Q-Adverbs as Selective Binders

Q-Adverbs as Selective Binders PDF Author: Stefan Hinterwimmer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199203
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This book deals with the interpretation of adverbially quantified sentences containing definite DPs and Free Relatives (FR) Thereby, it concentrates on the origins of Quantificational Variability Effects (QVEs), i.e. readings according to which the respective quantificational adverb seems to quantify over the individuals denoted by the respective DP/FR. QVEs are usually discussed only in connection with singular indefinites and bare plurals. This book therefore provides the first comprehensive account of QVEs with definite DPs and Free Relatives (while also discussing singular indefinites and bare plurals). Presenting new empirical observations and arguments for the assumption that Q-adverbs quantify over situations exclusively, it is also an important contribution to the theoretical debate concerning the quantificational domain of Q-adverbs.. It is of interest to linguists working in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface as well as to philosophers of language who are interested in adverbial quantification and situation semantics. Furthermore, it offers an introduction to the core issues of situation semantics and adverbial quantification and is therefore accessible to graduate students interested in these topics.

Q-Adverbs as Selective Binders

Q-Adverbs as Selective Binders PDF Author: Stefan Hinterwimmer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199203
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book deals with the interpretation of adverbially quantified sentences containing definite DPs and Free Relatives (FR) Thereby, it concentrates on the origins of Quantificational Variability Effects (QVEs), i.e. readings according to which the respective quantificational adverb seems to quantify over the individuals denoted by the respective DP/FR. QVEs are usually discussed only in connection with singular indefinites and bare plurals. This book therefore provides the first comprehensive account of QVEs with definite DPs and Free Relatives (while also discussing singular indefinites and bare plurals). Presenting new empirical observations and arguments for the assumption that Q-adverbs quantify over situations exclusively, it is also an important contribution to the theoretical debate concerning the quantificational domain of Q-adverbs.. It is of interest to linguists working in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface as well as to philosophers of language who are interested in adverbial quantification and situation semantics. Furthermore, it offers an introduction to the core issues of situation semantics and adverbial quantification and is therefore accessible to graduate students interested in these topics.

Cantonese Particles and Affixal Quantification

Cantonese Particles and Affixal Quantification PDF Author: Peppina Po-lun Lee
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400743874
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Cantonese, the lingua franca of Hong Kong and its neighboring province, has an unusually rich repertoire of verbal particles. This volume significantly augments the academic literature on their semantics, focusing on three affixal quantifiers, -saai, -hoi and -maai. The author shows how these verbal suffixes display a unique interplay of syntax and semantics: used in a sentence with no focus, they quantify items flexibly, according to an accessibility hierarchy; with focus, focus comes into effect after syntactic selection. This fresh and compelling perspective in the study of particles and quantification is the first in-depth analysis of Cantonese verbal suffixes. It compares the language’s affixal quantification to the alternative determiner and adverbial quantifiers. The book’s syntax-semantics mapping geography deploys both descriptive and theoretical approaches, making it an essential resource for researchers studying the nexus of syntax and semantics, as well as Cantonese itself.

Language and Logos

Language and Logos PDF Author: Thomas Hanneforth
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3050062363
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This volume contributes to a linguistic program characterized by the view that explanatory goals in syntax and semantics can be met only in models that are sufficiently formalized. The properties of these formalizations must be well understood, and they have to do justice to both the syntactic and semantic aspects of a construction. The contributions shed light on this view from the perspectives of theoretical linguistics (semantics, syntax), automata theory, and computational and mathematical linguistics.

The Impact of Pronominal Form on Interpretation

The Impact of Pronominal Form on Interpretation PDF Author: Patrick Grosz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500775
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The interplay between the interpretation of pronouns (e.g. bound/referential) and their form (e.g. null/overt) is still ill-understood. This volume has a cross-linguistic orientation with in-depth investigations of more than 10 different languages. It unites researchers from the linguistic subfields of syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics, thus furthering dialogue with the goal of shedding new light on the form/interpretation connection.

Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting

Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting PDF Author: John Collins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192591797
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists, Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation. Language-and by extension meaning-provides constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections, focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: 'it is raining/snowing/sunny'. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication, quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.

Features of Person

Features of Person PDF Author: Peter Ackema
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262347377
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules. The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.

The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax

The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax PDF Author: Grant Goodall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316998606
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 787

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Book Description
Experimental syntax is an area that is rapidly growing as linguistic research becomes increasingly focused on replicable language data, in both fieldwork and laboratory environments. The first of its kind, this handbook provides an in-depth overview of current issues and trends in this field, with contributions from leading international scholars. It pays special attention to sentence acceptability experiments, outlining current best practices in conducting tests, and pointing out promising new avenues for future research. Separate sections review research results from the past 20 years, covering specific syntactic phenomena and language types. The handbook also outlines other common psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods for studying syntax, comparing and contrasting them with acceptability experiments, and giving useful perspectives on the interplay between theoretical and experimental linguistics. Providing an up-to-date reference on this exciting field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics interested in using experimental methods to conduct syntactic research.

Information Structure

Information Structure PDF Author: Malte Zimmermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199570957
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
A collection of overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication.

Genericity

Genericity PDF Author: Alda Mari
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199691819
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics. It gathers new work from senior and young researchers and is organized along three main areas of study: the generic and individuals; genericity and time; and the sources of genericity and types of judgment.

THE SEMANTICS OF ROMANIAN UNIVERSAL FREE CHOICE ITEM ORICE

THE SEMANTICS OF ROMANIAN UNIVERSAL FREE CHOICE ITEM ORICE PDF Author: MARA PANAITESCU
Publisher: Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press
ISBN: 6061613016
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book is intended as an addition to the studies on the semantics of determiners, more precisely an analysis of the phenomenon of free choice in the framework of possible words semantics.