A Syntactic Study of Idioms
A Syntactic Study of Idioms

Author: Anna Dąbrowska

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-09-30

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1527516784

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the general tendencies of present-day English focus more on idiomatic usage, it seems to be worth paying attention to the role phraseological units play in a language. In the field of English phraseology, linguists have shown a constant interest in idioms. Undoubtedly, not only are idioms an important part of the language and culture of the society, but they also carry more impact than non-idiomatic expressions because of their close identification with a particular language and culture. It is difficult to speak or write English without using idioms, especially while describing one’s emotional or mental condition. Therefore, it is interesting and worthwhile to to analyse both the language of phraseological units and emotions. In other words, this book focuses not only on idioms, but also on one’s psychological condition. However, its purpose is neither to discuss the issues of idioms and emotions from the psychological point of view, nor provide a conceptual analysis of emotional metaphors. Instead, the book analyses idioms referring to psychological states in English from the perspective of syntax, focusing particularly both on the syntactic structure of this specific set of verbal psych-idioms, and on the constraints on the way they are built. Therefore, the most current studies, performed within the scope of the Phase Theory and the Idioms as Phases Hypothesis are chosen to address certain syntactic problems that idioms pose.

Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English
Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English

Author: Laurel J. Brinton

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9027230501

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The focus of this carefully selected volume concerns the existence, frequency, and form of composite/complex predicates (the “take a look” construction) in earlier periods of the English language, an area of scholarship which has been virtually neglected. The various contributions seek to understand the collocational and idiomatic aspects of these structures, as well as of related structures such as complex prepositions (e.g., “on account of”) and phrasal verbs (e.g., “look up”), in their earliest manifestations. Moreover, study of these constructions at the individual stages of English leads to diachronic questions concerning their development, raising issues pertaining to grammaticalization, lexicalization, and idiomaticization-processes which are not always clearly differentiated nor fully understood.

Corpus Based Studies in English
Corpus Based Studies in English

Author: Ljung

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-11-27

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 9004653643

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Corpus-based Studies in English contains selected papers from the seventeenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 17). The topics include parsing and annotation of corpora, discourse studies, lexicography, translation studies, parallel corpora, language variation and change, national varieties, methodology and English language teaching. The papers on parsing and annotation include discussions of the treatment of irregular forms, semantic/pragmatic labels in air traffic control, a comparison of tagging systems and a presentation of T-tag lexicon construction. The papers on discourse and lexicography include a study of like as a discourse marker, thesaural relations and the lexicalisation of NPs. In translation studies one paper discusses explicitness as a universal feature of translation and the paper on parallel corpora contrasts English and Norwegian. Many papers deal with variation and change; here we find a discussions of dialogue vs. non-dialogue in modern English fiction and an account of verbal disputes in adolescent English; the historical studies deal with e.g. text type evolution, multi-verb words, normalization in Middle English prose and modalities in Early Modern English. The methodology papers discuss the use in corpus analysis of inferential statistics, probabilistic approaches to anaphora resolution and multi-method approaches to data. The ELT paper compares the use of the progressive in native and non-native compositions.

Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1
Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1

Author: Tibor Kiss

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 816

ISBN-13: 3110377403

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar
On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar

Author: Koen Bostoen

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2023-03-15

Total Pages: 862

ISBN-13: 3961104069

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.

Stretched Verb Constructions in English
Stretched Verb Constructions in English

Author: D. J. Allerton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1134517408

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Constructions such as 'make an accusation against', or 'give one's approval for' can be seen as 'stretched' versions of simple verbs, such as 'accuse' or 'approve of'. What is the precise linguistic nature of stretched verbs, and how many basic types are there? What kinds of grammatical connections are involved, and what lexical limits are there on these constructions? What is their precise semantic value? These are some of the questions that this book sets out to answer in its investigation of stretched verb constructions.

Semantics - Lexical Structures and Adjectives
Semantics - Lexical Structures and Adjectives

Author: Claudia Maienborn

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 311062639X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Discover vital research on the lexical and cognitive meanings of words. In this exciting book from a team of world-class researchers, in-depth articles explain a wide range of topics, including thematic roles, sense relation, ambiguity and comparison. The authors focus on the cognitive and conceptual structure of words and their meaning extensions such as coercion, metaphors and metonymies. The book features highly cited material – available in paperback for the first time since its publication – and is an essential starting point for anyone interested in lexical semantics, especially where it meets other cognitive and conceptual research.

Synchronic Corpus Linguistics
Synchronic Corpus Linguistics

Author: Carol E. Percy

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9789042000193

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Synchronic corpus linguistics contains select papers from the sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16). The papers reflect the state of the art in the design, analysis, and annotation of corpora. Corpora new and old facilitate the description of single registers of English (e.g., London teenage English, business English) and of specific grammatical topics across registers (e.g., the grammatical flexibility of idioms), including variation studies (e.g., popular vs. technical registers of English). Other corpora permit the comparison of English to other languages (Norwegian, German, Swedish); of L1 English to L2 English; and of English as an original language to English in translation. A number of these papers emphasize pragmatics: indeed, among the papers on spoken English is an assessment of corpora annotated for discourse analysis. Other papers describe different aspects of the automatic analysis of text. Two papers describe semantic analysis of large text corpora composed of news/business text. Automatic grammatical analysis is the subject of other papers: two evaluate existing automatic parsers and wordclass taggers, while two describe how annotated corpora are being used to develop two new and innovative automatic parsers.