Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions PDF Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205914
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions PDF Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205914
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions PDF Author: Andrej Malchukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287163
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
This volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages, but also includes considerations of several African, American, South-East Asian, Australian, and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive, or from active to passive, or participant-to event-centered construction.

Impersonal "si" constructions

Impersonal Author: Roberta D'Alessandro
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110207516
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.

The Early English Impersonal Construction

The Early English Impersonal Construction PDF Author: Ruth Möhlig-Falke
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199777721
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries-their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English-have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. Möhlig-Falke offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. She focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. Her research comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses. It is thus the most comprehensive investigation of the impersonal construction in early English available to date.

Passivization and Typology

Passivization and Typology PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027229805
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
Is the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive, if not universal, has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive, or passive-like constructions, and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active, middle, reflexive), specific semantic meanings such as adversativity, or tense-aspect categories (stative, perfect, preterit). Certain contributors review the passives in various languages and language groups, including languages rarely discussed. Another group of contributors takes a novel theoretical approach toward passivization within a broad typological perspective. Among the languages discussed are Vedic, Irish, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Lithuanian, Mordvin, and Nganasan, next to almost all European languages. Various theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, modern structuralist approaches, Role and Reference Grammar, cognitive semantics, Distributed Morphology, and case grammar have been applied by the different authors.

Constructions and Environments

Constructions and Environments PDF Author: Peter Petré
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019937340X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Peter Petré analyzes: · The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorðan 'become' as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. · The merger of is 'is' and bið 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb, and how it is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. · The co-occurrence of multiple changes that led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity in one fell swoop. In explaining each of these changes, Petré goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb's embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. Using a radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from (changing) frequencies, Petré draws attention to general principles of constructional change, including but not limited to grammaticalization and lexicalization. He proposes novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, Petré explains how each individual's mental grammar can be seen as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition.

Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature

Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature PDF Author: Osamu Imahayashi
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631609668
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
"The first international conference was held at Chiba University in 1-3 September 2005, the second one at Nagoya University in 7-9 September 2007, and the third one at Hiroshima University in 28-30 August 2009"--P. [v].

The Germanic Languages

The Germanic Languages PDF Author: Ekkehard Konig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317799577
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish.

Advances in English Historical Linguistics (1996)

Advances in English Historical Linguistics (1996) PDF Author: Jacek Fisiak
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110161519
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Comprising a selection of papers presented at the Ninth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held in Poznan in August 1996, this volume contains 28 contributions addressing a range of topics, but with an emphasis on morphological and syntactical studies on word-formation, modality and negation, and clause structure in the history of the English language. A more theoretically-oriented strain is represented by contributions treating grammaticalization or lexical diffusion in language change. There are also contributions addressing the historiography of historical linguistics including discussion of past grammarians such as Buchanan or Huish, as well as phonological studies and discussion of the development of Early Modern English. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Cross-cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse

Cross-cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse PDF Author: Paul Bayley
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027227003
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The activity of parliaments is largely linguistic activity: they produce talk and they produce texts. Broadly speaking, the objectives that this discourse aims to satisfy are similar all over the world: to legitimate or contest legislation, to represent diverse interests, to scrutinise the activity of government, to influence opinion and to recruit and promote political actors. But the discourse of different national parliaments is subject to variation, at all linguistic levels, on the basis of history, cultural specificity, and political culture in particular. Through the use of various analytical tools of functional linguistics, this volume seeks to provide explanatory analyses of parliamentary discourse in different countries – Britain, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States – and to explore its peculiarities. Each chapter outlines a particular methodological framework and its application to instances of parliamentary discourse on important issues such as war, European integration, impeachment and immigration.