Transitivity and Discourse in French

Transitivity and Discourse in French PDF Author: Anna Andreyevna Krusanova
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Transitivity and Discourse in French

Transitivity and Discourse in French PDF Author: Anna Andreyevna Krusanova
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Oral Narration in Modern French

Oral Narration in Modern French PDF Author: Janice Carruthers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351195530
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
"Storytelling is a universal human activity and oral narration - particularly modern 'conversational' narration such as anecdotes or personal stories - has long been fertile ground for linguists working on tense usage across a variety of languages. This book introduces 'performed' oral storytelling into the debate, using data from traditional and contemporary storytellers in French to explore the narrative tenses attested, the discourse-pragmatic effects of tense switching, the structures deployed at points of temporal sequence, as well as broader questions concerning the nature of oral discourse."

A Systemic Functional Grammar of French

A Systemic Functional Grammar of French PDF Author: Alice Caffarel-Cayron
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847141862
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
'[The] consistent interplay between theoretical and applied pursuits has always been a defining feature of systemic functional theory... This kind of mutual enrichment is clearly demonstrated in Alice Caffarel's work. The result is a description which penetrates to the heart of the language, revealing it at one and the same time as a specimen of the human semiotic and a unique resource for the continuous creation of meaning.' Professor M A K Halliday, from the Preface.

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition PDF Author: Michel Aurnague
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292671
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Despite a growing interest for space in language, most research has focused on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among entities (verbs, prepositions, postpositions, case markings...). Little attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities, their status in linguistic descriptions, and their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of this book, that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems, formal accounts of linguistic data, and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies, all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities, while also throwing a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning space and/or the relation between language and cognition.

Language Acquisition Across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems

Language Acquisition Across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems PDF Author: Michèle Kail
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027253145
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
How and why do all children learn language? Why do some have difficulties while others are early language learners? What are the consequences of early bilingualism? Is it possible to reach native-like competence in a foreign language? Although we still cannot fully answer these questions, research during the last two decades has begun to solve some pieces of the puzzle. This book proposes an interdisciplinary collection of writings from some of the best specialists across several fields in cognitive science, offering a wide sample of recent advances in the study of first language acquisition, bilingualism, second language acquisition, and disorders of oral language. It is addressed to all researchers and students interested in language acquisition, as well as to teachers, clinicians and parents, who will find therein many new findings and varied methodological approaches, as well as challenging questions that are still debated and in need of further research.

Studies in Transitivity

Studies in Transitivity PDF Author: Paul J. Hopper
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004368906
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description


The Nominative & Accusative and Their Counterparts

The Nominative & Accusative and Their Counterparts PDF Author: Kristin Davidse
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027228147
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This volume is devoted to the central cases relating to the basic oppositions between subject-object and agent-patient, viz. nominative and accusative, as well as their counterparts such as ergative and absolutive. It aims at contributing to the typological investigation of these cases by providing descriptive studies of ten different languages, not only Romance and Germanic languages, but also Polish and Basque, as well as Cora, Warrwa and Ewe. These studies show that the formal devices used to mark the two nuclear cases may be quite diverse (including non-overt and 'configurational' coding), but that all the languages studied crucially display a subject-object asymmetry, even languages such as Basque and Ewe for which this had been questioned. One of the most striking subthemes to emerge from this collection is the complexity of the object-zone, both with regard to formal and functional diversity. Various studies in the volume also contribute reflections, couched mainly in broadly cognitive-functional terms, about the semantic function of the subject-object contrast and why it is so central across languages.

The Categories of Grammar

The Categories of Grammar PDF Author: Alan Huffman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027281971
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This book offers an analysis of the French clitic object pronouns lui and le in the radically functional Columbia school framework, contrasting this framework with sentence-based treatments of case selection. It suggests that features of the sentence such as subject and object relations, normally taken as pretheoretical categories of observation about language, are in fact part of a theory of language which does not withstand empirical testing. It shows that the correct categories are neither those of structural case nor those of lexical case, but rather, semantic ones. Traditionally, anomalies in the selection of dative and accusative case in French, such as case government, use of the dative for possession and disadvantaging, its use in the faire-causative construction, and other puzzling distributional irregularities have been used to support the idea of an autonomous, non-functional central core of syntactic phenomena in language. The present analysis proposes semantic constants for lui and le which render all their occurrences explicable in a straightforward way. The same functional perspective informs issues of cliticity and pronominalization as well. The solution offered here emerges from an innovative instrumental view of linguistic meaning, an acknowledgment that communicative output is determined only partially and indirectly by purely linguistic input, with extralinguistic knowledge and human inference bridging the gap. This approach entails identification of the pragmatic factors influencing case selection and a reevaluation of thematic-role theory, and reveals the crucial impact of discourse on the structure as well as the functioning of grammar. One remarkable feature of the study is its extensive and varied data base. The hypothesis is buttressed by hundreds of fully contextualized examples and large-scale counts drawn from modern French texts.

Coherence and Grounding in Discourse

Coherence and Grounding in Discourse PDF Author: Russell S. Tomlin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027228817
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
This volume seeks to expand our understanding of the relation holding between discourse relations, cognitive units, and linguistic coding. The twenty contributions in this collection explore one or more of the following themes: How point of view, or the salience of information in discourse, affects the organizational coherence of text and discourse; the concept of cognitive and linguistic event and how events are reflected in text and discourse organization; the nature of linguistic coding of events and other kinds of significant information; and the cognitive bases or cognitive correlates of the linguistic organization of discourse.

The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French

The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French PDF Author: Betsy K. Barnes
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027279616
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
Left detachment constructions (LDs) (e.g. un buffet de campagne, c’est un meuble) are examined in a corpus of informal spontaneous conversation between educated native speakers of French. The overwhelming majority of these constructions are shown to have a clearly pragmatic motivation. The author’s observations support a view of LD in French as a particular type of paratactic structure which should be seen primarily as a feature of unplanned discourse. The analysis partly builds on views expressed by Knud Lambrecht in an earlier contribution tot this series.