Thetics and Categoricals

Thetics and Categoricals PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260877
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role, i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with sub­ject inversion, subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text begin­nings, jokes, stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives, thus speech acts without com­mu­nicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contribu­tions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences, but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which, in contrast to German and English, sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.

Thetics and Categoricals

Thetics and Categoricals PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260877
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role, i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with sub­ject inversion, subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text begin­nings, jokes, stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives, thus speech acts without com­mu­nicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contribu­tions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences, but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which, in contrast to German and English, sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.

Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics

Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108861083
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
What do we mean when we say things like 'If only we knew what he was up to!' Clearly this is more than just a message, or a question to our addressee. We are expressing simultaneously that we don't know, and also that we wish to know. Several modes of encoding contribute to such modalities of expression: word order, subordinating subjunctions, sentences that are subordinated but nevertheless occur autonomously, and attitudinal discourse adverbs which, far beyond lexical adverbials of modality, allow the speaker and the listener to presuppose full agreement, partial agreement under presupposed conditions, or negotiation of common ground. This state of the art survey proposes a new model of modality, drawing on data from a variety of Germanic and Slavic languages to find out what is cross-linguistically universal about modality, and to argue that it is a constitutive part of human cognition.

Mouton Classics

Mouton Classics PDF Author:
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110886006
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 886

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Book Description
Mouton proudly presents this collection of articles considered to be representative of author achievements over the past quarter-century of its publishing history. A selection, of course, can do little more than make the readers wish for more; it is hoped that these volumes will do just that. The book contains essays on Phonology, Morphology, Formal Syntax, Functional Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Language and Cognition, Language Acquisition, Discourse and Text, Sociology of Language, Semiotics.

Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe

Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe PDF Author: Giuliano Bernini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110892227
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.

Focus and Secondary Predication

Focus and Secondary Predication PDF Author: Susanne Winkler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110815214
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Reconnecting Form and Meaning

Reconnecting Form and Meaning PDF Author: Caroline Gentens
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027254494
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This volume is intended as a celebration of Kristin Davidse’s work and its impact within the broad traditions of cognitive, functional and usage-based grammars. Reflecting this wide functionalist lens, the contributions develop ideas central to Neo-Firthian theories of grammar (in particular, Semiotic Grammar and SFL), the Prague School, Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), and broader cognitive-functional (e.g. Construction Grammar) and usage-based approaches (e.g. Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization theory, corpus-based sociolinguistics). The range of topics addressed makes the volume particularly relevant to linguists investigating information structure, construction grammar, functional discourse grammar, spatial deixis, pronoun and case systems, and/or the semantics of verbal constructions.

Diversity in African languages

Diversity in African languages PDF Author: Doris L. Payne
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234704
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
Diversity in African Languages contains a selection of revised papers from the 46th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Oregon. Most chapters focus on single languages, addressing diverse aspects of their phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, information structure, or historical development. These chapters represent nine different genera: Mande, Gur, Kwa, Edoid, Bantu, Nilotic, Gumuzic, Cushitic, and Omotic. Other chapters investigate a mix of languages and families, moving from typological issues to sociolinguistic and inter-ethnic factors that affect language and accent switching. Some chapters are primarily descriptive, while others push forward the theoretical understanding of tone, semantic problems, discourse related structures, and other linguistic systems. The papers on Bantu languages reflect something of the internal richness and continued fascination of the family for linguists, as well as maturation of research on the family. The distribution of other papers highlights the need for intensified research into all the language families of Africa, including basic documentation, in order to comprehend linguistic diversities and convergences across the continent. In this regard, the chapter on Daats’íin (Gumuzic) stands out as the first-ever published article on this hitherto unknown and endangered language found in the Ethiopian-Sudanese border lands.

Information Structure and Sentence Form

Information Structure and Sentence Form PDF Author: Knud Lambrecht
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316582418
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.

Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics

Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics PDF Author: K. Mulligan
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940090505X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Phenomenology was in large part the discovery of Edmund Husserl, whose Logical Investigations of 1900/01 are normally regarded as the work that launched the phenomenological movement. Yet Husserl's phenomenology, in particular in the form in which it is set out in this his most important contribution to philosophy, is itself part of an Austrian philosophical tradi tion inspired by Brentano and continued, in very different ways, by Meinong, Stumpf, Twardowski, Ehrenfels, Husserl - and Marty. Like Brentano and all his heirs Marty's philosophical interests were in the philosophy of mind, where this is taken to include or at least ground the philosophy of language, and analytic metaphysics. It is Marty's discussions of topics in these two areas that provide the contributions to this volume with their subject-matter. The papers by Roderick Chisholm, S.-Y. Kuroda, Barry Smith, Peter Simons, Rosaria Egidi, Karl Schuhmann, Elmar Holenstein, Edgar Morscher, Wolf gang Wenning and myself were presented at the 1984 conference on Anton Marty in Fribourg, Switzerland. Our host in Fribourg was Guido Kung, the conference was made possible by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. I should like to thank both for their help. Geneva, April 1988 KEVIN MULLIGAN Xl Abbreviations Employed in the Text Anton Marty's two major works, the Untersuchungen and the posthumously published Raum und Zeit are referred to in what follows in the following style. U Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, Vol. I (only volume published). Halle a. S.

Aspect and Predication

Aspect and Predication PDF Author: Gillian Ramchand
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198236511
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book investigates the systematic correspondences between syntactic structure and semantic interpretation in the domain of predicate-argument relationships. It takes as its starting point the striking effects of nominal argument interpretation on aspectual semantics, pursuing the intuition that these effects are not quirky or exceptional, but are in fact the most visible reflexes of a more pervasive and systematic interaction between the aspectual event structure of a predicate and its arguments. The Scottish Gaelic language is the empirical base of the investigation, as it exhibits a set of predicational structures which interact in a highly visible way with its aspectual system. The book provides a detailed working out of a semantic system of argument classification which moves away from lexically-driven thematic roles in the traditional sense and towards a more constrained, syntactically motivated, set of primitives.