Functional Perspectives on Grammar and Discourse
Functional Perspectives on Grammar and Discourse

Author: Christopher S. Butler

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2007-07-13

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 902729223X

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This book, a tribute to Angela Downing, consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language, with topics ranging from the general (grammar as an evolutionary product, text comprehension, integrative linguistics) to particular aspects of the grammars of languages (Bulgarian, English, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish). The more specific papers are sequenced according to Halliday’s division into ideational, textual and interpersonal aspects of the grammar, and cover a wide range of areas, including aspect, argument structure, noun phrase/nominal group structure and nominalisations, pronominal clitics, theme in relation to writing skills, discourse structures and markers, the role of attention in conversation, the functions of topic, phatic communion, subjectification, formulaic language and modality. A recurrent theme in the volume is the use of corpus materials in order to base functional descriptions on authentic productions. Overall, the volume constitutes a panoramic but nevertheless detailed view of some important current trends in functional linguistics.

Definiteness in Bulgarian
Definiteness in Bulgarian

Author: Olga M. Mladenova

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9783110195576

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Like other Slavic languages, Bulgarian lacked a definite article in its earlier stages. Unlike them, it has one today. The book formulates the rules that govern the use of articles and other markers of (in)definiteness in Modern Standard Bulgarian in comparison with the seventeenth century, and constructs a model of transition from the older system to the modern one, a model which is then evaluated against broader historical and dialect data and placed in a Balkan and general Slavic context

Degrees of Explicitness
Degrees of Explicitness

Author: John Leafgren

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9789027253422

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This book explores factors relevant in the choices speakers and writers make in regard to explicitness of reference to the subjects and objects in their utterances. Bulgarian is a particularly felicitous target language for this type of study, since it possesses a rich inventory of available packaging techniques, ranging from zero reference, to various stressed and unstressed single forms, to actual doubled (“reduplicated”) constructions. The study systematically addresses the need to avoid referential and grammatical ambiguity, and the crucial influence of emphasis. Another, and perhaps most interesting central factor is the status of what the communication is about, which is assessed on two different levels. The book makes use of data from both published Bulgarian fiction and naturally occurring oral conversations. The fundamental similarities between these modes of communication with respect to noun phrase selection is demonstrated, but explanations are also proposed for the observable differences.

Dutch Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists
Dutch Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 940120618X

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This volume contains articles by 17 slavists from the Low Countries. Although they are all about Slavic linguistics, they cover a wide range of subjects and their theoretical implications are often not restricted to slavistics alone. Most contributions deal with Russian or Slavic in general, but South and West Slavic are also represented. The reader who knows the strong points for which Dutch slavistics is traditionally known and appreciated will not be disappointed: s/he will find papers on syntax and semantics (Fortuin, Van Helden, Honselaar, Keijsper, Tribušinina), aspectology (Barentsen, Genis), philology (Veder), historical Slavic phonology and morphology (Derksen, Kortlandt, Vermeer), dialectology (Houtzagers, Pronk), the study of sentence intonation (Odé) and papers representing crossroads between these disciplines: philology and historical linguistics (Hendriks, Schaeken), aspectology and philology (Kalsbeek). Apart from its quality in the linguistic fields enumerated here, Dutch Slavic linguistics is known for its empirical approach: the main goal is to find explanations for linguistic reality. Theory is relevant inasmuch as it helps us to find such explanations and not for its own sake. Though each and every paper in this volume exemplifies this empirical attitude, it might be especially illustrative to mention that almost all authors who studied the larger contemporary Slavic languages made extensive use of language corpus resources, part of which were collected at the University of Amsterdam.

New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion
New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion

Author: Victoria Hasko

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010-05-06

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9027288631

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This volume unifies a wide breadth of interdisciplinary studies examining the expression of motion in Slavic languages. The contributors to the volume have joined in the discussion of Slavic motion talk from diachronic, typological, comparative, cognitive, and acquisitional perspectives with a particular focus on verbs of motion, the nuclei of the lexicalization patterns for encoding motion. Motion verbs are notorious among Slavic linguists for their baffling idiosyncratic behavior in their lexical, semantic, syntactical, and aspectual characteristics. The collaborative effort of this volume is aimed both at highlighting and accounting for the unique properties of Slavic verbs of motion and at situating Slavic languages within the larger framework of typological research investigating cross-linguistic encoding of the motion domain. Due to the multiplicity of approaches to the linguistic analysis the collection offers, it will suitably complement courses and programs of study focusing on Slavic linguistics as well as typology, diachronic and comparative linguistics, semantics, and second language acquisition.