Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation

Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation PDF Author: M. Shimojo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230505384
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Japanese is well known for its array of argument encoding types - but how is speakers' choice of encoding types to be described? This book investigates the encoding of subject and direct object in conversational Japanese and attempts to explain Japanese argument encoding as a unified system. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of a bank of conversation are provided, with the emphasis on speakers' use of the encoding types rather than their acceptability for given arguments.

Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation

Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation PDF Author: M. Shimojo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230505384
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Japanese is well known for its array of argument encoding types - but how is speakers' choice of encoding types to be described? This book investigates the encoding of subject and direct object in conversational Japanese and attempts to explain Japanese argument encoding as a unified system. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of a bank of conversation are provided, with the emphasis on speakers' use of the encoding types rather than their acceptability for given arguments.

Salience of Information in Japanese

Salience of Information in Japanese PDF Author: Mitsuaki Shimojo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009421816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
'Salience' is a linguistic phenomenon whereby information that is 'given', or 'new', is distributed and presented within a sentence in particular ways that convey its relevance. Although it has been widely described as the speaker's linguistic choices based on the hearer's perspective, it has received less attention as the speaker's manipulations of the hearer's cognitive states. This timely study redresses that balance by analysing several morphosyntactic phenomena in Japanese, drawing on a wide range of authentic language examples. Taking a functionalist perspective, it brings together studies of grammar and discourse, which are often described separately, and deploys the combined grammar-discourse approach in Role and Reference Grammar, the structural-functionalist theory in which syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are equally central to our understanding of language. It also offers an analysis of second language (L2) learners' Japanese discourse, and demonstrates the relevance of that analysis to issues outside of traditional second language research.

Different Slants on Grammaticalization

Different Slants on Grammaticalization PDF Author: Sylvie Hancil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027252815
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This volume on grammaticalization focuses on new theoretical and methodological challenges underpinning language change. It provides new approaches and insights deepening our understanding of the cognitive, pragmatic, and socio-cultural mechanisms that trigger the formation and the change of grammars. In this volume, grammaticalization is dealt with diachronically, synchronically and as a by-product of dialogic interaction. Another key feature of this book is language diversity; as it includes studies on language families ranging from Niger-Congo, Koreanic, Japonic, Sino-Tibetan to Germanic and Romance. The novel aspects of grammaticalization addressed are new slants on the fundamental debate about grammaticalization as expansion vs reduction; the grammatical formation of ideophones; the semantic domain of fear as a source and a trigger of grammatical change, and many other aspects of semantic and morphosyntactic development.

Investigations of the Syntax–Semantics–Pragmatics Interface

Investigations of the Syntax–Semantics–Pragmatics Interface PDF Author: Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290334
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface presents on-going research in Role and Reference Grammar in a number of critical areas of linguistic theory: verb semantics and argument structure, the nature of syntactic categories and syntactic representation, prosody and syntax, information structure and syntax, and the syntax and semantics of complex sentences. In each of these areas there are important results which not only advance the development of the theory, but also contribute to the broader theoretical discussion. In particular, there are analyses of grammatical phenomena such as transitivity in Kabardian, the verb-less numeral quantifier construction in Japanese, and an unusual kind of complex sentence in Wari’ (Chapakuran, Brazil) which not only illustrate the descriptive and explanatory power of the theory, but also present interesting challenges to other approaches. In addition, there are papers looking at the implications and applications of Role and Reference Grammar for neurolinguistic research, parsing and automated text analysis.

Information Structuring of Spoken Language from a Cross-linguistic Perspective

Information Structuring of Spoken Language from a Cross-linguistic Perspective PDF Author: M. M. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393352
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Information structure and the organization of oral texts have been rarely studied crosslinguistically. This book contains studies of the grammatical organization of information in languages from different areas (e.g. Amazonian, Finno-Ugric, South-Asian) from a variety of theoretical angles. It will be a valuable resource for researchers investigating the interaction of morphosyntax and discourse in familiar and less familiar languages.

The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics PDF Author: Yoko Hasegawa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316952754
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 778

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Book Description
The linguistic study of Japanese, with its rich syntactic and phonological structure, complex writing system, and diverse sociohistorical context, is a rapidly growing research area. This book, designed to serve as a concise reference for researchers interested in the Japanese language and in typological studies of language in general, explores diverse characteristics of Japanese that are particularly intriguing when compared with English and other European languages. It pays equal attention to the theoretical aspects and empirical phenomena from theory-neutral perspectives, and presents necessary theoretical terms in clear and easy language. It consists of five thematic parts including sound system and lexicon, grammatical foundation and constructions, and pragmatics/sociolinguistics topics, with chapters that survey critical discussions arising in Japanese linguistics. The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics will be welcomed by general linguists, and students and scholars working in linguistic typology, Japanese language, Japanese linguistics and Asian Studies.

Usage-based and Typological Approaches to Linguistic Units

Usage-based and Typological Approaches to Linguistic Units PDF Author: Tsuyoshi Ono
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259836
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of ‘unit’ in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and interactional linguistics. This volume contributes to and extends this discussion by examining the nature of units in actual usage in a range of genetically and typologically unrelated languages, English, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Mandarin, engaging with fundamental theoretical issues. The chapters show that categories originally created for the description of Indo-European languages have limited usefulness if our goal is to understand the nature of human language in general. The authors thus question the status of traditionally accepted linguistic units, especially their static understanding as a priori entities, and suggest instead that an emergent and interactional view of both structure and function offers a better fit with the data from the languages examined. Originally published as special issue 43:2 (2019) of Studies in Language.

New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar

New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar PDF Author: Wataru Nakamura
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443834270
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar presents a broad picture of current developments in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a version of parallel structure grammar with an emphasis on typological adequacy. Since its inception, RRG has been applied to a wide range of languages, in particular to case marking, complex clauses (e.g. control, raising, and serial verb constructions), unaccusativity/unergativity, and the interplay between syntax and information structure. The present book is a continued investigation of the intermodular correspondence in a variety of languages and comprises 13 papers, which not only contribute to the further development of the theory, but also investigate controversial areas of linguistic theory including inflectional and derivational morphology, verbal semantics and argument structure (anticausative and serial verb constructions), the argument-adjunct distinction, an extended typology of complex clauses, the syntax-information structure interface, and interactions between the lexicon and constructions. In addition, three papers illustrate how RRG may be applied to sign languages, language acquisition, and machine translation from Arabic to English.

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis PDF Author: Bernd Heine
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199677077
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1217

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Book Description
This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interactions between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis offers an indispensable guide for everyone researching any aspect of language including those in linguistics, comparative philology, cognitive science, developmental philology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, computational science, and artificial intelligence. This second edition has been updated to include seven new chapters looking at linguistic units in language acquisition, conversation analysis, neurolinguistics, experimental phonetics, phonological analysis, experimental semantics, and distributional typology.

The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure

The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure PDF Author: Caroline Féry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199642672
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 993

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Book Description
This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.