Building a bridge between linguistic communities of the Old and the New World
Building a bridge between linguistic communities of the Old and the New World

Author: Chiyo Nishida

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9401208344

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The present volume is a collection of fourteen original papers selected from those presented at the first US installment of Chronos: International Conference on Tense, Aspect, Mood and Modality, which took place at the University of Texas at Austin in October, 2008. The volume serves as an excellent forum for international scholars working on expressions of on tense, aspect, mood and modality. It contains papers dealing with a diverse variety of languages ranging from well studied languages like English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese, to less known ones like Basque, Chamorro, Iquito, Australian English and Singlish. The originality and relevance of the individual contributions is highlighted by the broadness of the theoretical approaches they employ and the novel empirical data they examine. All the studies go beyond exploring issues strictly related to tense, aspect, mood and modality; rather, they cut across all main linguistics subfields, such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and language evolution, thus attesting to how research on tense, aspect, mood and modality is vital to the better understanding of human language in general. This diverse nature of the volume will certainly appeal to broad audience.

The Present in Linguistic Expressions of Temporality
The Present in Linguistic Expressions of Temporality

Author: Marie-Eve Ritz

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1003803121

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This book offers a comprehensive examination of Present Time Expressions (PTEs), illustrating how a more informed understanding of their semantic and pragmatic representations can offer unique insights into the temporal systems of languages. The volume takes as its point of departure the notion that tenses, aspectual viewpoint markers, and temporal expressions have a semantic meaning, which is further pragmatically enriched and manipulated in use by speakers. Building on this foundation, the book introduces current theories on the linguistic expression of temporality toward better highlighting the need for further understanding of PTEs, encompassing tenses of the present and words such as ‘now.’ The volume draws on data from Australian English and Indigenous Australian languages to support its goal of arriving at a theory of the flexibility of uses of PTEs and their centrality in language and highlight the implications for future research on pragmatic and semantic change. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and philosophy of language, as well as those interested in research on Indigenous Australian Languages and Australian English.

Epistemic Modalities and Evidentiality in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Epistemic Modalities and Evidentiality in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Author: Zlatka Guentchéva

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-04-09

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 3110572265

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This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal verbs; the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality; the relationship of modal notions with some tense and aspect notions; the notions of (inter)subjectivity, commitment and (dis)engagement; the prosodic variation of modal adverbs, the diachronic connections between negation and evidential markers, the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, and typology.

Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory
Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory

Author: Deborah L. Arteaga

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-03-18

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 3030110060

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This volume presents novel analyses of morphosyntax and phonology by well-known scholars in their respective fields. The book offers chapters on a range of Romance languages and dialects, including Canadian French, Standard French, Modern French, Sardinian, Sicilian, and Spanish. Other chapters focus on diachronic topics on French and Italian. The volume will be of interest to researchers looking for current research in linguistics on the Romance languages. It will also serve as a reference volume or supplemental reading for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in linguistics.

New Perspectives on the Study of Ser and Estar
New Perspectives on the Study of Ser and Estar

Author: Isabel Pérez-Jiménez

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2015-10-15

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9027268134

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This is the first book entirely and exclusively devoted to the grammar of the two copular verbs ser and estar, certainly one of the most intriguing features of Spanish grammar. Although the topic has long attracted the interest of scholars, it had never given rise to a collection of papers that covers both theoretical issues in syntax and semantics and topics in the acquisition domain. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the central research questions concerning the ser / estar alternation: the syntactic or semantic nature of the distinction, its link with aspect and with the Individual-Level / Stage-Level distinction, and its connection with interface phenomena. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Hispanic linguistics, but can be equally attractive for researchers working on Romance linguistics, theoretical linguistics (syntax, semantics, pragmatics), acquisition theory, and historical linguistics.

The Acquisition of Spanish in Understudied Language Pairings
The Acquisition of Spanish in Understudied Language Pairings

Author: Tiffany Judy

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2015-02-18

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9027269084

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By examining the acquisition of Spanish in combination with languages other than English (Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish), this volume advances novel data pertinent to the field’s understanding of acquisition of Spanish in the XXI century. Its crosslinguistic nature invites us to reconsider major theoretical questions such as the role of L1 transfer, linguistic typology, and onset of acquisition from a fresh perspective, and to question the validity of the traditional parameter (re)setting perspective taken in SLA. Additionally, this volume underscores the necessity of providing accurate descriptions of the language pairings investigated, emphasizing the interconnection between linguistic and SLA theory, and pushing us to a more atomic view of the system in which features and feature bundles mapped onto lexical items comprise the skeleton of language. This volume is of great relevance for researchers and students of SLA alike.

The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages
The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages

Author: María J. Arche

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-03

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0192565427

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This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

Modality Across Syntactic Categories
Modality Across Syntactic Categories

Author: Ana Arregui

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-02-09

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0191028037

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This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.

Sentence and Discourse
Sentence and Discourse

Author: Jacqueline Guéron

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0198739427

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This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. Experts in the field make use of data from a variety of languages to examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply.

A Basisc Linguistic Description of English Language
A Basisc Linguistic Description of English Language

Author: Joaquín José Cuellar Trasorras

Publisher: Universidad Almería

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 95

ISBN-13: 8417261966

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This book is not an extensive manual, so the result is a basic and straightforward handbook. Obviously, it is just an initial reference that may be used in the two levels of Spanish post- compulsory secondary Education (Bachillerato). Even, it can be used in the first years at the University (Magisterio por Inglés, Filología Inglesa), in order to have a first contact with some of the grammatical components of English Language. It is not intended for students that are studying CAE or Proficiency levels, as long as it is not as specific as it should be in those levels. The practical nature of the book should be emphasized, as it is felt that it will give many opportunities for discussion of morphosyntactic structures.