Tense, Aspect, and Indexicality

Tense, Aspect, and Indexicality PDF Author: James Higginbotham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191716904
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
James Higginbotham's work on tense, aspect, and indexicality explore the principles governing demonstrative, temporal, and indexical expressions in natural language and present new ideas in the semantics of sentence structure.

Tense, Aspect, and Indexicality

Tense, Aspect, and Indexicality PDF Author: James Higginbotham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191716904
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book

Book Description
James Higginbotham's work on tense, aspect, and indexicality explore the principles governing demonstrative, temporal, and indexical expressions in natural language and present new ideas in the semantics of sentence structure.

Tense, Aspect, and Indexicality

Tense, Aspect, and Indexicality PDF Author: James Higginbotham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199239312
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
James Higginbotham's key contributions to work on tense, aspect, and indexicality explore the principles governing demonstrative, temporal, and indexical expressions in natural language and present new ideas in the semantics of sentence structure. A precious resource for students of semantics and syntactic theory in linguistics and philosophy.

Recent Advances in the Syntax and Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality

Recent Advances in the Syntax and Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality PDF Author: Louis de Saussure
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110198762
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation: information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this information has scope over the whole characterization of the eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers (originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses, aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts, aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives, economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality, past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics (general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and logic.

Pragmatic Aspects of Scalar Modifiers

Pragmatic Aspects of Scalar Modifiers PDF Author: Osamu Sawada
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019871422X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This volume examines the meaning of scalar modifiers - expressions such as more than, a bit, and much - from the standpoint of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In natural language, scalar expressions such as comparatives, intensifiers, and minimizers are used for measuring an object or event at a semantic level. However, cross-linguistically scalar modifiers can often be used to express a range of subjective feelings or discourse pragmatic information at the level of conventional implicature (CI). For example, in English more than anything can signal the degree of importance of the given utterance, and in Japanese the minimizer chotto 'a bit' can weaken the degree of imposition of the speech act. In this book, Osamu Sawada draws on data from Japanese and a range of other languages to explore the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers: he claims that although semantic scalar meanings and CI scalar meanings are logically different, the relationship between the two makes it crucial to examine them both together. The volume provides a new perspective on the semantic-pragmatics interface, and will be of interest to researchers and students of Japanese linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, and theoretical linguistics more generally.

Time, Tense, and Reference

Time, Tense, and Reference PDF Author: Aleksandar Jokić
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262600507
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Original essays by philosophers of language and philosophers of time exploring the semantics and metaphysics of tense.

Indexicality

Indexicality PDF Author: Peter Juul Nielsen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110791439
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The book offers the first full-scale focused treatment of linguistic indexicality as a tool for analysis and explanation of the organization of linguistic structures. The book demonstrates the application of the concept of indexicality in the description of a broad range of linguistic phenomena, from the internal workings of morphology via relations within syntactic constructions to lexical and grammatical elements designed to hook on to features outside the clause in the interactional context. The book offers a focused treatment of the general nature of linguistic indexicality in the larger perspective of the semiotics of language, including examinations of domain-straddling indexical functions. It presents studies of the role of indexicality in synchrony and diachrony with descriptive cases from a number of languages from diverse language families and it examines the way indexicality enters into the mechanisms of change, including examinations of semiotic shifts from indexical to symbolic function and vice versa. The book is relevant for researchers and students in historical and synchronic linguistics from a variety of linguistic frameworks with an interest in the role of semiotics in linguistic analysis.

The Roots of Verbal Meaning

The Roots of Verbal Meaning PDF Author: John Beavers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198855788
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, with semantic and grammatical properties determined not just by templates, but also by roots.

The Grammar of Expressivity

The Grammar of Expressivity PDF Author: Daniel Gutzmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192540165
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker. While the expressive function of natural language has been widely studied in recent years, the role that grammar plays in the interpretation of expressive items has been largely neglected in the semantic and pragmatic literature. Daniel Gutzmann demonstrates that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of these utterances, and argues that expressivity is in fact a syntactic feature on a par with other established features such as tense and gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies of expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives; their puzzling properties are accounted for through a minimalist approach to syntactic features and agreement, which shows that expressivity can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and be selected for syntactically. The analysis not only supports the hypothesis of expressive syntax, but also highlights the hidden role that grammar may play in phenomena that are traditionally considered to be solely semantic in nature.

The Place of Case in Grammar

The Place of Case in Grammar PDF Author: Christina Sevdali
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192635417
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
This book deals with the category of case and where to place it in grammar. The crux of the debate lies in how the morphological expression of grammatical function should relate to formal syntax. In the generative tradition, this issue was addressed by the influential proposal that abstract syntactic Case should be dissociated from the morphological expression of case. The chapters in this book deal with a number of key issues in the ongoing debates that have emerged from this proposal. The first part discusses the modes that we need for structural case assignment, and how Case would relate to a theory of parameters. In the second part, contributors explore the division of labour between structural and inherent case, synchronically and diachronically, while the third part investigates individual cases and how they can illuminate case theory. The chapters discuss a wide range of phenomena, including differential object marking (DOM), global case splits, prepositional genitives and other prepositional phrases, nominative infinitival subjects, nominalizations of deponent verbs, and three-place predicates. They also draw on data from a variety of languages and language families, such as Hindi, Lithuanian, Kashmiri, Kinande, Greek, Hiberno-English, Romance, and Sahapatin.

The Grammar of the Utterance

The Grammar of the Utterance PDF Author: Alice Corr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192598503
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with i) vocatives, interjections, and particles; and ii) illocutionary complementizers, items that look like subordinators but behave differently. Alice Corr argues that the behaviour of these conversation-oriented items provides insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. The approach identifies the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer - i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside - and the empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the configurational architecture of grammar also configures the architecture of the mind. The book thus builds on existing work on the syntax of discourse not only by contributing new empirical and theoretical insights, but also by pursuing explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalizes the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. Drawing on a wealth of naturalistic data from social media and online corpora, augmented by elicited introspective judgements, The Grammar of the Utterance offers new insights into the colloquial grammar and morphosyntactic variation of (Ibero-)Romance, and showcases the utility of comparative work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organization of grammar.