Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions

Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions PDF 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.

Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions

Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions PDF Author: Carol Lord
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027276854
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

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.

Serial Verb Constructions

Serial Verb Constructions PDF Author: Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199279152
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
A serial verb construction is a sequence of verbs which acts together as one. This oustanding book is the first to study the phenomenon across languages of different typological and genetic profiles. The authors, all experienced linguistic fieldworkers, follow a unified typological approach and avoid formalisms.

Multi-verb Constructions

Multi-verb Constructions PDF Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004194525
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This book surveys multi-verb constructions in multiple languages from the Americas, showing a very rich tapestry of typologically unusual constructions, including serial verbs, auxiliaries, co-verbs, phasal verbs. Where possible, a diachronic perspectrive is offered.

Auxiliary Verb Constructions

Auxiliary Verb Constructions PDF Author: Gregory D.S. Anderson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780199280315
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of auxiliary verb constructions, as in 'he could have been going to drink it' and 'she does eat cheese'. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and he presents his results within a new typological framework.The book's impressive range includes data on variation within and across languages and language families. In addition to examining languages in Africa, Europe, and Asia the author presents analyses of languages in Australasia and the Pacific and in North, South, and Meso-America. In doing so he reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution. His book will interest scholars and researchersin language typology, historical and comparative linguistics, syntax, and morphology.

Complex Predicates

Complex Predicates PDF Author: Alex Alsina i Keith
Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study
ISBN: 9781575860466
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
A variety of approaches to the question of the range and nature of complex predicates.

Unity and diversity in grammaticalization scenarios

Unity and diversity in grammaticalization scenarios PDF Author: Walter Bisang
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234992
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The volume contains a selection of papers originally presented at the symposium on “Areal patterns of grammaticalization and cross-linguistic variation in grammaticalization scenarios” held on 12-14 March 2015 at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. The papers, written by leading scholars combining expertise in historical linguistics and grammaticalization research, study variation in grammaticalization scenarios in a variety of language families (Slavic, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Bantu, Mande, "Khoisan", Siouan, and Mayan). The volume stands out in the vast literature on grammaticalization by focusing on variation in grammaticalization scenarios and areal patterns in grammaticalization. Apart from documenting new grammaticalization paths, the volume makes a methodological contribution as it addresses an important question of how to reconcile universal outcomes of grammaticalization processes with the fact that the input to these processes is language-specific and construction-specific.

New Directions for Historical Linguistics

New Directions for Historical Linguistics PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900441407X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This volume consists of revised versions of presentations given at a roundtable on “New Directions for Historical Linguistics: Impact and Synthesis, 50 Years Later” held at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in San Antonio, Texas, in 2017, as well as an introduction by the editors. The roundtable discussed the evolution of historical linguistics since the 1966 symposium on “Directions for Historical Linguistics,” held in Austin, Texas. Six prominent scholars of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics contributed: William Labov (the only surviving author from the 1968 volume), Gillian Sankoff, Elizabeth Traugott, Brian Joseph, Sarah Thomason, and Paul Hopper (a graduate student assistant at the original symposium).

Morphosyntactic Change

Morphosyntactic Change PDF Author: Bettelou Los
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107012635
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.

Structure and Variation in Language Contact

Structure and Variation in Language Contact PDF Author: Ana Deumert
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027252513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai'i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect - from various perspectives and using different types of data - on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages, including Surinamese creoles, Chinook Jargon, Yiddish, AAVE, Haitian Creole, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties, Nigerian Pidgin, Sri Lankan Malay, Papiamentu, and Bahamian Creole English (Hackert). A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions, and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation, agglutination, negation, TMAs, plural marking, the copula, and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.

Languaging Without Languages

Languaging Without Languages PDF Author: Robin Sabino
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004364595
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Drawing on usage-based theory, neurocognition, and complex systems, Languaging Beyond Languages elaborates an elegant model accommodating accumulated insights into human language even as it frees linguistics from its two-thousand-year-old, ideological attachment to reified grammatical systems. Idiolects are redefined as continually emergent collections of context specific, probabilistic memories entrenched as a result of domain-general cognitive processes that create and consolidate linguistic experience. Also continually emergent, conventionalization and vernacularization operate across individuals producing the illusion of shared grammatical systems. Conventionalization results from the emergence of parallel expectations for the use of linguistic elements organized into syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. In parallel, vernacularization indexes linguistic forms to sociocultural identities and stances. Evidence implying entrenchment and conventionalization is provided in asymmetrical frequency distributions.