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Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192582569
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This volume explores the question of why languages - even those spoken in the same geographical area by people who share similar social structures, occupations, and religious beliefs - differ in the meanings expressed by their grammatical systems. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Marielle Butters outline a new methodology to explore these differences, and to discover the motivations behind the emergence of meanings. The motivations that they identify include: the communicative need triggered when the grammatical system inherently produces ambiguities; the principle of functional transparency; the opportunistic emergence of meaning, whereby unoccupied formal niches acquire a new function; metonymic emergence, whereby a property of an existing function receives a formal means of its own, thus creating a new function; and the emergence of functions through language contact. The book offers new analyses of a range of phenomena across different languages, such as benefactives and progressives in English, and point of view of the subject and goal orientation in Chadic languages. It also draws on a wealth of data from other languages including French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and a variety of less familiar Sino-Russian idiolects.
Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191879838
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This volume explores the question of why languages - even those spoken in the same geographical area by people who share similar social structures, occupations, and religious beliefs - differ in the meanings expressed by their grammatical systems. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Marielle Butters outline a new methodology to explore these differences, and to discover the motivations behind the emergence of meanings. The motivations that they identify include: the communicative need triggered when the grammatical system inherently produces ambiguities; the principle of functional transparency; the opportunistic emergence of meaning, whereby unoccupied formal niches acquire a new function; metonymic emergence, whereby a property of an existing function receives a formal means of its own, thus creating a new function; and the emergence of functions through language contact. The book offers new analyses of a range of phenomena across different languages, such as benefactives and progressives in English, and point of view of the subject and goal orientation in Chadic languages. It also draws on a wealth of data from other languages including French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and a variety of less familiar Sino-Russian idiolects.
Author: Hugh Chisholm
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 1016
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Book Description
Author: M. A. K. Halliday
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ingles - Enseąnza
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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Book Description
Author: Pieter A. Verburg
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027284377
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 613
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Book Description
When Pieter Verburg (1905-1989) published Taal en Functionaliteit in 1952, the work was received with admiration by linguistic scholars, though the number of those who could read the Dutch text for themselves remained limited. The title alludes to the theories of linguistic function set out in 1936 by Karl Bühler, but Verburg regards the three functions of discourse — focussing respectively on the speaker, the person addressed and the matter discussed — as no more than sub-functions of the human function of speech. His central concern is to explore the relationships between thought and language, and language and reality; and the work sets out to provide a historical analysis of views on these relationships in the period 1100 to 1800. The great strength of the work lies in the way in which the views of language are related to contemporaneous moves in philosophy and science, contrasting essentially the mediaeval acceptance of authority, the beginnings of induction in the Renaissance, the dependence of early rationalism on calculation based on axiomatic truths, and the further development of independent observation. All these trends are reflected in the way men thought about language, as well as in the way they used it. Much has been written on the history of linguistics since this book was written, but it still offers a unique view of the development of thinking about language.
Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198844298
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
This volume explores the question of why languages differ in the meanings expressed by their grammatical systems. It offers a new methodology to explore the differences and the motivations behind the emergence of meanings, based on data from a wide range of languages, including English, French, Polish, Chadic languages, and Sino-Russian idiolects.
Author: Klaus J. Kohler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107170729
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Prosody in English, German and Chinese is outlined as a principal component of linguistic form for communicative functions in speech interaction.
Author: Howard Jackson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 144112151X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
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Author: Simon Kirby
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191583529
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
This book explores issues at the core of modern linguistics and cognitive science. Why are all languages similar in some ways and in others utterly different? Why do languages change and change variably? How did the human capacity for language evolve, and how far did it do so as an innate ability? Simon Kirby looks at these questions from a broad perspective, arguing that they can (indeed must) be studied together. The author begins by examining how far the universal properties of language may be explained by examining the way it is used, and how far by the way it is structured. He then considers what insights may be gained by combining functional and formal approaches. In doing so he develops a way of treating language as an adaptive system, in which its communicative and formal roles are both crucial and complementary. In order to test the effectiveness of competing theories and explanations, Simon Kirby develops computational models to show what universals emerge given a particular theory of language use or acquisition. He presents here both the methodology and the results. Function, Selection, and Innateness is important for its argument, its methodology, and its conclusions. It is a powerful demonstration of the value of looking at language as an adaptive system and goes to the heart of current debates on the evolution and nature of language.
Author: Chris Knight
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521786966
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous levels of social cooperation. Phonetic competence correspondingly reflects social pressures for vocal imitation, learning, and other forms of social transmission. Distinctively human social and cultural strategies gave rise to the complex syntactical structure of speech. This book, presenting language as a remarkable social adaptation, testifies to the growing influence of evolutionary thinking in contemporary linguistics. It will be welcomed by all those interested in human evolution, evolutionary psychology, linguistic anthropology, and general linguistics.
Author: Angela D. Friederici
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262036924
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
A comprehensive account of the neurobiological basis of language, arguing that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language. Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us, although we seldom think about it. Language is also an extremely complex entity with subcomponents responsible for its phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects. In this landmark work, Angela Friederici offers a comprehensive account of these subcomponents and how they are integrated. Tracing the neurobiological basis of language across brain regions in humans and other primate species, she argues that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language. Friederici shows which brain regions support the different language processes and, more important, how these brain regions are connected structurally and functionally to make language processes that take place in milliseconds possible. She finds that one particular brain structure (a white matter dorsal tract), connecting syntax-relevant brain regions, is present only in the mature human brain and only weakly present in other primate brains. Is this the “missing link” that explains humans' capacity for language? Friederici describes the basic language functions and their brain basis; the language networks connecting different language-related brain regions; the brain basis of language acquisition during early childhood and when learning a second language, proposing a neurocognitive model of the ontogeny of language; and the evolution of language and underlying neural constraints. She finds that it is the information exchange between the relevant brain regions, supported by the white matter tract, that is the crucial factor in both language development and evolution.
