Coordination and the Syntax DS Discourse Interface
Coordination and the Syntax DS Discourse Interface

Author: Daniel Altshuler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-07-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0198804237

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This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

The Syntax-Information Structure Interface
The Syntax-Information Structure Interface

Author: Timothy Gupton

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-10-24

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1501500309

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It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of generative grammar, there is still uncertainty with respect to the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of languages. According to canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are arguments (A-elements). However, following non-canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are not arguments, but rather A’-elements that behave like topical preverbal direct and indirect objects, which have received a CLLD analysis in the literature (e.g. Cinque 1990). The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are non-arguments, one must question the universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Agnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician is an underdocumented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, I develop an experimental program for establishing clausal word order preferences for a number of information structure contexts. The preference data suggest that preverbal subjects behave like canonical elements, and not CLLD elements. These results inform the model of the preverbal field that I propose for Galician, which also takes into account the enclisis-proclisis divide and reco.

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics
The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

Author: Keith Allan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 967

ISBN-13: 1139501895

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Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

Coordination and the Syntax – Discourse Interface
Coordination and the Syntax – Discourse Interface

Author: Daniel Altshuler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-06-09

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0192526286

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This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

At the Syntax-pragmatics Interface
At the Syntax-pragmatics Interface

Author: Lutz Marten

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780199250646

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This book explores the interaction of grammar and context in human communication. Lutz Marten focuses on verbs and verb phrases: he examines the relationship between language rules and linguistic behaviour, seeking to distinguish between language-specific syntactic knowledge and the generalreasoning people need to understand and to make themselves understood. He considers how the component elements of linguistic theory explain what appear to be simple utterances but whose structure is hard to analyse - how, for example, 'Fran is baking Mary a cake in the oven' is different from 'Franis baking Mary a cake in the kitchen'.The author's account of the interactions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics is based on extensive observation among contrasting cultures and a variety of languages. He makes important contributions to understanding in all three areas. His book will appeal to linguistic theoreticians of allpersuasions.

Spanish Learner Corpus Research
Spanish Learner Corpus Research

Author: Margarita Alonso-Ramos

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2016-12-16

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 9027266247

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The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive picture of the current state of Spanish learner corpus research (SLCR), which makes it unique, since no other monograph has focused on collecting research dealing with learner corpora of any language other than English. In addition to an introductory appraisal of current SLCR, as well as a wake-up call reminding us that learner corpus design still needs to be improved, this volume features a selection of original studies ranging from general issues concerning learner corpora compilation to more specific aspects such as phonetic, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic features of the interlanguage of learners of Spanish, as reflected in corpus data. This volume will undoubtedly be of significant interest to researchers involved in corpus linguistics, second language acquisition research, as well as to professionals in the field of Spanish as a second language, including teachers, and creators and publishers of teaching materials.

Default Semantics
Default Semantics

Author: Katarzyna Jaszczolt

Publisher: Oxford Linguistics

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0199261989

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In this pioneering book Kasia Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She provides a step-by-step introduction to thetheory and its application, and explains new terms and formalisms as required. Dr Jaszczolt unites the precision of truth-conditional, dynamic approaches with insights from neo-Gricean pragmatics into the role of speaker's intentions in communication. She shows that the compositionality of meaningmay be understood as merger representations combining information from various sources including word meaning and sentence structure, various kinds of default interpretations, and conscious pragmatic inference. Among the applications the author discusses are constructions that pose problems in semantic analysis such as referring expressions, propositional attitude constructions, presupposition, modality, numerals, and sentential connectives. She proposes solutions to cutting edge problems in thesemantics/pragmatics interface - for example, how many levels of meaning should be distinguished; the status of underspecification; how much contextual information should be placed in the representation of the speaker's meaning; whether there are default interpretations; the stage of utteranceinterpretation at which pragmatic inference begins; and whether compositionality is a necessary feature of the theory of meaning and if so how it is to be defined.The book is for students and researchers in semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language at advanced undergraduate level and above.

Subordination and Coordination Strategies in North Asian Languages
Subordination and Coordination Strategies in North Asian Languages

Author: Edward J. Vajda

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2008-11-27

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 9027290946

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Across North Asia, complex sentence formation patterns display an unusually high prevalence of suffixed relational morphemes used to convey subordination. Suffixal subordinators occur in a variety of genetic groupings, most notably Samoyedic, Turkic, and Tungusic, but also in some of the region’s language isolates, such as Ket and Ainu. No general study has surveyed complex sentences across Northern Eurasia and the Pacific Rim, an area noted both for its complicated web of language contact phenomena and its long-established genetic divisions. The 14 chapters in this volume survey synthetic and analytic methods of subordination and coordination. Much of the data reflect original fieldwork, and several chapters focus on critically endangered languages. Nearly every family or isolate in North Asia is taken into consideration, as are all major formal and functional types of complex sentence formation.

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation
The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation

Author: Paul Saka

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-07

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 3319687476

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The chapters in this volume address a variety of issues surrounding quotation, such as whether it is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon, what varieties of quotation exist, and what speech acts are involved in quoting. Quotation poses problems for many prevailing theories of language. One fundamental principle is that for a language to be learnable, speakers must be able to derive the truth-conditions of sentences from the meanings of their parts. Another popular view is that indexical expressions like "I" display a certain fixity -- that they always refer to the speaker using them. Both of these tenets appear to be violated by quotation. This volume is suitable for scholars in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, and for graduate students in philosophy and linguistics. The book will also be useful for researchers in other fields that study quotation, including psychology and computer science.