Existential Sentences in English

Existential Sentences in English PDF Author: Gary L. Milsark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317931580
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word ‘existential’ in a linguistic investigation, the author reserved the term existential sentence (ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed, non-deictic, ‘existential’ there. Thus the term will be used as a characterisation of a class of syntactic objects, not as a semantic description. With ES sentences including formations such as ‘There were several people talking’ and ‘There ensued a riot’, perhaps nowhere else do we find so clearly displayed the complexity and subtlety of the syntactic and semantic interactions which determine the nature of human language.

Existential Sentences in English

Existential Sentences in English PDF Author: Gary L. Milsark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317931580
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word ‘existential’ in a linguistic investigation, the author reserved the term existential sentence (ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed, non-deictic, ‘existential’ there. Thus the term will be used as a characterisation of a class of syntactic objects, not as a semantic description. With ES sentences including formations such as ‘There were several people talking’ and ‘There ensued a riot’, perhaps nowhere else do we find so clearly displayed the complexity and subtlety of the syntactic and semantic interactions which determine the nature of human language.

Existential Sentences in English

Existential Sentences in English PDF Author: Gary L. Milsark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description


Existential Sentences in English

Existential Sentences in English PDF Author: Gary L. Milsark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Existential Sentences

Existential Sentences PDF Author: Michael Lumsden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317933710
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
What is the relationship between the structure of existential sentences and their meaning? How do hearers interpret existential sentences using pragmatic assumptions? This study attempts to account for the relationship between the structure of existential sentences (ES) and their meaning. The study of ES has received a great deal of attention because the construction has complex syntactic properties, is associated with restrictions of a semantic nature, and provides an interesting area for investigation at a pragmatic level.

Existential Sentences in English, Swedish, German, and Icelandic

Existential Sentences in English, Swedish, German, and Icelandic PDF Author: Christer Platzack
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Book Description


Existential Sentences in English and Lithuanian

Existential Sentences in English and Lithuanian PDF Author: Violeta Kalėdaitė
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Existential sentences in the world's languages tend to develop specific morphological, syntactic, and lexical properties. The present work offers a contrastive functional analysis of these constructions in two typologically unrelated languages, English and Lithuanian. The study focuses on the relationship between the syntactic structure of different existential sentence types and their meaning; it also explores the semantic and pragmatic parameters relevant to the structural differences within a single language and across the two compared languages. Most importantly, a new definition of the existential sentence, which takes into account both semantic and syntactic criteria, is proposed for Lithuanian. The findings are drawn on the basis of the corpus and highlight conspicuous differences in the linguistic representations of the construction in the two languages. With respect to Lithuanian, communicative word order variations, language-specific structures (the BKI and the impersonal passive), and a wider use of lexical verbs present an area of special interest. Contents: The English existential: definition and classification -- General characteristics: structural patterns -- Semantic types -- Word order -- The interpretation of there -- Verbs in the construction -- The definiteness restriction -- Lithuanian existentials: the semantics of the basic sentence patterns -- Types of 'be' existentials -- Communicative types of existential sentences -- Semantic classes of acceptable lexical verbs -- Definite and indefinite subject NPs -- Language-specific existential structures.

Fsp of English Existential Sentences

Fsp of English Existential Sentences PDF Author: Kateřina Velká
Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9783659468193
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
The book deals with the Functional sentence perspective of English existential sentences. In the theoretical part of the paper, the reader is acquainted with essential information concerning syntactic, semantic and functional description of English existential sentences. Chapter 3 offers information about syntactic structure of existential there-constructions and its relationship with regular SVO sentence structure. In the following chapter, semantic variation among existential sentences is discussed. In Chapter, Firbasian theory of FSP is introduced, focusing especially on communicative dynamism and degrees of communicative dynamism distributed by different sentence elements. Dynamic semantic functions, dynamic semantic scales, and factors influencing the distribution of FSP are introduced as well. The analytical part is based on analysis of a corpus of 250 English existential sentences that were subjected to a functional description. Sentences are grouped in accord with what dynamic semantic scale they represent. Three groups of scales are descriptively analysed. Afterwards, conclusions defining general patterns and tendencies of the FSP of English existential sentence are drawn.

The Representation of (in)definiteness

The Representation of (in)definiteness PDF Author: Eric J. Reuland
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262181266
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The Representation of(In)definiteness collects the most important current research, reflecting a wide range of approaches, on a central theoretical issue in linguistics: characterizing the distinction between definite and indefinite expressions. The authors of these 11 original essays, which draw on current work in theoretical syntax and semantics, were charged by the editors to take more than usual heed of alternative analyses offered by other theories, thereby promoting cross fertilization of syntactic and semantic ideas, concepts, and argumentation. The project as a whole is grounded in the belief that explicit comparison of seemingly incompatible approaches is essential to improve our understanding of the nature and structure of natural language. Eric J. Reuland and Alice ter Meulen are Professors of Linguistics at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the University of Washington respectively. The Representation of (In)definiteness is fourteenth in the series Current Studies in Linguistics, edited by Samuel Jay Keyser.

English existentials in functional grammar

English existentials in functional grammar PDF Author: Michael Hannay
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111334317
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description


Truth without Predication

Truth without Predication PDF Author: R. Szekely
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137483296
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject–predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.