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Author: Anna-Lena Wiklund
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110197839
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals is an in-depth investigation of the syntax of verb-verb agreement phenomena in Swedish, including pseudocoordinations of the form John started and wrote 'John started writing' and double participles of the form John had been-able written 'John had been able to write'. Providing evidence from facts concerning extraction, locality, selection, and interpretation, the book argues that the relevant construction types all involve surface variants of "infinitives in disguise"; infinitivals that agree with the matrix clause in tense/mood/aspect. Arguments are presented in favour of taking the dependencies underlying the agreement to be instances of Agree between functional heads of the same label, a configuration that yields restructuring/clause-union. The main theoretical contributions of the book are two: (i) Agreement is proportional to functional structure: The possibility of "copying" a particular morphosyntactic form is contingent on the presence of the corresponding functional projection in the agreeing XP. (ii) Size constancy between restructuring/non-restructuring infinitivals: The category selected by a verb may remain constant between restructuring and non-restructuring configurations. It is suggested that an important aspect of restructuring may be alternation between unmarked (negatively specified) features and unvalued varieties of the same features, capturing properties such as "tenselessness", "finitelessness", etc. of restructuring infinitivals. The book is an important contribution to the syntax of infinitival clauses, the syntax of clause-union/restructuring, and more generally to the syntax of agreement phenomena in natural language. In addition, it provides a general reference source for anyone interested in the syntax of Swedish and other Scandinavian languages.
Author: Anna-Lena Wiklund
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110197839
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Get Book Here
Book Description
Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals is an in-depth investigation of the syntax of verb-verb agreement phenomena in Swedish, including pseudocoordinations of the form John started and wrote 'John started writing' and double participles of the form John had been-able written 'John had been able to write'. Providing evidence from facts concerning extraction, locality, selection, and interpretation, the book argues that the relevant construction types all involve surface variants of "infinitives in disguise"; infinitivals that agree with the matrix clause in tense/mood/aspect. Arguments are presented in favour of taking the dependencies underlying the agreement to be instances of Agree between functional heads of the same label, a configuration that yields restructuring/clause-union. The main theoretical contributions of the book are two: (i) Agreement is proportional to functional structure: The possibility of "copying" a particular morphosyntactic form is contingent on the presence of the corresponding functional projection in the agreeing XP. (ii) Size constancy between restructuring/non-restructuring infinitivals: The category selected by a verb may remain constant between restructuring and non-restructuring configurations. It is suggested that an important aspect of restructuring may be alternation between unmarked (negatively specified) features and unvalued varieties of the same features, capturing properties such as "tenselessness", "finitelessness", etc. of restructuring infinitivals. The book is an important contribution to the syntax of infinitival clauses, the syntax of clause-union/restructuring, and more generally to the syntax of agreement phenomena in natural language. In addition, it provides a general reference source for anyone interested in the syntax of Swedish and other Scandinavian languages.
Author: Ljiljana Progovac
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027233578
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
This volume brings the data that many in formal linguistics have dismissed as peripheral straight into the core of syntactic theory. By bringing together experts from syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, language acquisition, aphasia, and pidgin and creole studies, the volume makes a multidisciplinary case for the existence of nonsententials, which are analyzed in various chapters as root phrases and small clauses (Me; Me First!; Him worry?!; Class in session), and whose distinguishing property is the absence of Tense, and, with it, any syntactic phenomena that rely on Tense, including structural Nominative Case. Arguably, the lack of Tense specification is also responsible for the dearth of indicative interpretations among nonsententials, as well as for their heavy reliance on pragmatic context. So pervasive is nonsentential speech across all groups, including normal adult speech, that a case can be made that continuity of grammar lies in nonsentential, rather than sentential speech.
Author: Charles G. Häberl
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443811432
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 387
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Book Description
Robert Hetzron first organized the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL) at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1973 and passed away only six months after it had completed a quarter century of annual meetings. He would undoubtedly have been pleased to know that NACAL is still going strong, and that ten years after his passing it attracted no fewer than thirty-six scholars from the United States, Canada, and eight other countries, who presented on topics near and dear to his heart such as phonology, morphology, syntax, language contact, classification, subgrouping, and the history of scholarship, in languages such as Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Egyptian, Hebrew, Omotic, and others, as well as the groups to which they pertain. Since he established it, NACAL has served a unique role among the meetings of learned societies in North America. Only a handful of organizations worldwide hold annual meetings dedicated to Afroasiatic linguistics, and NACAL is one of a very small number of venues where linguists from all sub-disciplines and schools of thought meet to share their research. NACAL is also an academic nexus, a unique node at which graduate students at the beginning of their careers rub shoulders with the native speakers of the languages which they study and with the titans of their fields, men and women of an almost legendary stature such as Hetzron himself. This volume contains sixteen contributions from these scholars, on a broad cross-section of topics within the field of Afroasiatic linguistics.
Author: Sjef Barbiers
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848550219
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 495
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Book Description
Contains seventeen papers on microvariation in syntactic doubling. This work provides an overview of the syntactic doubling phenomena attested and of the theoretical analyses available. It discusses the syntactic doubling phenomena including, among others, subject pronoun doubling, WH pronoun doubling, clitic doubling and auxiliary doubling.
Author: Antonio Fábregas
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110670917
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
This monograph explores the properties of passive and middle voice constructions in Norwegian and Swedish, concentrating on the linguistic variation related to these two constructions in Mainland Scandinavian. At an empirical level, we provide a detailed discussion of the morphosyntax and semantics of the two main types of passives in both languages, lexical (s-) and periphrasitic (bli-) passives. At a theoretical level, we propose an architecture of the language faculty where exponents play a central role. Exponents are selected to identify the structures generated by the grammar and provide a platform that make these units interpretable by the sensori-motor and conceptual-intentional interfaces. Exponents this play an essential role in determining the well-formedness of linguistic structures. We demonstrate how different syntactic structures identified and lexicalized by exponents in these two languages are capable of capturing the microvariation observed in the voice systems of these two languages in a straightforward way. The amount of linguistic information (i.e., aspect and mood) identified by each exponent in each language determines the types of complements and specifiers that can be integrated into and lexicalized by a given exponent. Although our approach shares certain affinities with other neo-constructionist approaches, a novel proposal we advance in this book is that exponents are housed in an intermediate level of structure that exists between the narrow syntax and its external interfaces. This exponency-level (Ʃ-structure) allows for a more parsimonious theoretical analysis that does not sacrifice descriptive adequacy.
Author: Barbara Egedi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192644998
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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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.
Author: Evie Coussé
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027264163
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Grammaticalization research has increasingly highlighted the notion of constructions in the last decade. In the wake of this heightened interest, efforts have been made in grammaticalization research to more precisely articulate the largely pretheoretical notion of construction in the theoretical framework of construction grammar. As such, grammaticalization research increasingly interacts and converges with the emerging field of diachronic construction grammar. This volume brings together articles that are situated at the intersection of grammaticalization research and diachronic construction grammar. All articles share an interest in integrating insights from grammaticalization research and construction grammar in order to advance our understanding of empirical cases of grammaticalization. Constructions at various levels of abstractness are investigated, both in well-documented languages, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, Norwegian and English, and in less-described languages, such as Manchu and Mongolian.
Author: Sandra Pereira
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443895571
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Recent studies on the syntax and semantics of complex sentences have dealt with several challenges to the traditional boundaries between coordination and subordination. Some constructions belong to one of the two types according to syntactic criteria but relate to the other type on semantic grounds, whereas other constructions are not compatible with either the canonical syntactic or semantic tests traditionally employed to establish this distinction. Other constructions, by contrast, seem to have evolved in such a way that they now cross the divide between both types. The collection of papers in this volume delves further into the theoretical implications of previous analyses and focuses on a wide array of data from different languages, taking those challenges as a point of departure to develop innovative perspectives and to advance thought-provoking ideas.
Author: Kip K. Sewell
Publisher: Rond Books
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 828
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Book Description
INFINITY IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS… Infinity is commonly assumed to be a logical concept, reliable for conducting mathematics, describing the Universe, and understanding the divine. Most of us are educated to take for granted that there exist infinite sets of numbers, that lines contain an infinite number of points, that space is infinite in expanse, that time has an infinite succession of events, that possibilities are infinite in quantity, and over half of the world’s population believes in a divine Creator infinite in knowledge, power, and benevolence. According to this treatise, such assumptions are mistaken. In reality, to be is to be finite. The implications of this assessment are profound: the Universe and even God must necessarily be finite. The author makes a compelling case against infinity, refuting its most prominent advocates. Any defense of the infinite will find it challenging to answer the arguments laid out in this book. But regardless of the reader’s position, Forever Finite offers plenty of thought-provoking material for anyone interested in the subject of infinity from the perspectives of philosophy, mathematics, science, and theology.
Author: Agnès Celle
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027254047
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This set of eleven articles, by linguists from four different European countries and a variety of theoretical backgrounds, takes a new look at the discourse functions of a number of English connectives, from simple coordinators (and, but) to phrases of varying complexity (after all, the fact is that). Using authentic spoken and written data from varied sources, the authors explore the ways in which current uses of connectives result from the interaction of syntax, semantics and prosody, both over time and through diversity of discourse situations. Most adopt an integrative approach in which speaker-listener or writer-reader relationships are viewed as part and parcel of the linguistic properties of each marker. Because it combines functional, generative and enunciative approaches into a coherent whole with a common explanatory aim, this book will be of interest to linguists, corpus-linguists and all those who investigate the semantics-pragmatics interface.
