Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality
Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality

Author: Lotte Hogeweg

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 9027255318

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Preface -- 1. The semantics of tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world / Lotte Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop & Andrej Malchukov -- 2. Incompatible categories: Resolving the 'present perfective paradox' / Andrej L. Malchukov -- 3. The perfective/imperfective distinction: Coercion or aspectual operators? / Corien Bary -- 4. Lexical and compositional factors in the aspectual system of Adyghe / Peter M. Arkadiev -- 5. Event structure of non-culminating accomplishments / Sergei Tatevosov & Mikhail Ivanov -- 6. The grammaticalised use of the Burmese verbs la 'come' and .wà 'go' / Nicoletta Romeo -- 7. Irrealis in Yurakaré and other languages: On the cross-linguistic consistency of an elusive category / Rik van Gijn & Sonja Gipper -- 8. On the selection of mood in complement clauses / Rui Marques -- 9. 'Out of control' marking as circumstantial modality in St'át'imcets / Henry Davis, Lisa Matthewson & Hotze Rullmann -- 10. Modal geometry: Remarks on the structure of a modal map / Kees de Schepper & Joost Zwarts -- 11. Acquisitive modals / Johan van der Auwera, Petar Kehayov & Alice Vittrant -- 12. Conflicting constraints on the interpretation of modal auxiliaries / Ad Foolen & Helen de Hoop -- 13. Modality and context dependence / Fabrice Nauze -- 14. Verbal semantic shifts under negation, intensionality, and imperfectivity: Russian genitive objects / Barbara H. Partee & Vladimir Borschev -- 15. The Estonian partitive evidential: Some notes on the semantic parallels between aspect and evidential categories / Anne Tamm -- Index.

Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect
Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect

Author: Susan D. Rothstein

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2008-03-20

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9027291586

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The papers in this volume investigate the semantics of aspect from both a theoretical and a crosslinguistic point of view, in a wide range of languages from a number of different language families. The papers are all informed by the belief that a thorough exposure to the expression of aspect crosslinguistically is crucial for progress in understanding how the semantics of aspect works and what the semantic basis of aspectual distinctions is. The languages discussed include Russian, English, Dutch, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and Kalaallisut. The issues discussed in this volume include the centrality of measuring and counting in an understanding of telicity; the importance of the singular/plural distinction in the study of aspect; the importance of homogeneity as a property of event types; the flexibility of lexical classes; and the interaction between expressions of aspect and the particular morphosyntactic structure of a language.

Cross-linguistic Semantics
Cross-linguistic Semantics

Author: Cliff Goddard

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9789027205698

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Cross-linguistic semantics – investigating how languages package and express meanings differently – is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The opening chapters give a state-of-the-art overview of the NSM model, propose several theoretical innovations and advance a number of original analyses in connection with names and naming, clefts and other specificational sentences, and discourse anaphora. Subsequent chapters describe and analyse diverse phenomena in ten languages from multiple families, geographical locations, and cultural settings around the globe. Three substantial studies document how the metalanguage of NSM semantic primes can be realised in languages of widely differing types: Amharic (Ethiopia), Korean, and East Cree. Each constitutes a lexicogrammatical portrait in miniature of the language concerned. Other chapters probe topics such as inalienable possession in Koromu (Papua New Guinea), epistemic verbs in Swedish, hyperpolysemy in Bunuba (Australia), the expression of "momentariness" in Berber, ethnogeometry in Makasai (East Timor), value concepts in Russian, and “virtuous emotions” in Japanese. This book will be valuable for linguists working on language description, lexical semantics, or the semantics of grammar, for advanced students of linguistics, and for others interested in language universals and language diversity.

Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on the Semantics of Grammatical Aspect
Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on the Semantics of Grammatical Aspect

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-05-27

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 9004401008

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The volume proposes original semantic analyses on items marking grammatical aspect. The contributions deal with structurally divergent languages, setting to the fore some less studied forms coding aspect, revisiting or challenging certain conventionalized views on aspectual categories and shedding light on interactions between aspect and modality, another multifaceted semantic category. In doing so, the volume is intended to emphasize the diversity of aspectual systems and the fuzzy semantics of grammatical aspect and help the reader to make their own mind on a topic traditionally viewed as a subcategory of verbal aspect together with lexical aspect. Contributors are Denis Apothéloz, Trang Phan and Nigel Duffield, Galia Hatav, Jens Fleischhauer and Ekaterina Gabrovska, Stephen M. Dickey, Adeline Patard, Laura Baranzini, Jaroslava Obrtelova.

Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change
Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change

Author: Heiko Narrog

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-07-19

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0199694370

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This book is a cross-linguistic exploration of semantic and functional change in modal markers. With a focus on Japanese and to a lesser extent Chinese the book is a countercheck to hypotheses built on the Indo-European languages. It also contains numerous illustrations from other languages.

Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics
Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics

Author: Raffaella Zanuttini

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2006-05-19

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9781589013056

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Presenting cutting-edge research in syntax and semantics, this important volume furthers theoretical claims in generative linguistics and represents a significant addition to present scholarship in the field. Leading scholars present crosslinguistic studies dealing with clausal architecture, negation, and tense and aspect, and the issue of whether a statistical model can by itself capture the richness of human linguistic abilities. Taken together, these contributions elegantly show how theoretical tools can propel our understanding of language beyond pretheoretical descriptions, especially when combined with the insight and skills of linguists who can analyze difficult and complex data. Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics covers a range of topics currently at the center of lively debate in the linguistic literature, such as the structure of the left periphery of the clause, the proper treatment of negative polarity items, and the role of statistical learning in building a model of linguistic competence. The ten original contributions offer an excellent balance of novel empirical description and theoretical analysis, applied to a wide range of languages, including Dutch, German, Irish English, Italian, Malagasy, Malay, and a number of medieval Romance languages. Scholars and students of semantics, syntax, and linguistic theory will find it to be a valuable resource for ongoing scholarship and advanced study.

Definiteness across languages
Definiteness across languages

Author: Ana Aguilar-Guevara

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 3961101922

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Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.

Words and Meanings
Words and Meanings

Author: Cliff Goddard

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0199668434

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This book presents cross-linguistic and cross-cultural investigations of word meaning from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. The words they consider are complex, culturally important, and basic, in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay.

The Language of Memory in a Crosslinguistic Perspective
The Language of Memory in a Crosslinguistic Perspective

Author: Mengistu Amberber

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9789027223753

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This book offers, for the first time, a detailed comparative study of how speakers of different languages express memory concepts. While there is a robust body of psycholinguistic research that bears on how memory and language are related, there is no comparative study of how speakers themselves conceptualize memory as reflected in their use of language to talk about memory. This book addresses a key question: how do speakers of different languages talk about the experience of having prior experiences coming to mind ( remembering ) or failing to come to mind ( forgetting )? A complex array of answers is provided through detailed grammatical and semantic investigation of different languages, including English, German, Polish, Russian and also a number of non-Indo-European languages, Amharic, Cree, Dalabon, Korean, and Mandarin. In addition, the book calls for a broader interdisciplinary engagement by urging that cognitive semantics be integrated with other sciences of memory.

Events of Putting and Taking
Events of Putting and Taking

Author: Anetta Kopecka

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012-05-09

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 9027275009

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Events of putting things in places, and removing them from places, are fundamental activities of human experience. But do speakers of different languages construe such events in the same way when describing them? This volume investigates placement and removal event descriptions from 18 areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages. Each chapter describes the lexical and grammatical means used to describe such events, and further investigates one of the following themes: syntax-semantics mappings, lexical semantics, and asymmetries in the encoding of placement versus removal events. The chapters demonstrate considerable crosslinguistic variation in the encoding of this domain, as well as commonalities, e.g. in the semantic distinctions that recur across languages, and in the asymmetric treatment of placement versus removal events. This volume provides a significant contribution within the emerging field of semantic typology, and will be of interest to researchers interested in the language-cognition interface, including linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.