Verb Valency Changes

Verb Valency Changes PDF Author: Albert Álvarez González
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265267
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This volume surveys a variety of verb valency change phenomena among diverse languages and from diverse theoretical viewpoints. It offers typological studies comparing languages in topics like applicative polysemy, complex predicate formation and locative alternation, but also works describing the different valency-changing operations in specific languages including West Circassian, Huasteca Nahuatl, Tlachichilco Tepehua and Seri, and works dealing with specific valency change constructions, such as tla- constructions in Nahuatl, resultatives in Yaqui, antipassives in Mocoví, and labile verbs in Arabic. This book aims to put this variety of backdrops in perspective and to clarify the notion and mechanisms of verb valency change. Both scholars and expert readers will get in these works a better understanding of the different verb valency changing operations and of the typological aspects involved in this phenomenon, together with a better grasp of how argument realization and verb morphology are connected in some languages.

Verb Valency Changes

Verb Valency Changes PDF Author: Albert Álvarez González
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265267
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume surveys a variety of verb valency change phenomena among diverse languages and from diverse theoretical viewpoints. It offers typological studies comparing languages in topics like applicative polysemy, complex predicate formation and locative alternation, but also works describing the different valency-changing operations in specific languages including West Circassian, Huasteca Nahuatl, Tlachichilco Tepehua and Seri, and works dealing with specific valency change constructions, such as tla- constructions in Nahuatl, resultatives in Yaqui, antipassives in Mocoví, and labile verbs in Arabic. This book aims to put this variety of backdrops in perspective and to clarify the notion and mechanisms of verb valency change. Both scholars and expert readers will get in these works a better understanding of the different verb valency changing operations and of the typological aspects involved in this phenomenon, together with a better grasp of how argument realization and verb morphology are connected in some languages.

Changing Valency

Changing Valency PDF Author: Robert M. W. Dixon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521660394
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Distinguished scholars examine the phenomena of passives and causatives in languages from around the world.

Valence Changes in Zapotec

Valence Changes in Zapotec PDF Author: Natalie Operstein
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027267782
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Zapotec languages present a wide range of lexical, morphological, phonological, and syntactic means of indicating valence changes. Despite their significant theoretical interest, detailed descriptions of valence-changing phenomena in Zapotec are rare, comparative studies are practically non-existent, and Zapotec contributions to the general typology of valence-changing phenomena still remain largely untapped. The present volume addresses this imbalance by being the first to explore Zapotec valence-changing constructions in depth, and to highlight their broad comparative, typological, and theoretical significance. This book contains both write-ups of contributions to the Special Session on Valence-Changing Devices in Zapotecan (annual meeting of SSILA, 2012) and specially commissioned chapters. It will be of interest to Zapotecanists, Otomangueanists, Mesoamericanists, typologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticians, and general linguists with an interest in valence-changing phenomena, and may also be used as supplementary reading in field methods and typology courses.

Morphosyntactic Change

Morphosyntactic Change PDF Author: Bettelou Los
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107012635
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.

Valency in Verbs and Verb-related Structures

Valency in Verbs and Verb-related Structures PDF Author: Anna Malicka-Kleparska
Publisher: Sounds ¿ Meaning ¿ Communication
ISBN: 9783631777121
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The volume deals with valency phenomena in verbs and complex deverbal lexical structures (nominalizations, adjectivizations and synthetic compounds) in a variety of languages (English, Polish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, Hebrew, Ga and Bantu languages). The proposed analyses are couched in lexically and syntactically driven approaches.

Frame-Constructional Verb Classes

Frame-Constructional Verb Classes PDF Author: Ryan Dux
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027261016
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar. On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions. This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.

Language Contact and Change in the Americas

Language Contact and Change in the Americas PDF Author: Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027267332
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
This unique collection of articles in honor of Marianne Mithun represents the very latest in research on language contact and language change in the Indigenous languages of the Americas. The book aims to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into how and why languages change, especially with regard to contact phenomena in languages of North America, Meso-America and South America. The individual chapters cover a broad range of topics, including sound change, morphosyntactic change, lexical semantics, grammaticalization, language endangerment, and discourse-pragmatic change. With chapters from distinguished scholars and talented newcomers alike, this book will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in internally- and externally-motivated language change.

Change of Object Expression in the History of French

Change of Object Expression in the History of French PDF Author: MIchelle Troberg
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144385011X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This comprehensive case study of a systematic shift in object expression provides insight into the construal of a class of two-place activity verbs in the history of French and proposes that a change in the prepositional system underlies the shift. The book focuses on nineteen verbs of helping and hindering whose single internal object shifts from indirect to direct object during the 15th and 16th century. It describes how these verbs are distinguished from all other verbs that take indirect objects in French and explains why only their indirect object was the target of change. Troberg offers a detailed examination of the data to show that contrary to previous approaches to the problem, the shift was neither random nor a result of low-level analogical changes. An important outcome of the study links the shift in object expression to other changes in the grammar at the end of the Middle French period. The author argues that the loss of the syntactically derived Path meaning, available to simple prepositions in the earlier stages of French, not only brings about the decisive shift in object expression, but also triggers the loss of a number of resultative secondary predicate constructions at the same time.

Voice and Argument Structure in Baltic

Voice and Argument Structure in Baltic PDF Author: Axel Holvoet
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027267952
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The second volume in the VARGReB series deals with voice in the wider sense, encompassing both alternations that preserve semantic valency, with passives as the most typical instance, and valency-changing devices such as the causative. Regarding the former, special attention is given to event-structural conditions on passivization, non-canonical passives, and the relation between passives and (active) impersonals. Papers dealing with causatives focus on valency patterns and argument marking in canonical as well as extended uses of causative morphology. Other articles consider converse constructions and the argument structure of middles, which seem to hold a position between voice in the narrow sense and valency-changing operations. An introductory article provides background information on the repertoire of voice alternations in Baltic from a cross-linguistic perspective. Representing different approaches and methods, the contributions to this volume offer fine-grained analyses of data from contemporary Latvian and Lithuanian.

Case Studies from Austronesia, the Pacific, the Americas, and Theoretical Outlook

Case Studies from Austronesia, the Pacific, the Americas, and Theoretical Outlook PDF Author: Andrej Malchukov
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110429349
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 872

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Book Description
Earlier empirical studies on valency have looked at the phenomenon either in individual languages or a small range of languages, or have concerned themselves with only small subparts of valency (e.g. transitivity, ditransitive constructions), leaving a lacuna that the present volume aims to fill by considering a wide range of valency phenomena across 30 languages from different parts of the world. The individual-language studies, each written by a specialist or group of specialists on that language and covering both valency patterns and valency alternations, are based on a questionnaire (reproduced in the volume) and an on-line freely accessible database, thus guaranteeing comparability of cross-linguistic results. In addition, introductory chapters provide the background to the project and discuss its main characteristics and selected results, while a series of featured articles by leading scholars who helped shape the field provide an outside perspective on the volume’s approach. The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in valency and argument structure, irrespective of theoretical persuasion, and will serve as a model for future descriptive studies of valency in individual languages.