Invariance, Markedness, and Distinctive Feature Analysis

Invariance, Markedness, and Distinctive Feature Analysis PDF Author: Y. Tobin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781556195655
Category : Distinctive features (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume provides a new kind of contrastive analysis of two unrelated languages -- English and Hebrew -- based on the semiotic concepts of invariance, markedness and distinctive feature theory. It concentrates on linguistic forms and constructions which are remarkably different in each language despite the fact that they share the same familiar classifications and labels. Tobin demonstrates how and why traditional and modern syntactic categories such as grammatical number; verb tense, aspect, mood and voice; conditionals and interrogatives; etc., are not equivalent across languages. It is argued that these so-called universal concepts function differently in each language system because they belong to distinct language-specific semantic domains which are marked by different sets of semantic features. The data used in this volume have been taken from a wide range of both spoken and written discourse and texts reflecting people's actual use of language presented in their relevant linguistic and situational contexts.

Invariance, Markedness, and Distinctive Feature Analysis

Invariance, Markedness, and Distinctive Feature Analysis PDF Author: Y. Tobin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781556195655
Category : Distinctive features (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume provides a new kind of contrastive analysis of two unrelated languages -- English and Hebrew -- based on the semiotic concepts of invariance, markedness and distinctive feature theory. It concentrates on linguistic forms and constructions which are remarkably different in each language despite the fact that they share the same familiar classifications and labels. Tobin demonstrates how and why traditional and modern syntactic categories such as grammatical number; verb tense, aspect, mood and voice; conditionals and interrogatives; etc., are not equivalent across languages. It is argued that these so-called universal concepts function differently in each language system because they belong to distinct language-specific semantic domains which are marked by different sets of semantic features. The data used in this volume have been taken from a wide range of both spoken and written discourse and texts reflecting people's actual use of language presented in their relevant linguistic and situational contexts.

Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible

Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible PDF Author: Ellen van Wolde
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004497528
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Biblical Hebrew grammar was until recently concentrated on the morpho-syntax within sentence boundaries. In the past few decades text-syntactic theories have been developed. At the conference Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible (Tilburg 1996) six eminent scholars presented both a paper on Hebrew syntax and a workshop in which Exodus 19-24 or 1 Samuel 1 was studied. Both kinds of contributions are collected in this volume. They tend to lead towards one conclusion: traditional sentence-grammar and text-syntactic studies should not exclude, but include each other. The verb forms, word-order and other syntactic features need to be studied as functioning at more than one level. A combination of a morpho-syntactic study at the sentence level and a text-syntactic approach is thus defended. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Morphological Analysis in Comparison

Morphological Analysis in Comparison PDF Author: Wolfgang U. Dressler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027237088
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This volume consists of selected and revised papers from the Seventh International Morphology Meeting, held in 1996 in Vienna. It presents advances in morphological theorizing, such as the foundations of sign-based morphology, the morphology-syntax interface, the boundaries between compounding and derivation, derivation and inflection, and the emergence of morphology from premorphological precursors in early first-language acquisition. The contributions deal with morphological analyses in various fields of the ever-widening domain of morphology and its relevance to the lexicon. The comparative aspect is reflected in the above-mentioned areas, and through the variety of languages investigated: Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages of Europe, and Asian, African and American languages. This breadth allows valuable insights into current problems of morphological research in America, Western and Eastern Europe.

Gender Across Languages

Gender Across Languages PDF Author: Marlis Hellinger
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027218412
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This is the first of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and its follow-up volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material. Languages of Volume 1: Arabic, Belizean Creole, Eastern Maroon Creole, English (American, New Zealand, Australian), Hebrew, Indonesian, Romanian, Russian, Turkish.

Expressing the Same by the Different

Expressing the Same by the Different PDF Author: Igor Dreer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902729190X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This volume offers an alternative, sign-oriented analysis of the distribution of the French Indicative and Subjunctive. It rejects both government and functions, attributed to both moods, and shows that the distribution of the Indicative and the Subjunctive is motivated by their invariant meanings. The volume illustrates the close interaction between the Indicative and the Subjunctive, as linguistic signs, and signs of other grammatical systems, contextually associated with the invariant meanings of both moods. Special consideration is given to the use of the Indicative and the Subjunctive in texts of different styles and genres.This volume also deals with the diachronic disfavoring of the Subjunctive and especially of the Imperfect Subjunctive that occurred from Old French to Contemporary French. It is argued that this disfavoring was motivated by the narrowing of the invariant meaning of the Contemporary French Subjunctive. All hypotheses are supported by contextualized examples and frequency counts.

Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context

Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context PDF Author: Susanne Feigenbaum
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027297207
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The growing interest in prepositions is reflected by this impressive collection of papers from leading scholars of various fields. The selected contributions of Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context focus on the local and temporal semantics of prepositions in relation to their context, too. Following an introduction which puts this new approach into a thematical and historical perspective, the volume presents fifteen studies in the following areas: The semantics of space dynamics (mainly on French prepositions); Language acquisition (aphasia and code-switching); Artificial intelligence (mainly of English prepositions); Specific languages: Hebrew (from a number of perspectives — syntax, semiotics, and sociolinguistic impact on morphology), Maltese, the Melanesian English-based Creole Bislama, and Biblical translations into Judeo-Greek.

From Case to Adposition

From Case to Adposition PDF Author: John Hewson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292965
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
In the historical development of many languages of the IE phylum the loss of inflectional morphology led to the development of a configurational syntax, where syntactic position marked syntactic role. The first of these configurations was the adposition (preposition or postposition), which developed out of the uninflected particle/preverbs in the older forms of IE, by forming fixed phrases with nominal elements, a pattern later followed in the development of a configurational NP (article + nominal) and VP (auxiliary + verbal). The authors follow this evolution through almost four thousand years of documentation in all twelve language families of the Indo-European phylum, noting the resemblances between the structure of the original IE case system and the systemic oppositions to be found in the sets of adpositions that replaced it. Quite apart from its theoretical analyses and proposals which in themselves amount to a new look at many traditional problems, this study has a value in the collected store of information on cases, and on adpositions and their usage. There is also a considerable store of etymological information that is relevant to the description of the systemic development.

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics PDF Author: Sami Boudelaa
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027285268
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The papers in this volume are a selection from papers presented at the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, held in Cambridge, UK, in 2002. They deal with a wide range of theoretical issues in varieties of Arabic.

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2006

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2006 PDF Author: Danièle Torck
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027248192
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The annual conference series Going Romance has developed into a major European discussion forum where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages in particular are put in an inter-active perspective, giving room to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume contains a selection of the papers that were presented at the 20th Going Romance conference, held at the VU University in Amsterdam in December 2006. The papers in the volume deal with current issues in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and range across a variety of Romance languages."

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and Phonology PDF Author: Marina Vigário
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902728900X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The papers included in the volume Phonetics and Phonology: Interactions and interrelations are concerned with some of the multiple possible forms of interactions and interrelations in phonetics and phonology: the phonetic and/or phonological nature of speech patterns, segmental and prosodic interactions, and interactions between segments and features, both in child and in adult language, combining perception and production data, and doing so from theoretically as well as experimentally oriented perspectives. The book is unique in the universe of recent publications for its topic, wide scope and coherent thematic content. It is of interest to all researchers, teachers and students in the fields of phonetics and phonology as well as to those interested in the interplay between production and perception, the organization of grammar and language typology. In general, Phonetics and Phonology. Interactions and interrelations may be a useful companion to all those wishing to widen and deepen their knowledge of the sound structure of language(s).