chapters explore synchronic and diachronic aspects of alignment morphosyntax based on data from Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Armenian, and Slavic. All have a strong empirical focus, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, and range from broad comparative studies to detailed investigations of specific constructions in individual languages. The book is one of very few studies to examine variation and change in alignment typology across languages in a single family. It contributes to a greater understanding of the roles played by analogy/extension, reanalysis, and areal factors in alignment change, and demonstrates the extent of variation found in the morphosyntax of argument realization in genetically-related languages.

Arabic and the Case Against Linearity in Historical Linguistics

Arabic and the Case Against Linearity in Historical Linguistics PDF Author: Jonathan Owens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192867512
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of Arabic, this book instead advocates a multiple pathways approach to Arabic language history. Arabic has multifarious sources: its relations to other Semitic languages, an old epigraphic and papyrological tradition, a vibrant and linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, and a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties. These diverse sources present a challenge to and an opportunity for defining a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history. The geographical breadth and chronological depth of Arabic make it a fertile ground for a critical appraisal and application of perspectives from a range of subdisciplines including sociolinguistics, typology, grammaticalization, and corpus linguistics. Jonathan Owens draws on these approaches to investigate more than 20 individual case studies that cover more than 1500 years of documented and reconstructed history: the results demonstrate that Arabic is a far more complex historical object than traditional accounts have assumed. This complexity is further explored in a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages that can be compared over roughly the same period (500 AD-2022 AD): Icelandic, English, and Arabic. Icelandic and English are diametrically opposed on a parameter of linearity. Icelandic is effectively alinear: the morphology of the earliest Icelandic writings is the morphology of today. English is linear, having undergone a drastic change in morphology from its Old English stage to the Middle English period. Arabic is shown to be alinear in many important respects, but multilinear in others, with different sorts of linguistic changes being spread across many individual historical speech communities.

Functional Heads Across Time

Functional Heads Across Time PDF Author: Barbara Egedi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192644998
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data.

Germanic Phylogeny

Germanic Phylogeny PDF Author: Frederik Hartmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198872747
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book provides a computational re-evaluation of the genealogical relations between the early Germanic families and of their diversification from their most recent common ancestor, Proto-Germanic. It also proposes a novel computational approach to the problem of linguistic diversification more broadly, using agent-based simulation of speech communities over time. This new method is presented alongside more traditional phylogenetic inference, and the respective results are compared and evaluated. Frederik Hartmann demonstrates that the traditional and novel methods each capture different aspects of this highly complex real-world process; crucially, the new computational approach proposed here offers a new way of investigating the wave-like properties of language relatedness that were previously less accessible. As well as validating the findings of earlier research, the results of this study also generate new insights and shed light on much-debated issues in the field. The conclusion is that the break-up of Germanic should be understood as a gradual disintegration process in which tree-like branching effects are rare.

Diminutives across Languages, Theoretical Frameworks and Linguistic Domains

Diminutives across Languages, Theoretical Frameworks and Linguistic Domains PDF Author: Stela Manova
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311079294X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This volume addresses a number of issues in current morphological theory from the point of view of diminutive formation, such as the role of phonology in diminutives and hypocoristics and consequently its place in the overall architecture of grammar, i.e. phonology-first versus syntax/morphology-first theoretical analyses, diminutives in the L1 acquisition of typologically diverse languages, and the borrowing of non-diminutive morphology for the expression of diminutive meanings, among others. Among the peculiarities of diminutive morphology discussed are the relation between diminutives and mass nouns, the avoidance of diminutives in plural contexts in some languages, and the relatively frequent semantic bleaching and reanalysis of diminutive forms cross-linguistically. Special attention is paid to the debate on the head versus modifier status of diminutive affixes (corresponding to high versus low diminutives in alternative analyses), with data from spoken and sign languages. Overall, the volume addresses a number of topics that will be of interest to scholars of almost all linguistic subfields and per

Language, History, Ideology

Language, History, Ideology PDF Author: Camiel Hamans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019882789X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This volume explores the ways in which historical linguistics and language change interact with ideology. The chapters present twelve in-depth case studies that cover topics ranging from the location of the Indo-European homeland to language policy in the former Yugoslavia.

Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian

Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian PDF Author: Robin Meyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019885109X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book draws on a detailed corpus analysis of fifth-century historiographical texts to explore the influence of the Iranian languages on the syntax of Armenian. Robin Meyer argues that the Armenian periphrastic perfect was created on the model of similar constructions in Parthian via a long period of language contact.

The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar

The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar PDF Author: Delia Bentley
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009353551
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1014

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Book Description
Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a theory of language in which linguistic structures are accounted for in terms of the interplay of discourse, semantics and syntax. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this Handbook provides a field-defining overview of RRG. Assuming no prior knowledge, it introduces the framework step-by-step, and includes a pedagogical guide for instructors. It features in-depth discussions of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, including treatments of lexical and grammatical categories, the syntax of simple clauses and complex sentences, and how the linking of syntax with semantics and discourse works in each of these domains. It illustrates RRG's contribution to the study of language acquisition, language change and processing, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, and also contains five grammatical sketches which show how RRG analyses work in practice. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how grammar interfaces with meaning.