Demonstratives

Demonstratives PDF Author: Holger Diessel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027229422
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.

Demonstratives

Demonstratives PDF Author: Holger Diessel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027229422
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.

Demonstratives in Interaction

Demonstratives in Interaction PDF Author: Ritva Laury
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027275815
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This book concerns one of the paradigm examples of grammaticalization, the development of a definite article from a demonstrative determiner. Although standard written Finnish has no articles, the demonstrative se is currently emerging as a definite article in spoken Finnish. This book describes and explains the developing use of se based on a database consisting of spoken narratives from three different periods spanning the last one hundred years. The author proposes that the development from demonstrative to article has its roots in the way that speakers ordinarily use demonstratives in conversation, and provides an analysis of the use of se and the two other Finnish demonstratives, tämä and tuo in a corpus of multi-party conversations, showing that speakers of Finnish use demonstratives to focus attention on important referents and to express and negotiate access to them in the interactive context of ongoing talk, and not primarily to talk about how near or far referents are. The development of se into a general marker of identifiability is shown to be connected with both the focusing function of demonstratives as well as its use for referents which the speaker considers accessible to the addressee.

Demonstratives in discourse

Demonstratives in discourse PDF Author: Åshild Næss
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3961102872
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.

Demonstratives, Deictic Pointing and the Conceptualization of Space

Demonstratives, Deictic Pointing and the Conceptualization of Space PDF Author: Holger Diessel
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889667820
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description


Demonstratives and Grammaticalization

Demonstratives and Grammaticalization PDF Author: Metin Balpınar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429655894
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Demonstratives and Grammaticalization offers an in-depth analysis of the demonstrative system in Turkish. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis dealing with both the synchronic variations in Turkish demonstratives and their grammatical changes. It sheds light on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the demonstratives, systematically describes the various usages of these forms, and provides a unified explanation for the various accounts of their distribution. While the focus is on Turkish, this analysis contributes to our understanding of how a demonstrative system operates in a language with a three-way distinction.

Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective PDF Author: Stephen C. Levinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108424287
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
The definitive guide to demonstratives, which play a key role in language acquisition and use.

Linguistica Uralica

Linguistica Uralica PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description


Atypical Demonstratives

Atypical Demonstratives PDF Author: Marco Coniglio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110560291
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Atypical demonstratives have not received adequate attention in the literature so far, or have even been completely neglected. By providing fresh insights and discussing new facets, this volume contributes to the better understanding of this group of words, starting from specific empirical phenomena, and advances our knowledge of the various properties of demonstratives, their syntactic multi-functionality, semantic feature specifications and pragmatic functions. In addition, some of the papers discuss different grammaticalization processes involving demonstratives, in particular how and from which lexical and morphosyntactic categories they originate cross-linguistically, and which semantic or pragmatic mechanisms play which role in their emergence. As such, the different contributions guide the readers on an adventurous journey into the realm of different exotic species of demonstratives, whose peculiar properties offer new exiting insights into the complex nature of demonstrative expressions themselves.

Demonstratives

Demonstratives PDF Author: Daniel J. Bender
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781634259514
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Written by experienced litigators, trial consultants, and graphic designers, Demonstratives: Definitive Treatise on Visual Persuasion guides lawyers and consultants through the process of creating and using persuasive visuals, and includes over 300 color images as examples.

The World Atlas of Language Structures

The World Atlas of Language Structures PDF Author: Martin Haspelmath
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191531243
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps - all in colour - display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals, tense, word order, and body part terminology. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description of the structural feature in question. The CD provides an interactive electronic version of the database which allows the reader to zoom in on or customize the maps, to display bibliographical sources, and to establish correlations between features. The book and the CD together provide an indispensable source of information for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages. The Atlas will be especially valuable for linguistic typologists, grammatical theorists, historical and comparative linguists, and for those studying a region such as Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe. It will also interest anthropologists and geographers. More than fifty authors from many different countries have collaborated to produce a work that sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to be without it.