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Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 653
ISBN-13: 9027205914
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFeatures the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.
Author: Andrej Malchukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2011-07-20
Total Pages: 653
ISBN-13: 9027287163
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages, but also includes considerations of several African, American, South-East Asian, Australian, and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive, or from active to passive, or participant-to event-centered construction.
Author: Roberta D'Alessandro
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2008-09-25
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 3110207516
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.
Author: Mutsumi Yamamoto
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2006-01-01
Total Pages: 167
ISBN-13: 9027230889
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.
Author: Cynthia L. Allen
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 534
ISBN-13: 9780198238676
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEnglish underwent sweeping changes to its inflectional system in the Middle English period and it is widely assumed that the loss of case-marking distinctions had profound consequences for the syntax of the language. Allen here makes a detailed study of these changes, questioning the results of previous analyses which, she argues, posit too direct a link between the morphological and syntactic changes.
Author: Denis Creissels
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2024-10-29
Total Pages: 849
ISBN-13: 0198899580
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book sets up a consistent theoretical and terminological framework for the study of the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the terms transitivity, valency, and voice. These three concepts are at the heart of the most basic aspects of clausal structure in any language; however, there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in the constraints on how verbs combine with noun phrases that refer to participants in the event that they denote or to the circumstances of the event. In this book, Denis Creissels explores and accounts for the extent of this cross-linguistic variation, capturing its regularities and examining the historical phenomena that have resulted in the emergence of constructions and markers. The novel framework developed in the book allows similar phenomena to be identified across typologically diverse languages, and facilitates systematic comparison of the manifestations of these phenomena in the grammars of individual languages.
Author: C. Jan-Wouter Zwart
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 430
ISBN-13: 9789027227744
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume presents a collection of articles reporting on new research carried out within the theoretical framework of generative grammar on the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages. Divided in four main sections, the book focuses on issues of subordination and complementation (with emphasis on German/Dutch and Danish), displacement phenomena discussed in relation with richness of morphology (with special attention to English, German/Dutch, and Norwegian, as well as presenting more general discussion of the issue), language variation and change (studying historical English syntax and Frisian contact dialects), and the syntax-semantics interface viewed from a Germanic perspective (addressing ellipsis, reflexivity, and the behavior of quantifiers).
Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2006-01-01
Total Pages: 566
ISBN-13: 9027229805
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIs the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive, if not universal, has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive, or passive-like constructions, and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active, middle, reflexive), specific semantic meanings such as adversativity, or tense-aspect categories (stative, perfect, preterit). Certain contributors review the passives in various languages and language groups, including languages rarely discussed. Another group of contributors takes a novel theoretical approach toward passivization within a broad typological perspective. Among the languages discussed are Vedic, Irish, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Lithuanian, Mordvin, and Nganasan, next to almost all European languages. Various theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, modern structuralist approaches, Role and Reference Grammar, cognitive semantics, Distributed Morphology, and case grammar have been applied by the different authors.
Author: Peter Petré
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-06-17
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 019937340X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Peter Petré analyzes: · The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorðan 'become' as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. · The merger of is 'is' and bið 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb, and how it is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. · The co-occurrence of multiple changes that led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity in one fell swoop. In explaining each of these changes, Petré goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb's embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. Using a radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from (changing) frequencies, Petré draws attention to general principles of constructional change, including but not limited to grammaticalization and lexicalization. He proposes novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, Petré explains how each individual's mental grammar can be seen as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition.
Author: Osamu Imahayashi
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 9783631609668
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"The first international conference was held at Chiba University in 1-3 September 2005, the second one at Nagoya University in 7-9 September 2007, and the third one at Hiroshima University in 28-30 August 2009"--P. [v].
