English Grammatical Categories

English Grammatical Categories PDF Author: Ian Michael
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521143264
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
This book examines the traditional grammar, very briefly for its Greek and Latin origins, and fully during its first two hundred years as 'English' grammar.

English Grammatical Categories

English Grammatical Categories PDF Author: Ian Michael
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521143264
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
This book examines the traditional grammar, very briefly for its Greek and Latin origins, and fully during its first two hundred years as 'English' grammar.

The Categories of Grammar

The Categories of Grammar PDF Author: Alan Huffman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027281971
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This book offers an analysis of the French clitic object pronouns lui and le in the radically functional Columbia school framework, contrasting this framework with sentence-based treatments of case selection. It suggests that features of the sentence such as subject and object relations, normally taken as pretheoretical categories of observation about language, are in fact part of a theory of language which does not withstand empirical testing. It shows that the correct categories are neither those of structural case nor those of lexical case, but rather, semantic ones. Traditionally, anomalies in the selection of dative and accusative case in French, such as case government, use of the dative for possession and disadvantaging, its use in the faire-causative construction, and other puzzling distributional irregularities have been used to support the idea of an autonomous, non-functional central core of syntactic phenomena in language. The present analysis proposes semantic constants for lui and le which render all their occurrences explicable in a straightforward way. The same functional perspective informs issues of cliticity and pronominalization as well. The solution offered here emerges from an innovative instrumental view of linguistic meaning, an acknowledgment that communicative output is determined only partially and indirectly by purely linguistic input, with extralinguistic knowledge and human inference bridging the gap. This approach entails identification of the pragmatic factors influencing case selection and a reevaluation of thematic-role theory, and reveals the crucial impact of discourse on the structure as well as the functioning of grammar. One remarkable feature of the study is its extensive and varied data base. The hypothesis is buttressed by hundreds of fully contextualized examples and large-scale counts drawn from modern French texts.

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary PDF Author: Kate Woodford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521824231
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 1550

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Book Description
The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary is the ideal dictionary for advanced EFL/ESL learners. Easy to use and with a great CD-ROM - the perfect learner's dictionary for exam success. First published as the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, this new edition has been completely updated and redesigned. - References to over 170,000 words, phrases and examples explained in clear and natural English - All the important new words that have come into the language (e.g. dirty bomb, lairy, 9/11, clickable) - Over 200 'Common Learner Error' notes, based on the Cambridge Learner Corpus from Cambridge ESOL exams Plus, on the CD-ROM: - SMART thesaurus - lets you find all the words with the same meaning - QUICKfind - automatically looks up words while you are working on-screen - SUPERwrite - tools for advanced writing, giving help with grammar and collocation - Hear and practise all the words.

Grammatical Categories

Grammatical Categories PDF Author: M. Rita Manzini
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500430
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Grammatical categories (e.g. complementizer, negation, auxiliary, case) are some of the most important building blocks of syntax and morphology. Categorization therefore poses fundamental questions about grammatical structures and about the lexicon from which they are built. Adopting a 'lexicalist' stance, the authors argue that lexical items are not epiphenomena, but really represent the mapping of sound to meaning (and vice versa) that classical conceptions imply. Their rule-governed combination creates words, phrases and sentences - structured by the 'categories' that are the object of the present inquiry. They argue that the distinction between functional and non-functional categories, between content words and inflections, is not as deeply rooted in grammar as is often thought. In their argumentation they lay the emphasis on empirical evidence, drawn mainly from dialectal variation in the Romance languages, as well as from Albanian.

Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories

Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories PDF Author: K. Brown
Publisher: Pergamon
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Complementing Brown & Miller's recent Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories (1996), to which this is a companion volume, this encyclopedia is a collection of articles drawn from the highly successful Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. It presents a collection of 79 articles, all of which have been revised and updated. It also provides a number of newly commissioned articles, one of which has been substantially updated and extended. The volume is alphabetically organised and includes an introduction and a glossary. The Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories will provide a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of the building blocks of syntax: word classes, sentence/clause types, functional categories of the noun and verb, anaphora and pronominalisation, transitivity, topicalisation and work order.

The Evolution of Grammar

The Evolution of Grammar PDF Author: Joan Bybee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226086658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.

Analogical classification in formal grammar

Analogical classification in formal grammar PDF Author: Matías Guzmán Naranjo
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101868
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The organization of the lexicon, and especially the relations between groups of lexemes is a strongly debated topic in linguistics. Some authors have insisted on the lack of any structure of the lexicon. In this vein, Di Sciullo & Williams (1987: 3) claim that “[t]he lexicon is like a prison – it contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in commonis lawlessness”. In the alternative view, the lexicon is assumed to have a rich structure that captures all regularities and partial regularities that exist between lexical entries.Two very different schools of linguistics have insisted on the organization of the lexicon. On the one hand, for theories like HPSG (Pollard & Sag 1994), but also some versions of construction grammar (Fillmore & Kay 1995), the lexicon is assumed to have a very rich structure which captures common grammatical properties between its members. In this approach, a type hierarchy organizes the lexicon according to common properties between items. For example, Koenig (1999: 4, among others), working from an HPSG perspective, claims that the lexicon “provides a unified model for partial regularties, medium-size generalizations, and truly productive processes”. On the other hand, from the perspective of usage-based linguistics, several authors have drawn attention to the fact that lexemes which share morphological or syntactic properties, tend to be organized in clusters of surface (phonological or semantic) similarity (Bybee & Slobin 1982; Skousen 1989; Eddington 1996). This approach, often called analogical, has developed highly accurate computational and non-computational models that can predict the classes to which lexemes belong. Like the organization of lexemes in type hierarchies, analogical relations between items help speakers to make sense of intricate systems, and reduce apparent complexity (Köpcke & Zubin 1984). Despite this core commonality, and despite the fact that most linguists seem to agree that analogy plays an important role in language, there has been remarkably little work on bringing together these two approaches. Formal grammar traditions have been very successful in capturing grammatical behaviour, but, in the process, have downplayed the role analogy plays in linguistics (Anderson 2015). In this work, I aim to change this state of affairs. First, by providing an explicit formalization of how analogy interacts with grammar, and second, by showing that analogical effects and relations closely mirror the structures in the lexicon. I will show that both formal grammar approaches, and usage-based analogical models, capture mutually compatible relations in the lexicon.

The Uses of Grammar

The Uses of Grammar PDF Author: Judith Rodby
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
ISBN: 1602352526
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
In this second edition of The Uses of Grammar, Judith Rodby and W. Ross Winterowd develop their successful first edition with new examples, more discussion questions and exercises, and clear explanations of the grammatical principles that teach students to understand grammar conceptually and deeply. The first edition has been completely redesigned visually to enhance learning and retention. Rodby and Winterowd’s The Uses of Grammar 2e is an accessible approach grounded in deep understanding of language acquisition, structure, and even the rhetoric of everyday use. The Uses of Grammar 2e integrates traditional, structural, and functional concepts with ideas from contemporary linguistics and grammatical study. Rather than simply partition the study of grammar from the bottom up—from the parts to the whole—Rodby and Winterowd employ a unique structure based on the differentiation of form and function.

Discourse and Grammar

Discourse and Grammar PDF Author: Günther Grewendorf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614511608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Bringing together papers from various subfields of theoretical linguistics, this volume gives a representative glimpse of current research on form and function in grammar. Its overarching topic is as old as it is hot: the relation between the major clause types as determined in syntax, and their canonical or idiosyncratic roles in discourse as characterized in pragmatic terms. Though none of the papers addresses this topic in its full breadth, they can all be seen to make their specific contributions to it, scrutinizing the pertinent aspects of the grammatical interfaces and elaborating detailed case studies. The first part of this collection comprises three papers (by Asher, Portner, and van Rooy & Franke) devoted to the semantics/pragmatics interface. The second part, with contributions by Rizzi, Saito, and Belletti, deals with the question of how the constitution of sentence types can be related to properties of functional categories in the clausal periphery.The last four papers (Bošković, van Riemsdijk, Bauke & Roeper, Williams) concern the interaction of lexical elements and clausal functional categories, revealing unexpected parallels between clause structure and the internal structure, particularly in lexical categories.

An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory

An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory PDF Author: Dominique Sportiche
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118470478
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory offers beginning students a comprehensive overview of and introduction to our current understanding of the rules and principles that govern the syntax of natural languages. Includes numerous pedagogical features such as 'practice' boxes and sidebars, designed to facilitate understanding of both the 'hows' and the 'whys' of sentence structure Guides readers through syntactic and morphological structures in a progressive manner Takes the mystery out of one of the most crucial aspects of the workings of language – the principles and processes behind the structure of sentences Ideal for students with minimal knowledge of current syntactic research, it progresses in theoretical difficulty from basic ideas and theories to more complex and advanced, up to date concepts in syntactic theory