Discourse Configurational Languages

Discourse Configurational Languages PDF Author: Katalin É Kiss
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195088344
Category : Generative grammar
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.

Discourse Configurational Languages

Discourse Configurational Languages PDF Author: Katalin É Kiss
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195088344
Category : Generative grammar
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.

Discourse Configurational Languages

Discourse Configurational Languages PDF Author: Katalin 'E. Kiss
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195358503
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.

Why Agree? Why Move?

Why Agree? Why Move? PDF Author: Shigeru Miyagawa
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262265974
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
An argument that not only do movement and agreement occur in every language, they also work in tandem to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power. An unusual property of human language is the existence of movement operations. Modern syntactic theory from its inception has dealt with the puzzle of why movement should occur. In this monograph, Shigeru Miyagawa combines this question with another, that of the occurrence of agreement systems. Using data from a wide range of languages, he argues that movement and agreement work in tandem to achieve a specific goal: to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power. Without movement and agreement, he contends, human language would be merely a shadow of itself, with severe limitation on what can be expressed. Miyagawa investigates a variety of languages, including English, Japanese, Bantu languages, Romance languages, Finnish, and Chinese. He finds that every language manifests some kind of agreement, some in the form of the familiar person/number/gender system and others in the form of what Katalin É. Kiss calls “discourse configurational” features such as topic and focus. A key proposal of his argument is that the computational system in syntax deals with the wide range of agreement types uniformly—as if there were just one system—and an integral part of this computation turns out to be movement. Why Agree? Why Move? is unique in proposing a unified system for movement and agreement across language groups that are vastly diverse—Bantu languages, East Asian languages, Indo-European languages, and others.

Functional Discourse Grammar

Functional Discourse Grammar PDF Author: Kees Hengeveld
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199278105
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive presentation of Functional Discourse Grammar. The authors set out its nature and origins and show how it relates to contemporary linguistic theory. They demonstrate and test its explanatory power and descriptive utility against linguistic facts from over 150 languages across a full range of linguistic families.

Agreement Beyond Phi

Agreement Beyond Phi PDF Author: Shigeru Miyagawa
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262533324
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features. Much attention in theoretical linguistics in the generative and Minimalist traditions is concerned with issues directly or indirectly related to movement. The EPP (extended projection principle), introduced by Chomsky in 1981, appeared to coincide with morphological agreement, and agreement came to play a central role as the driver of movement and other narrow-syntax operations. In this book, Shigeru Miyagawa continues his investigation into a computational equivalent for agreement in agreementless languages such as Japanese. Miyagawa extends his theory of Strong Uniformity, introduced in his earlier book, Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-Based and Discourse-Configurational Languages (MIT Press). He argues that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and discourse configurational features of topic and focus. He looks at various combinations of these two grammatical features across a number of languages and phenomena, including allocutive agreement, root phenomena, topicalization, “why” questions, and case alternation.

Constituent Order in the Languages of Europe

Constituent Order in the Languages of Europe PDF Author: Anna Siewierska
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110812207
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 849

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Phase-based Approach to Russian Free Word Order

A Phase-based Approach to Russian Free Word Order PDF Author: Marina Dyakonova
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russian language
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description


Formal Approaches to Function in Grammar

Formal Approaches to Function in Grammar PDF Author: Andrew Carnie
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027296901
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
The contributions making up this volume in honor of Eloise Jelinek are written from a formalist perspective that deals with stereotypically functionalist questions about language. Jelinek's pioneering work in formalist syntax has shown that autonomous syntax need not exist in a vacuum. Her work has highlighted the importance of incorporating the effects of discourse and information structure on the syntactic representation. This book aims to invoke Jelinek's work either in substance or spirit. The focus is on Jelinek's influential Pronominal Argument Hypothesis as an "non-configurational" language; the influence of discourse-related interface phenomena on syntactic structure; the syntactic analysis of the grammaticalization; interactions between morphology, phonology and phonetics; and foundational issues about the link between formal grammar and function of language, as well as the methodological issues underlying the different approaches to linguistics.

Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe

Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe PDF Author: Giuliano Bernini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110892227
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 657

Get Book Here

Book Description
The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.

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

Get Book Here

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.