Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect

Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect PDF Author: Susan Deborah Rothstein
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027233745
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
The papers in this volume investigate the semantics of aspect from both a theoretical and cross linguistic point of view, in a wide range of languages from a number of different language families. The papers are all informed by the belief that a thorough exposure to the expression of aspect cross-linguistically is crucial for progess in understanding how the semantics of aspect and what the semantic basis of aspectual distinctions is. The languages discussed include Russian, English, Dutch, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and Kalaallisut. The issues discussed in this volume include the centrality of measuring and counting in an understanding of telicity; the importance of the singular/plural distinction in the study of aspect, the importance of homogeneity as a property of event types, the flexibility of lexical classes, and the interaction between expressions of aspect and the particular morphosyntactic structure of a language.

Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect

Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect PDF Author: Susan Deborah Rothstein
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027233745
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Get Book Here

Book Description
The papers in this volume investigate the semantics of aspect from both a theoretical and cross linguistic point of view, in a wide range of languages from a number of different language families. The papers are all informed by the belief that a thorough exposure to the expression of aspect cross-linguistically is crucial for progess in understanding how the semantics of aspect and what the semantic basis of aspectual distinctions is. The languages discussed include Russian, English, Dutch, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and Kalaallisut. The issues discussed in this volume include the centrality of measuring and counting in an understanding of telicity; the importance of the singular/plural distinction in the study of aspect, the importance of homogeneity as a property of event types, the flexibility of lexical classes, and the interaction between expressions of aspect and the particular morphosyntactic structure of a language.

Aspect and Reference Time

Aspect and Reference Time PDF Author: Olga Borik
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191516244
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book investigates the temporal structure of language. It deals with central issues in the understanding of tense and aspect, proposes a new approach to the main problems in the area, and seeks to establish the universal semantic properties of two important and contentious aspectual categories, perfectivity and imperfectivity. Dr Borik develops an original theory of aspect. She shows how this accounts for aspectual categories in Russian, and that it can used to compare Russian to other languages where similar aspectual issues arise. She devotes particular attention to English, a language which appears to have no grammatical categories of perfectivity and imperfectivity. She argues that the semantic properties established for the Russian tense-aspect system are reflected in English, and reveals parallels in the expression of temporal and aspectual information in the two languages. Aspect and Reference Time will interest all scholars of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of aspect and tense. The author's clear exposition and cross-linguistic approach make it a useful basis for courses at graduate level.

Perspectives on Aspect

Perspectives on Aspect PDF Author: Henk J. Verkuyl
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402032323
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.

The Parameter of Aspect

The Parameter of Aspect PDF Author: C.S. Smith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401579113
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
During the period I have been working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation, for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. ANational Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, allowed me time to pursue this project. I also thank the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas for research support. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Östen Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentIess comments and questions throughout. The individuals with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real difference to the working out of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including cOlloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and the University of Tel Aviv.

Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality

Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality PDF Author: Dalila Ayoun
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263906
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus, some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods, while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French, German, English, Spanish) and also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Avar, Andi, Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective.

Semantics. Volume 2

Semantics. Volume 2 PDF Author: Klaus von Heusinger
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110255073
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1079

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (VON HEUSINGER ET AL.) BD. 33.2 HSK E-BOOK".

Events, States and Times

Events, States and Times PDF Author: Daniel Altshuler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110485915
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb ‘now’ and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and times and proposes that ‘now’ seeks a prominent state that holds throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles of discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative progression in a discourse. The theme of the second part of the monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic predictions of the analysis are considered, including their consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light of the hypothesis. The monograph is directed at graduate students and researchers in semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of language. The analysis of narrative discourse that is developed in the monograph synthesizes and builds on prior collaborative research with Corien Bary, Valentine Hacquard, Thomas Roberts, Roger Schwarzschild, Una Stojnić, Károly Varasdi and Aaron White. Daniel Altshuler is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College and an Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Telicity, Change, and State

Telicity, Change, and State PDF Author: Violeta Demonte
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199693501
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.

Russian verbal prefixation

Russian verbal prefixation PDF Author: Yulia Zinova
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961102988
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This book addresses the complexity of Russian verbal prefixation system that has been extensively studied but yet not explained. Traditionally, different meanings have been investigated and listed in the dictionaries and grammars and more recently linguists attempted to unify various prefix usages under more general descriptions. The existent semantic approaches, however, do not aim to use semantic representations in order to account for the problems of prefix stacking and aspect determination. This task has been so far undertaken by syntactic approaches to prefixation, that divide verbal prefixes in classes and limit complex verb formation by restricting structural positions available for the members of each class. I show that these approaches have two major drawbacks: the implicit prediction of the non-existence of complex biaspectual verbs and the absence of uniformly accepted formal criteria for the underlying prefix classification. In this book the reader can find an implementable formal semantic approach to prefixation that covers five prefixes: za-, na-, po-, pere-, and do-. It is shown how to predict the existence, semantics, and aspect of a given complex verb with the help of the combination of an LTAG and frame semantics. The task of identifying the possible affix combinations is distributed between three modules: syntax, which is kept simple (only basic structural assumptions), frame semantics, which ensures that the constraints are respected, and pragmatics, which rules out some prefixed verbs and restricts the range of available interpretations. For the purpose of the evaluation of the theory, an implementation of the proposed analysis for a grammar fragment using a metagrammar description is provided. It is shown that the proposed analysis delivers more accurate and complete predictions with respect to the existence of complex verbs than the most precise syntactic account.

Semantics. Volume 1

Semantics. Volume 1 PDF Author: Claudia Maienborn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110226618
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 989

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (MAIENBORN ET AL.) BD. 33.1 HSK E-BOOK".