Author: Johan Van Der Auwera
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317933478
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
This book is a collection of linguistic and philosophical papers dealing with the semantic problems of determiners. The language under investigation is mostly English, although a few papers deal with French and German, and, to a lesser extent, with Dutch, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. The majority of the contributions focus on the semantics of the definite and indefinite articles, leading into discussions of anaphoricness, specificness, opacity and transparency, referentiality and attributiveness and genericness. The relation of the determiners to other parts of grammar, in particular relativisation and predication, is also investigated. Some attention is also given to quantifiers. In the spirit of pluralism, there is no single paradigm unifying all the papers, rather, the volume reflects elements of the Extended Standard Theory, Generative Semantics, Montague Grammar, (Gricean) Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory.
Author: Jila Ghomeshi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902725530X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
This volume brings together recent work on the formal and interpretational properties of determiners across a variety of typologically and geographically unrelated languages. It seeks to answer the core question of modern linguistic theory: Which properties of languages are universal and which are variable? In recent theorizing, much of language variation is argued to stem from differences in the properties of features associated with functional heads. As such, this volume can be viewed as a case study of one such category: the determiner (D). The contributions all investigate the status of D as a language universal by examining the language-specific syntactic and semantic properties associated with this category. This volume will appeal to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, as well as to those who have more a specific interest in determiners and noun phrases.
Author: Carrie Gillon
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443863483
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
This book investigates the properties of determiners in Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Salish. Determiners in Skwxwú7mesh are shown to behave significantly differently from the definite determiner the in English, as Skwxwú7mesh lacks a definite/indefiniteness distinction. All Skwxwú7mesh DPs can be used in both familiar and novel contexts, and are not required to refer to a unique entity. Instead, Skwxwú7mesh determiners are split along deictic/non-deicticlines. Determiners can therefore vary in terms of their semantics. However, determiners are argued to universally encode contextual sensitivity (domain restriction). A strict correlation between the syntax and semantics of determiners is proposed: if an article occupies D, it is context sensitive. Conversely, articles that do not occupy D are not context sensitive. This book also explores determiner systems in other Salish languages. Deixis is a part of most of the Salish determiner systems, but the systems vary quite a bit from one another. Other languages discussed include Inuttut (Labrador Inuktitut), Lithuanian and Maori.
Author: Diana Guillemin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027252602
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalism and Formal Semantics, this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners, which agglutinated to nouns, resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms, that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as 'type shifting operators' that shift Kinds into predicates, and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity, and the mapping of their form and function.
Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270694
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
This book is a research monograph that investigates the crosslinguistic distribution of multiple determiners. In some languages, noun phrases permit or even seem to require a double or multiple realization of definite/indefinite markers in certain modification environments. The book develops tools that can be used to keep the different instantiations of the phenomenon apart and argues that a uniform account thereof is not desirable. On the basis of these tools, it advances the proposal that there are different types of multiple occurrences of determiners (and sub-types thereof), some are syntactic, while others are purely morphological. It then puts forth a theoretical proposal that regulates the presence of the different types of multiple determiners across languages. The book will be of interst to researchers and students working on the structure of DP, the syntax of modification and the typology of noun phrases. Languages discussed include Greek, Romanian, Scandinavian, English, dialects of German, Hebrew, Albanian, Chinese, French, and Slovenian.
Author: Albert Oosterhof
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027255051
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
This monograph is a comprehensive study of the various ways in which genericity can be expressed in Dutch, dialects of Dutch, and languages related to Dutch. On the basis of empirical (corpus- and questionnaire-based) data, a wide range of topics are discussed which have been addressed in the literature on the semantics and pragmatics of generics. The empirical data presented in this book shed new light on issues crucial to the study of genericity. A number of widely accepted ideas are shown to be problematic. For example, arguments are presented against the well-known claim that progressive forms typically exclude characterizing interpretations. Furthermore, the author shows that speakers do not agree in their judgements of the acceptability of bare plurals (as well as other noun phrase types) in generic contexts. Such data are a problem for the influential thesis that bare plurals refer to kinds unambiguously.
Author: Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415266352
Category : Semantics
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
Author: Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415266345
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Author: Glyn Morrill
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3662441217
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19 International Conference on Formal Grammar 2014, collocated with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information in August 2014. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 19 submissions. Traditionally linguistics has been studied from the point of view of the arts, humanities and letters, but in order to make concrete ideas which might otherwise be fanciful the study of grammar has been increasingly subject to the rigours of computer science and mathematization i.e. articulation in the language of science.
Author: Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027271356
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 930
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Book Description
Based on recent research in formal linguistics, this volume provides a thorough description of the whole system of Romanian Noun Phrases, understood in an extended sense, that is, in addition to nouns, pronouns and determiners, it examines all the adnominal phrases: genitive-marked DPs, adjectives, relative clauses, appositions, prepositional phrases, complement clauses and non-finite modifiers. The book focuses on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface but also includes a systematic morphological description of the language. The implicitly comparative description of Romanian contained in the book can serve as a starting point for the study of the syntax/semantics of Noun Phrases in other languages, regardless of whether or not they are typologically related to Romanian. This book will be of special interest to linguists working on Romanian, Romance languages, comparative linguistics and language typology, especially because Romanian is relevant for comparative linguistics not only as a Romance language, but also as part of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund.
