Transitivity Alternations in Diachrony

Transitivity Alternations in Diachrony PDF Author: Nikolaos Lavidas
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443818100
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Τhis book offers a new approach to the theory of change in argument structure and voice morphology. It investigates the diachrony of transitivity, and especially the changes in causative verbs and transitivity alternations, based on data mainly from the Greek and English diachrony (all historical data are transcribed and accompanied by glosses and translations into Modern English). Data from earlier periods provide new information on burning questions in both Historical and Theoretical Linguistics. The study shows that (a) causativisations are the result of reanalysis of intransitive verbs as transitive on the basis of the linguistic cue of Case; (b) the changes in voice morphology do not depend on the derivation and direction of new transitivity alternations. Finally, the study demonstrates that the generalisation that guides the changes in voice demands morphological differentiation of the anticausative from the passive types.

Transitivity Alternations in Diachrony

Transitivity Alternations in Diachrony PDF Author: Nikolaos Lavidas
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443818100
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Τhis book offers a new approach to the theory of change in argument structure and voice morphology. It investigates the diachrony of transitivity, and especially the changes in causative verbs and transitivity alternations, based on data mainly from the Greek and English diachrony (all historical data are transcribed and accompanied by glosses and translations into Modern English). Data from earlier periods provide new information on burning questions in both Historical and Theoretical Linguistics. The study shows that (a) causativisations are the result of reanalysis of intransitive verbs as transitive on the basis of the linguistic cue of Case; (b) the changes in voice morphology do not depend on the derivation and direction of new transitivity alternations. Finally, the study demonstrates that the generalisation that guides the changes in voice demands morphological differentiation of the anticausative from the passive types.

The Diachrony of Written Language Contact

The Diachrony of Written Language Contact PDF Author: Nikolaos Lavidas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004503560
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Nobody can deny that an account of grammatical change that takes written contact into consideration is a significant challenge for any theoretical perspective. Written contact of earlier periods or from a diachronic perspective mainly refers to contact through translation. The present book includes a diachronic dimension in the study of written language contact by examining aspects of the history of translation as related to grammatical changes in English and Greek in a contrastive way. In this respect, emphasis is placed on the analysis of diachronic retranslations: the book examines translations from earlier periods of English and Greek in relation to various grammatical characteristics of these languages in different periods and in comparison to non-translated texts.

The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Literary Koine Greek

The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Literary Koine Greek PDF Author: Robert Crellin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119243548
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Literary Koine Greek incorporates linguistic insights from both neo-Davidsonian and Chomskyan traditions to present a unified semantic description of the perfect and pluperfect in literary Koine Greek. Offers a comprehensive and unified account of the Greek perfect that considers its behaviour in terms of tense and aspect, as well as voice (or diathesis) Features insights from the neo-Davidsonian and Chomskyan semantic traditions while addressing the perfect tense in Koine Greek Incorporates syntactic and semantic frameworks to provide an account of the perfect in terms of the causative alternation and aspectual classes of predicate Utilizes a large corpus of material that has not been previously discussed in a linguistic sense relating to the question of the semantics of the Greek perfect

Descriptive Grammar and Diachrony of Kurima

Descriptive Grammar and Diachrony of Kurima PDF Author: Aleksandra Jarosz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004680543
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Book Description
Spoken on Kurima, a miniscule island in the Miyakojima municipality in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, Kurima-Miyako is a South Ryukyuan topolect, a regional variant of the Miyako language. With most fluent speakers aged 80 or older and the island’s depopulation progressing, the topolect of Kurima faces imminent extinction, a reflection of a common pattern in the Ryukyus, whereupon the vernaculars of small islands and isolated remote areas have been facing multifold minorization for decades on the part of the dominant variety/varieties of the area (Shimoji and Hirara in the case of Kurima), Okinawan, and standard Japanese. Responding to the urgent task of producing a comprehensive description while it still has native speakers, the present volume is the first ever attempt at a systemic presentation of the Kurima topolect in any language. It also uses comparative evidence from Ryukyuan and Mainland Japonic languages to provide new proto-language reconstructions and offer insights into the history of Japonic languages.

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change PDF Author: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192568744
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the ?P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.

Transitive Nouns and Adjectives

Transitive Nouns and Adjectives PDF Author: John Jeffrey Lowe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019879357X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives, a rare linguistic phenomenon. The data is set in the wider historical context, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan, and analysed from diachronic, typological, and theoretical perspectives.

The Morphosyntax of Transitions

The Morphosyntax of Transitions PDF Author: Víctor Acedo-Matellán
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198733283
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state, taking as a starting point Talmy's typological generalization that classifies languages as either 'satellite-framed' or 'verb-framed'. In verb-framed languages, such as those of the Romance family, the information about the predicate is encoded by the verb. Satellite-framed languages, on the other hand, can be further subdivided into weak satellite-framed languages, in which theinformation is expressed by a prefix on the verb, and strong satellite-framed languages, in which it is expressed by a preposition. In this volume, Víctor Acedo-Matellán explores the similarities betweenLatin and Slavic in their expression of events of transition: neither allows the expression of complex adjectival resultative constructions and both express the result state or location of a complex transition through prefixes. They are therefore analysed as weak satellite-framed languages, along with Ancient Greek and some varieties of Mandarin Chinese, and stand in contrast to strong satellite-framed languages such as English, the Germanic languages in general, and Finno-Ugric. This variationis explained in terms of the morphological properties of the head expressing transition, Path, which is argued to be prefixal in weak but not in strong satellite-framed languages. On the other hand,in verb-framed languages like Romance, Path is strictly adjacent to the eventive head v. The analysis is couched in a neo-constructionist approach to argument structure, which accounts for the verbal elasticity shown by Latin, and a Distributed Morphology approach to the syntax-morphology interface.

The Diachrony of Verb Meaning

The Diachrony of Verb Meaning PDF Author: Elly van Gelderen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351719025
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This innovative volume offers a comprehensive account of the study of language change in verb meaning in the history of the English language. Integrating both the author’s previous body of work and new research, the book explores the complex dynamic between linguistic structures, morphosyntactic and semantics, and the conceptual domain of meaning, employing a consistent theoretical treatment for analyzing different classes of predicates. Building on this analysis, each chapter connects the implications of these findings from diachronic change with data from language acquisition, offering a unique perspective on the faculty of language and the cognitive system. In bringing together a unique combination of theoretical approaches to provide an in-depth analysis of the history of diachronic change in verb meaning, this book is a key resource to researchers in historical linguistics, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and the history of English.

Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax

Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax PDF Author: Eric Mathieu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191065021
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The chapters in this volume address the process of syntactic change at different granularities. The language-particular component of a grammar is now usually assumed to be nothing more than the specification of the grammatical properties of a set of lexical items. Accordingly, grammar change must reduce to lexical change. And yet these micro-changes can cumulatively alter the typological character of a language (a macro-change). A central puzzle in diachronic syntax is how to relate macro-changes to micro-changes. Several chapters in this volume describe specific micro-changes: changes in the syntactic properties of a particular lexical item or class of lexical items. Other chapters explore links between micro-change and macro-change, using devices such as grammar competition at the individual and population level, recurring diachronic pathways, and links between acquisition biases and diachronic processes. This book is therefore a great companion to the recent literature on the micro- versus macro-approaches to parameters in synchronic syntax. One of its important contributions is the demonstration of how much we can learn about synchronic linguistics through the way languages change: the case studies included provide diachronic insight into many syntactic constructions that have been the target of extensive recent synchronic research, including tense, aspect, relative clauses, stylistic fronting, verb second, demonstratives, and negation. Languages discussed include several archaic and contemporary Romance and Germanic varieties, as well as Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, among many others.

Studies in the Morpho-Syntax of Greek

Studies in the Morpho-Syntax of Greek PDF Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443808253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The volume presents a collection of papers of recent generative work on Modern Greek morpho-syntax. The book is divided into three parts. Part I of the book deals with argument alternations, part II with clitics and part III with the syntax and semantics of free relatives. The book will be interesting for scholars working on Greek but also in theoretical linguistics, as it exemplifies how the study of Greek feeds the development of generative theory. The issues discussed in the book are currently highly relevant for the develop­ment of a satisfactory theory of comparative syntax as well as the interface between syntax and morphology and syntax and semantics. Thus the analyses put forth here will contribute to the elaboration of such a theory and to our understanding of cross-linguistic variation.