Language Description Informed by Theory

Language Description Informed by Theory PDF Author: Rob Pensalfini
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270910
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores how linguistic theories inform the ways in which languages are described. Theories, as representations of linguistic categories, guide the field linguist to look for various phenomena without presupposing their necessary existence and provide the tools to account for various sets of data across different languages. A goal of linguistic description is to represent the full range of language structures for any given language. The chapters in this book cover various sub-disciplines of linguistics including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and anthropological linguistics, drawing upon theoretical approaches such as prosodic Phonology, Enhancement theory, Distributed Morphology, Minimalist syntax, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Kinship theory. The languages described in this book include Australian languages (Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan), Romance languages as well as English. This volume will be of interest to researchers in both descriptive and theoretical linguistics.

Language Description Informed by Theory

Language Description Informed by Theory PDF Author: Rob Pensalfini
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270910
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores how linguistic theories inform the ways in which languages are described. Theories, as representations of linguistic categories, guide the field linguist to look for various phenomena without presupposing their necessary existence and provide the tools to account for various sets of data across different languages. A goal of linguistic description is to represent the full range of language structures for any given language. The chapters in this book cover various sub-disciplines of linguistics including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and anthropological linguistics, drawing upon theoretical approaches such as prosodic Phonology, Enhancement theory, Distributed Morphology, Minimalist syntax, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Kinship theory. The languages described in this book include Australian languages (Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan), Romance languages as well as English. This volume will be of interest to researchers in both descriptive and theoretical linguistics.

Theory and description in African Linguistics

Theory and description in African Linguistics PDF Author: Emily Clem
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961102058
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 788

Get Book Here

Book Description
The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL.

Learning through Language

Learning through Language PDF Author: Vibeke Grøver
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781316620601
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Get Book Here

Book Description
Learning language and using language to learn is at the core of any educational activity. Bringing together a globally representative team of experts, this volume presents an innovative and empirically robust collection of studies that examine the role of language in education, with a particular emphasis on features of school-relevant language in middle childhood and adolescents, and its precursors in early childhood. It addresses issues such as how children's linguistic and literacy experiences at home prepare them for school, how the classroom functions as a language-mediated learning environment, and how schools can support language minority students in academic attainment. Set in three parts - Early Childhood, Middle Childhood and Adolescence and Learning in Multilingual Contexts - each part features a discussion from experts in the field to stimulate conversation and further routes for research. Its structure will make it useful for anyone interested in ongoing efforts towards building a pedagogically relevant theory of language learning.

A grammar of Palula

A grammar of Palula PDF Author: Henrik Liljegren
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234313
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Get Book Here

Book Description
This grammar provides a grammatical description of Palula, an Indo-Aryan language of the Shina group. The language is spoken by about 10,000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language, and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data, collected over the course of about ten years, commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded, mainly narrative, texts, but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community, and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering, annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology, morphology and syntax, illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances, but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven, but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account, particularly in the area of morphology, and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.

Neo-Firthian Approaches to Linguistic Typology

Neo-Firthian Approaches to Linguistic Typology PDF Author: William McGregor
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN: 9781781796689
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
Neo-Firthian theories - which include Systemic Functional Linguistics and its congeners - have, unlike other functionally oriented theories, engaged minimally with linguistic typology and have made little impact on the wider discipline. This book offers a programmatic and Neo-Firthian informed typological investigation that points to potential mutual enrichments of linguistic typology and Neo-Firthian theories.On the one hand, this book identifies the inadequacies of the dominant 'atheoretical' approaches to linguistic typology, and shows how these can be circumvented through a firm foundation in a Neo-Firthian theoretical framework. On the other hand, it contends that Neo-Firthian approaches must take typology seriously as a criterion of theoretical adequacy, and be able to account for the full range of grammatical phenomena and their variation across languages, as well as those features that are universal. Case studies illustrate this argument through a selection of grammatical phenomena - in particular, grammatical relations, the noun phrase, complex sentence constructions, optional case marking and grammatical classification.This book will be of interest to typologists, and well as to linguistics working within Systemic Functional Linguistics and other functional theories.

Interpersonal Grammar

Interpersonal Grammar PDF Author: J. R. Martin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108660681
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
This pioneering volume lays out a set of methodological principles to guide the description of interpersonal grammar in different languages. It compares interpersonal systems and structures across a range of world languages, showing how discourse, interpersonal relationships between the speakers, and the purpose of their communication, all play a role in shaping the grammatical structures used in interaction. Following an introduction setting out these principles, each chapter focuses on a particular language - Khorchin Mongolian, Mandarin, Tagalog, Pitjantjatjara, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, British Sign Language and Scottish Gaelic – and explores mood, polarity, tagging, vocation, assessment and comment systems. The book provides a model for functional grammatical description that can be used to inform work on system and structure across languages as a foundation for functional language typology.

Indefinites between Latin and Romance

Indefinites between Latin and Romance PDF Author: Chiara Gianollo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192540793
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners (such as aliquis 'some', nullus 'no', and nemo 'no one') between Latin and the Romance languages. Although these elements have undergone significant diachronic change since the Classical Latin period, the modern Romance languages show a remarkable degree of similarity in the way their systems of indefinites have evolved and are structured today. In this volume, Chiara Gianollo draws on data from Classical and Late Latin texts, and from electronic corpora of the early stages of various Romance languages, to propose a new account of these similarities. The focus is primarily on Late Latin: at this stage, the grammar of indefinites already shows a number of changes, which are homogeneously transmitted to the daughter languages, leading to parallelism in the various emerging Romance systems. The volume demonstrates the value of using methods and models from synchronic theoretical linguistics for investigating diachronic phenomena, as well as the importance of diachronic research in understanding the nature of crosslinguistic variation and language change.

On Under-reported Monolingual Child Phonology

On Under-reported Monolingual Child Phonology PDF Author: Elena Babatsouli
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1788928962
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 721

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book compiles original studies investigating crosslinguistic child phonological development in typical and atypical settings, that is, protolanguage phonology. The chapters address topics and issues not widely or exhaustively reported in the literature, such as research on under-represented languages and foci of interest, as well as information that has remained little-known to the field. It documents recent developments on typically developing populations, and atypical developmental speech in children with autism, developmental language disorder affecting speech, childhood apraxia of speech, phonological assessment and intervention, phonological awareness in (a)typical contexts affecting literacy, and motor speech analysis in speech sound disorders. The book will be of interest to linguists and academic researchers, as well as postgraduate students who are investigating child language acquisition in monolingual settings.

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax PDF Author: Andreas Dufter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393425
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1104

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

Questions of Syntax

Questions of Syntax PDF Author: Richard S. Kayne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190863609
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
There are far more syntactically distinct languages than we might have thought; yet there are far fewer than there might have been. Questions of Syntax collects sixteen papers authored by Richard S. Kayne, a preeminent theoretical syntactician, who has sought over the course of his career to understand why both these facts are true. With a particular emphasis on comparative syntax, these chapters collectively consider how wide a range of questions the field of syntax can reasonably attempt to ask and then answer. At issue, among other topics, are the relation between syntax and (certain aspects of) semantics, the relation between syntax and what appear to be lexical questions, the relation between syntax and morphology, the relation between syntax and certain aspects of phonology (insofar as silent elements and their properties play a substantial role), and the extent to which comparative syntax can provide new and decisive evidence bearing on these different kinds of questions. To Kayne, comparative syntax can shed light on what may initially seem lexical questions, and antisymmetry on the evolution of human language itself. Taken as a whole, these essays elucidate the theoretical contributions of one the most influential scholars in linguistics.