Author: Ana Maria Martins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198747306
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax and offers new insights into word order, syntactic movement, and related phenomena. It draws on data from a wide range of languages including Sanskrit, Tocharian, Portuguese, Irish, Hungarian and Coptic Egyptian.
Author: Susann Fischer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255407
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
followed by the loss of morphology. --Book Jacket.
Author: Chaofen Sun
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804724180
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
The goal of this pioneering work is to make available to Chinese linguists, as well as linguists in general, the results of the most recent research - not only the author's but that of scholars all over the world - on two of the most discussed topics in the history of Chinese: word-order change and grammaticalization.
Author: Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902729920X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
While Modern Icelandic exhibits a virtually uniform VO order in the VP, Old(er) Icelandic had both VO order and OV order, as well as ‘mixed’ word order patterns. In this volume, the author both examines the various VP-word order patterns from a descriptive and statistical point of view and provides a synchronic and diachronic analysis of VP-syntax in Old(er) Icelandic in terms of generative grammar. Her account makes use of a number of independently motivated ideas, notably remnant-movement of various kinds of predicative phrase, and the long movement associated with “restructuring” phenomena, to provide an analysis of OV orders and, correspondingly, a proposal as to which aspect of Icelandic syntax must have changed when VO word order became the norm: the essential change is loss of VP-extraction from VP. Although this idea is mainly supported here for Icelandic, it has numerous implications for the synchronic and diachronic analysis of other Germanic languages.
Author: John A Hawkins
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483296601
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
Word Order Universals
Author: Rosanna Sornicola
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027284717
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
The issue of permanence and change of word-order patterns has long been debated in both historical linguistics and structural theories. The interest in this theme has been revamped by contemporary research in typology with its emphasis on correlation or ‘harmonies’ of structures of word-order as explicative principles of both synchronic and diachronic processes. The aim of this book is to stimulate a critical reconsideration of perspectives and methods in the study of continuities and discontinuities of word-order patterns. Bringing together contributions by specialists of various theoretical backgrounds and with expertise in different language families or groups (Caucasian, Hamito-Semitic, and — among Indo-European — Hittite, Greek, Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic, Romance), the book addresses issues like the notions of stability, variation and change of word-order and their interrelations, the interplay of syntactic and pragmatic factors, and the role of internal and external factors in synchronic and diachronic dynamics of word-order. The book contains a selection of papers presented at a workshop held at the XIII International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Düsseldorf, August 1997) and additonal invited contributions.
Author: Charles N. Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
Author: John S. Bowers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107096758
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
This book proposes that the fundamental building blocks of syntax are relations between words rather than constituents formed from words.
Author: Doris L. Payne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027229058
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
For some time the assumption has been widely held that for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a "basic" order of subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other facts of the language, the "basic" order constitutes a useful way of typologizing languages. New debate has arisen over varying definitions of "basic," with investigators encountering languages where branding a particular order of grammatical relations as basic yielded no particular insightfulness. This work asserts that explanatory factors behind word order variation go beyond the syntactic and are to be found in studies of how the mind grammaticizes forms, processes information, and speech act theory considerations of speakers' attempts to get their hearers to build one, rather than another, mental representation of incoming information. Thus three domains must be distinguished in understanding order variation: syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic. The works in this volume explore various aspects of this assertion.
Author: Carol Lord
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027276854
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
This work examines both historical and comparative evidence in documenting the sweep of diachronic change in the context of serial verb constructions. Using a wide range of data from languages of West Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, it demonstrates how shifts in meaning and usage result in syntactic, morphological and lexical change. The process by which verbs lose lexical semantic content and develop case-marking functions is described; it is argued that the change is directional, from verb to preposition (or postposition) to affix, along a grammaticalization continuum. This same grammaticalization process is shown to result in the development of complementizers, adverbial subordinators, conjunctions, adverbs and auxiliaries from verbs. Strong parallels across languages are found in the meanings of the verbs that become “defective” and in the functions they come to mark. The changes are documented in detail, with examples from a number of languages illustrating the effect of the changes on typology and word order, implications for the encoding of definiteness and aspect, and the relevance of notions such as discourse topic, foreground and transitivity. With respect to theoretical assumptions and terminology, the author has taken a relatively nonpartisan approach, and the discussion is accessible to students of language as well as of interest to theoreticians.
