Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change

Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change PDF Author: Sam Featherston
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110401752
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The intention of this book is to highlight the extent to which more rigorous measurement of grammatical effects can yield insights into grammatical structures and grammatical change. While there is some incidental discussion of methodologies and dat

Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change

Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change PDF Author: Sam Featherston
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110401752
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The intention of this book is to highlight the extent to which more rigorous measurement of grammatical effects can yield insights into grammatical structures and grammatical change. While there is some incidental discussion of methodologies and dat

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics PDF Author: Douglas Biber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316298701
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 757

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Book Description
The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

Merge

Merge PDF Author: Barbara Citko
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262361256
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
An argument that Merge is binary but its binarity refers to syntactic positions rather than objects. In this book, Barbara Citko and Martina Gračanin-Yüksek examine the constraints on Merge--the basic structure-building operation in minimalist syntax--from a multidominant perspective. They maintain that Merge is binary, but argue that the binarity of Merge refers to syntactic positions Merge relates: what has typically been formulated as a constraint that prevents Merge from combining more than two syntactic objects is a constraint on Merge's relating more than two syntactic positions.

Freezing

Freezing PDF Author: Jutta Hartmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501504266
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Displacement is a fundamental property of human language, and the restrictions on displacement have been a central concern in generative grammar ever since Ross' (1967) ground-breaking observations of island constraints. While island phenomena have been investigated in detail from various perspectives, a different domain, the domain of Freezing, originally defined in terms of non-base structures, has received far less attention. This volume brings together papers that address the questions of: What are the different concepts of Freezing? Which empirical domains can they explain? Is Freezing a core-syntactic restriction or does information structure, or processing play a role? The collection of papers provides insights into the empirical basis of the Freezing Principle in relation to other restrictions on extraction in order to contribute to a broader understanding of the nature of restrictions on displacement in language. The overall goal of the volume is a reconsideration of Freezing and other (sub-)extraction phenomena, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective, by bringing together contributions from experts in the field to discuss and broaden our knowledge of the empirical range of Freezing phenomena as well as their explanation.

Grammatical Change in English World-wide

Grammatical Change in English World-wide PDF Author: Peter Collins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789027203755
Category : English languag
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The contributions to this volume apply and extend the techniques of corpus linguistics and diachronic linguistics to the challenge of describing and explaining grammatical change in varieties of English world-wide. The book is divided into two parts, with ten chapters on 'Inner Circle' varieties such as Australian, Canadian, and Irish English, and eight on 'Outer Circle' varieties such as Philippine, Indian, and Nigerian English. Contributors examine a range of topics including the progressive aspect, modal auxiliaries, do-support, verb morphology, and quotatives, using a wide variety of corpus resources. Overarching research questions addressed include the following: Do diachronic tendencies observed in a particular variety converge with, diverge from, or run in parallel with, those in the parent variety? What are the possible causes of changes observed (e.g. English teaching traditions, Americanisation, internal changes in registers)? This book will appeal to linguists, particularly those interested in grammatical description, corpus linguistics and World Englishes.

The Evolution of Grammar

The Evolution of Grammar PDF Author: Joan Bybee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226086658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.

The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II

The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II PDF Author: Richard D. Janda
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118732308
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 717

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Book Description
An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.

Encoding and Navigating Linguistic Representations in Memory

Encoding and Navigating Linguistic Representations in Memory PDF Author: Claudia Felser
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889451321
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 768

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Book Description
Successful speaking and understanding requires mechanisms for reliably encoding structured linguistic representations in memory and for effectively accessing information in those representations later. Studying the time-course of real-time linguistic dependency formation provides a valuable tool for uncovering the cognitive and neural basis of these mechanisms. This volume draws together multiple perspectives on encoding and navigating structured linguistic representations, to highlight important empirical insights, and to identify key priorities for new research in this area.

Measurements of Grammaticalization

Measurements of Grammaticalization PDF Author: David Correia Saavedra
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110753073
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Grammaticalization has often been described as a gradual phenomenon. While many studies have discussed the quantitative aspects of grammaticalization, there has been little to no work that has tried to propose a way of measuring degrees of grammaticalization. This book addresses this gap by proposing a corpus-based approach to the measurement of grammaticalization, using binary logistic regression modelling. Such an approach has theoretical benefits as it can provide empirical evidence for the gradience and gradualness of grammaticalization. It can help substantiate observations that have been done on the basis of case studies so far, such as the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization. In addition, as the methods proposed in this book rely on corpus-based data only, it offers a way of comparing grammaticalization across multiple languages, which is currently a challenging endeavour. What this book hopes to achieve is to start a discussion on the measurement of grammaticalization. To draw a parallel, the field of morphological productivity has greatly benefited from the discussions (and disputes) regarding how its object of study should be measured, and I believe that so will the field of grammaticalization.

Null Subjects in Generative Grammar

Null Subjects in Generative Grammar PDF Author: Federica Cognola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198815859
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This book considers the null-subject phenomenon, whereby some languages lack an overtly realized referential subject in specific contexts. It explores novel empirical data and new theoretical analyses covering the major approaches to null subjects in generative grammar, and examines a wide range of languages from different families.