Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts

Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts PDF Author: Renaat Declerck
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110869330
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts.

Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts

Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts PDF Author: Renaat Declerck
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110869330
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts.

Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English

Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English PDF Author: Peter C. Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134923627
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Systematic analysis of the discourse-functions of clefts and pseudo-clefts, providing information on the frequency of these constructions in different genres, and preventing the `tidying-up' found in examples devised by the linguist.

Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English

Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English PDF Author: Peter C. Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131742137X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
First published in 1991, this book examines the communicative properties of ‘cleft’ and ‘pseudo-cleft’ constructions in contemporary English. The book argues that these properties cannot be ignored in any attempt to provide an adequate grammatical description of the constructions. Furthermore, they provide a source of explanations for the patterns of stylistic variation displayed by clefts and pseudo-clefts. The book reports findings from a corpus-based study of clefts and pseudo-clefts in modern British English.

Cleft Structures

Cleft Structures PDF Author: Katharina Hartmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027271127
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The phenomenon of clefts is beyond doubt a golden oldie. It has captivated linguists of different disciplines for decades. The fascination arises from the unique syntax of clefts in interaction with their pragmatic and semantic interpretation. Clefts structure sentences according to the information state of the constituents contained in them. They are special as they exhibit a rather uncommon syntactic form to achieve the separation of the prominent part, either focal or topical, from the background of the clause. Despite the long-lasting interest in clefts, linguists have not yet come to an agreement on many basic questions. The articles contained in this volume address these issues from new theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on data from about 50 languages from all over the world, this volume presents new arguments for the proper derivation of clefts, and contributes to the ongoing debate on the information-structural impact of cleft structures. Theoretically, it combines modern syntactic theorizing with investigations at the interface between grammar and information-structure.

Structural-Functional Studies in English Grammar

Structural-Functional Studies in English Grammar PDF Author: Mike Hannay
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292590
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This collection presents a number of studies in the lexico-grammar of English which focus on the one hand on close reading of language in context and on the other hand on current functional theoretical concerns. The various contributions represent distinct functionalist models of language, including Functional Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar, Systemic-Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar. Taken together, however, they typify current work being conducted from the grammatical perspective within the functionalist enterprise, emphasizing on the relation between structure and usage. A fundamental goal of the enterprise is to identify linguistic structures which are constrained by specific features of use, or which actually encode specific features of use, as many of the contributions here show.

Ancient Texts and Modern Readers

Ancient Texts and Modern Readers PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004402918
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
This collection of articles by an international group of specialists presents original research, new lines of inquiry, and novel insights on subjects related to ancient Hebrew linguistics, Bible translation, and biblical interpretation.

Copular Clauses

Copular Clauses PDF Author: Line Mikkelsen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294135
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses, and its relation to other kinds of copular structures, predicational and equative clauses in particular. Based on evidence from Danish and English, I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses — one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit — but differ in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization, where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position, the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse. Equative clauses are argued to be fundamentally different.

The Blackwell Companion to Syntax

The Blackwell Companion to Syntax PDF Author: Martin Everaert
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405178418
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 3285

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Book Description
*** Pre-Order The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, second edition, publishing December 2017. Find out more at www.companiontosyntax.com *** This long-awaited reference work marks the culmination of numerous years of research and international collaboration by the world’s leading syntacticians. There exists no other comparable collection of research that documents the development of syntax in this way. Under the editorial direction of Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, this 5 volume set comprises 70 case studies commissioned specifically for this volume. The 80 contributors are drawn from an international group of prestigious linguists, including Joe Emonds, Sandra Chung, Susan Rothstein, Adriana Belletti, Jim Huang, Howard Lasnik, and Marcel den Dikken, among many others. A unique collection of 70 newly-commissioned case studies, offering access to research completed over the last 40 years. Brings together the world’s leading syntacticians to provide a large and diverse number of case studies in the field. Explores a comprehensive range of syntax topics from an historical perspective. Investigates empirical domains which have been well-documented and which have played a prominent role in theoretical syntax at some stage in the development of generative grammar. Serves as a research tool for not only theoretical linguistics but also the various forms of applied linguistics. Contains an accessible alphabetical structure, with an index integral to each volume featuring keywords and key figures. Each multi-volume set is also accompanied by a CD Rom of the entire Companion. Like the prestigious Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series, this multi-volume work, in the new The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Linguistics series, can be relied upon to deliver the quality and expertise with which Blackwell Publishing’s linguistics list is associated.

It-Clefts

It-Clefts PDF Author: Caterina Bonan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110734141
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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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.

Clefts and Their Relatives

Clefts and Their Relatives PDF Author: Matthew Reeve
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255687
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Cleft constructions have long presented an analytical challenge for syntactic theory. This monograph argues that clefts and related constructions cannot be analysed in a straightforwardly compositional manner. Instead, it proposes that the locality conditions on modification (for example by a restrictive relative clause) must be reformulated such that they account for the apparent compositionality of DP-internal modification whilst also permitting 'discontinuous' modification of the type which is independently needed for constructions such as relative clause extraposition. The empirical focus of the book is on clefts in English and Russian, which have a similar interpretation but considerably divergent syntactic structures. The author argues that, despite these syntactic differences, both types of cleft are mapped to their semantic interpretations in the same manner. This monograph will be essential reading for those working on cleft constructions and copular sentences more generally, and will be of interest to those working on the syntax-semantics interface.