The Evolution of Functional Left Peripheries in Hungarian Syntax

The Evolution of Functional Left Peripheries in Hungarian Syntax PDF Author: Katalin É. Kiss
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019101978X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book adopts a generative framework to investigate the diachronic syntax of Hungarian, one of only a handful of non-Indo-European languages with a documented history spanning more than 800 years. Professor É. Kiss and several internationally recognized experts in the field bring together the best in traditional descriptive linguistics and the state-of-the-art in theoretical linguistics to offer an indepth and original survey of some of the most important structural changes in the history of Hungarian. The book specifically focuses on the restructuring of Hungarian syntax from head-final to head-initial, which started in the Proto-Hungarian age. This development led to fundamental structural changes, resulting in the evolution of functional left peripheries on various levels of syntactic structure by the 16th century. Chapters examine a number of related topics, including the emergence of focus, topic, and negative quantifiers, the marking of definiteness, universal quantifiers, and non-finite and finite subordination. The mechanisms of change are those observed in Indo-European languages (reanalysis, grammaticalization, cyclicity), but the paths of change have often been different. The book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in historical and diachronic linguistics, as well as all those interested in the mechanisms and theory of linguistic change.

The Evolution of Functional Left Peripheries in Hungarian Syntax

The Evolution of Functional Left Peripheries in Hungarian Syntax PDF Author: Katalin É. Kiss
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019101978X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book adopts a generative framework to investigate the diachronic syntax of Hungarian, one of only a handful of non-Indo-European languages with a documented history spanning more than 800 years. Professor É. Kiss and several internationally recognized experts in the field bring together the best in traditional descriptive linguistics and the state-of-the-art in theoretical linguistics to offer an indepth and original survey of some of the most important structural changes in the history of Hungarian. The book specifically focuses on the restructuring of Hungarian syntax from head-final to head-initial, which started in the Proto-Hungarian age. This development led to fundamental structural changes, resulting in the evolution of functional left peripheries on various levels of syntactic structure by the 16th century. Chapters examine a number of related topics, including the emergence of focus, topic, and negative quantifiers, the marking of definiteness, universal quantifiers, and non-finite and finite subordination. The mechanisms of change are those observed in Indo-European languages (reanalysis, grammaticalization, cyclicity), but the paths of change have often been different. The book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in historical and diachronic linguistics, as well as all those interested in the mechanisms and theory of linguistic change.

Word Order Change

Word Order Change PDF Author: Ana Maria Martins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191064467
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax. Word order is at the core of natural language grammatical systems, linking syntax with prosody and with semantics and pragmatics. The chapters in this volume use the tools provided by the generative theory of grammar to examine the constrained ways in which historical word order variants have given way to new ones over time. Following an introduction by the editors, the book is divided into four parts that investigate changes regarding the targets for movement within the clausal functional hierarchy; changes (or stability) in the nature of the triggers for movement; verb movement into the left peripheries; and types of movement, with specific focus on word order change in Latin. Data are drawn from a wide variety of languages from different families and from both classical and modern periods, including Sanskrit, Tocharian, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Hungarian, and Coptic Egyptian. The book's broad coverage and combination of language-internal and comparative studies offers new perspectives on the relation between word order change and syntactic movement. The volume also provides a range of wider insights into the properties of natural language and the way in which those properties constrain language variation and change.

The Hungarian Nominal Functional Sequence

The Hungarian Nominal Functional Sequence PDF Author: Éva Dékány
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030634418
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The Hungarian Nominal Functional Sequence combines the methods of syntactic cartography with evidence from compositional semantics in a comprehensive exploration of the structure of Noun Phrases. Proceeding from the lexical core to the top of DP, it uses Hungarian as a window on the underlying universal functional hierarchy of Noun Phrases, but it also regularly complements and supports the analysis with cross-linguistic evidence. The book works out a minimal map of the extended NP in the sense that the proposed hierarchy only has projections which host overt material and it does not draw on semantically empty word order projections. Topics which receive special attention include the syntax of classifiers, demonstratives, proper names, possessive NPs and plural pronouns.

Approaches to Hungarian

Approaches to Hungarian PDF Author: Harry van der Hulst
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265534
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This volume contains a selection of papers from the 12th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Leiden, 2015). The contributions cover a wide range of topics and their significance in generative theorizing. The papers about morphosyntax focus on the formation of comparative clauses, the behavior of particle verbs, scope taking in deverbal nominal constructions, measure constructions, classifier constructions, the mass/count distinction as well as focus and quantifier scope. The papers about phonology investigate coexisting patterns of variation in vowel harmony, the representational account of vowel harmony and the nature of heteromorphemic vowel sequences. While the focus of the volume is on Hungarian, comparison is made with several other languages, such as English, German and Portuguese among others. The broad range of topics discussed in this volume will appeal both to scholars working on Hungarian and to a general audience of generative linguists.

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change PDF Author: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192568744
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the ?P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.

Functional Heads Across Time

Functional Heads Across Time PDF Author: Barbara Egedi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198871538
Category : Functionalism (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data.

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

The Oxford Handbook of Negation PDF Author: Viviane Déprez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019256627X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 955

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Book Description
In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking

The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking PDF Author: Alexandru Mardale
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027261091
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Differential Object marking (DOM), a linguistic phenomenon in which a direct object is morphologically marked for semantic and pragmatic reasons, has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics in the past few years. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages, whereas it has disappeared from others; it is easily acquired by monolingual children, but presents high instability and variability in bilingual acquisition and language contact situations. This edited collection contributes to further our understanding of the nature and development of DOM in the languages of the world, in acquisition, and in language contact, variation, and change. The thirteen chapters in this volume present new empirical data from Estonian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Hindi, Romanian and Basque in different acquisition contexts and learner populations. They also bring together multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives to account for the complexity and dynamicity of this widespread linguistic phenomenon.

Indefinites Between Latin and Romance

Indefinites Between Latin and Romance PDF Author: Chiara Gianollo
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198812663
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners between Latin and the Romance languages. It uses data from Classical and Late Latin texts and from electronic corpora of early Romance to propose a new account of the similarities in the grammar of indefinites across Romance.

Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics

Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics PDF Author: Huba Bartos
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319907107
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This volume offers a selection of interface studies in generative linguistics, a valuable “one-stop shopping” opportunity for readers interested in the ways in which the various modules of linguistic analysis intersect and interact. The boundaries between the lexicon and morphophonology, between morphology and syntax, between morphosyntax and meaning, and between morphosyntax and phonology are all being crossed in this volume. Though its focus is on theoretical approaches, experimental studies are also included. The empirical focus of many of the contributions is on Hungarian, and several chapters respond to work published by István Kenesei, to whom the volume is dedicated.