The Parameter of Aspect

The Parameter of Aspect PDF Author: C.S. Smith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401579113
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
During the period I have been working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation, for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. ANational Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, allowed me time to pursue this project. I also thank the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas for research support. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Östen Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentIess comments and questions throughout. The individuals with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real difference to the working out of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including cOlloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and the University of Tel Aviv.

The Parameter of Aspect

The Parameter of Aspect PDF Author: C.S. Smith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401579113
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Get Book

Book Description
During the period I have been working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation, for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. ANational Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, allowed me time to pursue this project. I also thank the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas for research support. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Östen Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentIess comments and questions throughout. The individuals with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real difference to the working out of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including cOlloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and the University of Tel Aviv.

Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters

Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters PDF Author: Nina Hyams
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400946384
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
This book is perhaps the most stunning available demonstration of the explanatory power of the parametric approach to linguistic theory. It is akin, not to a deductive proof, but to the discovery of a footprint in a far-off place which leaves an archeologist elated. The book is full of intricate reasoning, but the stunning aspect is that the reasoning moves between not only complex syntax and diverse languages, but it makes predictions about what two-year-old children will assume about the jumble of linguistic input that confronts them. Those predictions, Hyams shows, are supported by a discriminating analysis of acquisition data in English and Italian. Let us examine the linguistic context for a moment before we discuss her theory. The ultimate issue in linguistic theory is the explanation of how a child can acquire any human language. To capture this fact we must posit an innate mechanism which meets two opposite constraints: it must be broad enough to account for the diversity of human language, and narrow enough so that the child does not make irrelevant hypotheses about his own language, particularly ones from which there is no recovery. That is, a child must not posit a grammar which permits all of the sentences of a language as well as other sentences which are not in the language. In a word, the child must not create a language in which one cannot make adult discriminations between grammatical and ungrammatical.

A Theory of Aspectuality

A Theory of Aspectuality PDF Author: Henk J. Verkuyl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521564526
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Sentences may pertain to states or processes or events. They may express duration, frequency, habituality, and many other forms of temporality. How do they do this? It is the aspectual properties of sentences in natural languages which allow the user to express a temporal structure, and Henk Verkuyl presents a unified formal system to account for them. He explains aspectuality in terms of the opposition between terminative aspect and durative aspect, and describes the way in which terminative aspect is compositionally formed on the basis of semantic information expressed by different syntactic elements, in particular the verb and its arguments. The aim is to determine which semantic conditions make a sentence terminative; but at least ten different forms of durative aspectuality are also treated. All are drawn into a theory which can account for both terminative and durative aspectuality together. A Theory of Aspectuality draws together into a coherent whole the author's thinking on the subject over the last twenty years, and will interest all those working on aspect and the semantics of noun phrases. It promises to be a major new contribution to our understanding of the subject.

Verbal Prepositions and Argument Structure

Verbal Prepositions and Argument Structure PDF Author: Mai Ellin Tungseth
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027255044
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book investigates different types of verb-PP combinations and examines the types of meanings which arise when the argument structure of the PP fuses with the verbal argument structure. Focussing mainly on data from Norwegian, the book investigates three different empirical domains of PP-VP combinations and concludes that the arising interpretations result from a combination of the fine-grained structure of the PP, the structure of the verb phrase, and the different modes of combination. The book sheds new light on the syntax-semantics interplay while adding new insight about the properties of the category P in Norwegian. The book also contributes to the debate between Lexicalism and Constructionism, and it concludes that a moderate Constructionist model with a fine-grained syntactic structure determining interpretation is best equipped to handle the enormous flexibility of verb-prepositional phrase combinations of the types explored.

Annual Report of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics

Annual Report of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics PDF Author: United States. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 826

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Book Description


Aspectual Inquiries

Aspectual Inquiries PDF Author: Paula Kempchinsky
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402030352
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
The study of the linguistic reflexes of aspect has been an active field of research in various sub-disciplines of linguistics, such as syntax, semantics (including discourse theory) and acquisition studies. However, communication and dissemination of results across these various subfields has often been indirect. This volume solves that problem. The different angles brought together here give us a comprehensive picture of the representation of aspect in the mind/brain of the speaker. The papers in this volume represent the results of a workshop on the syntax, semantics and acquisition of aspect held in 2002 whose purpose was to foment active cross-disciplinary communication. A number of the papers examine the syntactic representation of lexical or situation aspect, while others focus on the syntactic interaction of lexical aspect with grammatical aspect, and of grammatical aspect and tense. Other papers examine the role of aspect in discourse representations, while a third group of papers reports on results of empirical studies on the acquisition of aspect in both first and second language acquisition, and patterns of loss of morphosyntactic reflexes of aspect in language attrition. This volume is of interest to researchers and advanced graduate students in syntax, semantics, discourse representation and language acquisition, particularly those working on tense and aspect.

Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics

Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics PDF Author: Mineharu Nakayama
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500589
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
The studies of the Japanese language and psycholinguistics have advanced quite significantly in the last half century thanks to the progress in the study of cognition and brain mechanisms, and because of technological developments in experimental techniques. This volume contains 18 chapters that discuss the process of Japanese language acquisition as a first/second language and the mechanism of Japanese language perception and production.

Tense-aspect

Tense-aspect PDF Author: Paul J. Hopper
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027228655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The verbal categories of tense and aspect have been studied traditionally from the point of view of their reference to the timing and time-perspective of the speaker s reported experience. They are universal categories both in terms of the semantic-functional domain they cover as well as in terms of their syntactic and morphological realization. Nevertheless, their treatment in contemporary linguistics is often restricted and narrow based, often involving mere recapitulatoin of traditional semantic and morphotactic studies.The present volume arises out of a symposium held at UCLA in May 1979, in which a group of linguists gathered to re-open the subject of tense-and-aspect from a variety of perspectives, including in addition to the traditional semantics also discourse-pragmatics, psycholinguistics, child language, Creolization and diachronic change. The languages discussed in this volume include Russian, Turkish, English, Indonesian, Ameslan, Eskimo, various Creoles, Mandari, Hebrew, Bantu and others. The emphasis throughout is not only on the description of language-specific tense-aspect phenomenon, but more on the search for universal categories and principles which underlie the cross-language variety of tense and aspect. In particular, many of the participants address themselves to the relationship between propositional-semantics and discourse-pragmatics, in so far as these two functional domains interact within tense-aspect systems.

The Acquisition of the Present

The Acquisition of the Present PDF Author: Dalila Ayoun
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902726807X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This is the first edited volume that tackles the acquisition of the present (tense, aspect, temporality), an under-researched area, particularly compared to the acquisition of past temporality. The first two chapters focus on the L1 acquisition of English from the perspective of the Aspect hypothesis and the Verb-Island hypothesis Wang & Shirai) and the L1 acquisition of French from the perspective of the zero-tense hypothesis (Demirdache & Lungu). The remaining chapters tackle the L2 acquisition of English (Liszka, Al-Thubaiti, Vraciu), French (Ayoun, Saillard), Spanish (Gabriele et al.), Russian (Martelle) and Japanese (Shirai & Li) by learners of different L1s (French, English, Arabic, Chinese and Korean), testing various semantic and syntactic hypotheses. The last chapter presents a summary of the findings, and offers a few conclusions as well as broad directions for future research.

Rethinking Idiomaticity

Rethinking Idiomaticity PDF Author: Stefanie Wulff
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441116443
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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