Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Grammar 1

Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Grammar 1 PDF Author: Sam A. Mchombo
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications
ISBN: 9780937073728
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The study of Bantu languages of sub-Saharan Africa has provided the basis for significant contributions to research in linguistics. In recent years they have been used to advance morphological as well as syntactic theory, and in the study of interface relations in grammatical theory. The papers assembled in this volume, contributed by leading scholars in Bantu and general linguistics, deal with various aspects of the structure of Bantu languages. Sam A. Mchombo is assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Grammar 1

Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Grammar 1 PDF Author: Sam A. Mchombo
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications
ISBN: 9780937073728
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study of Bantu languages of sub-Saharan Africa has provided the basis for significant contributions to research in linguistics. In recent years they have been used to advance morphological as well as syntactic theory, and in the study of interface relations in grammatical theory. The papers assembled in this volume, contributed by leading scholars in Bantu and general linguistics, deal with various aspects of the structure of Bantu languages. Sam A. Mchombo is assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Grammar 1

Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Grammar 1 PDF Author: Sam A. Mchombo
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The study of Bantu languages of sub-Saharan Africa has provided the basis for significant contributions to research in linguistics. In recent years they have been used to advance morphological as well as syntactic theory, and in the study of interface relations in grammatical theory. The papers assembled in this volume, contributed by leading scholars in Bantu and general linguistics, deal with various aspects of the structure of Bantu languages. Sam A. Mchombo is assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar

On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar PDF Author: Koen Bostoen
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104069
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 862

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Book Description
This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.

Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1

Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1 PDF Author: Tibor Kiss
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110377403
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

Checking Theory and Grammatical Functions in Universal Grammar

Checking Theory and Grammatical Functions in Universal Grammar PDF Author: Hiroyuki Ura
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195353404
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Ura demonstrates that his theory of multiple feature-checking, an extension of Chomsky's Agr-less checking theory, gives a natural explanation for a wide range of data drawn from a variety of languages in a very consistent way with a limited set of parameters.

Theoretical Approaches to Universals

Theoretical Approaches to Universals PDF Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027227706
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The present volume has its origin in the GLOW conference on Universals hosted in Berlin in March 1999. The papers in this volume are concerned both with formal as well as with substantive universals. All the contributions attempt to identify universal properties of the language faculty, as well as the source of cross-linguistic variation. They cover a wide range of empirical phenomena across languages such as locality, deletion, verb classes, XP-split constructions, Quantifier Raising, the EPP, the Person Case Constraint etc. Some of the articles pay particular attention to the organization of the grammar, the type of operations that are effective, the role of features in determining variation, and primitive notions of phrase-structure (c-command, Agree etc.). Others show how structural differences capture semantic and morphological differences within a language and across languages, and how these are the ultimate source of linguistic variation. The book is of primary interest to researchers and students in syntactic theory, comparative syntax, and linguistic variation.

The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar PDF Author: Mary Dalrymple
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104247
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 2192

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Book Description
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.

Applicative Morphology

Applicative Morphology PDF Author: Sara Pacchiarotti
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110778025
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.

Encoding Events

Encoding Events PDF Author: Xuhui Hu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019253596X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This volume presents theoretical and empirical research on the syntax of events within the broader framework of generative grammar, focusing on the central question of how conceptual meaning interacts with narrow syntactic computation. Xuhui Hu proposes a set of integration conditions that require the content of the predicate to be licensed by theta-role information generated by narrow syntax. The other principal theoretical component of the book concerns the functional structure of events, which is related to issues such as the parallel between the event and nominal domains, the mapping of a predicate onto an entity, and the grammatical foundation of verb classification. The framework is applied to three areas: the syntax of resultatives in English and Chinese, cross-linguistic and diachronic variation in resultatives, and applicative constructions. The findings shed light on the thematic relationship between core arguments and predicates and on the syntax of non-core arguments, contribute to the theory of parametric variation in the generative tradition, and provide insights into the verb-framed vs satellite-framed typology

The Syntax of Anaphoric Binding

The Syntax of Anaphoric Binding PDF Author: Mary Dalrymple
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language (CSLI)
ISBN: 9781881526063
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Mary Dalrymple provides a theory of the syntax of anaphoric binding, couched in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Cross-linguistically, anaphoric elements vary a great deal. One finds long- and short-distance reflexives, sometimes within the same language; pronominals may require local noncoreference or coreference only with nonsubjects. Analyses of the syntax of anaphoric binding which have attempted to fit all languages into the mold of English are inadequate to account for the rich range of syntactic constraints that are attested. How, then, can the cross-linguistic regularities exhibited by anaphoric elements be captured, while at the same time accounting for the diversity that is found? Dalrymple shows that syntactic constraints on anaphoric binding can be expressed in terms of just three grammatical concepts: subject, predicate, and tense. These concepts define a set of complex constraints, combinations of which interact to predict the wide range of universally available syntactic conditions that anaphoric elements obey. Mary Dalrymple is a member of the research staff of the Natural Language Theory and Technology group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.