To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.
Complementizers may be defined as conjunctions that have the function of identifying clauses as complements. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that they have additional functions. Some of these functions are semantic in the sense that they represent conventional contributions to the meanings of the complements. The present book puts a focus to these semantic complementizer functions.
The subject of this study, first published in 1979, is the role of the complementizer in English syntax and its implications for syntactic theory. It is argued that the familiar transformational treatment of complementizers is inadequate, and that they must be specified in deep structure by means of a Phrase Structure rule. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.
This book presents a stage in the evolution of a theory of modality meanings and forms. It covers exclusively complements. There are two questions that this book addresses. Can one find a small, finite set of meanings which systematically underlies the enormous variety of meanings found in complements? And can one make any predictions from this set of meanings about the variety of forms they take? The answer to both questions is yes. The author convincingly shows how a multiplicity of sentence meanings and forms can be accounted for by breaking down sentence meaning into a small set of modules and howing how these modules combine to express certain meanings and how complement forms are related to them and their combinations.
This book offers a new and compendious account of important verbal patterns in present-day English. Serving as a central source of data, it updates and refines earlier research contributing to the syntactic and semantic description of English. Rudanko establishes an original framework, and systematically analyzes patterns of complementation using the tool of case grammar. The examination of Control, or EQUI, is a common theme and an important problem for transformationalists, and English syntacticians will value Rudankos work on infinitive complements.
This book is the first and so far only formally precise machinery converting well-motivated semantic sentence representations into actual sentences of English, French, German and Dutch. It focuses on the auxiliary and complementation systems of the languages concerned.
“The semantics of grammar” presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither “autonomous” nor “arbitrary”, but that it follows from “semantics”. It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be compared in a precise and illuminating way, within one language and across language boundaries. The author develops a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals or near-universals (and, ultimately, on a system of universal semantic primitives), and shows that the same semantic metalanguage can be used for explicating lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language and thus offers a method for an integrated linguistic description based on semantic foundations. Analyzing data from a number of different languages (including English, Russian and Japanese) the author explores the notion of ethnosyntax and, via semantics, links syntax and morphology with culture. She attemps to demonstrate that the use of a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals makes it possible to rephrase the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in such a way that it can be tested and treated as a program for empirical research.
This new edition of "Syntax: A functional-typological introduction" is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of syntactic structure. With hindsight the author now finds the de-emphasis of the formal properties a somewhat regrettable choice, since it creates the false impression that one could somehow be a functionalist without being at the same time a structuralist. To redress the balance, explicit treatment is given to the core formal properties of syntactic constructions, such as constituency and hierarchy (phrase structure), grammatical relations and relational control, clause union, finiteness and governed constructions. At the same time, the cognitive and communicative underpinning of grammatical universals are further elucidated and underscored, and the interplay between grammar, cognition and neurology is outlined. Also the relevant typological database is expanded, now exploring in greater precision the bounds of syntactic diversity. Lastly, Syntax treats synchronic-typological diversity more explicitly as the dynamic by-product of diachronic development or grammaticalization. In so doing a parallel is drawn between linguistic diversity and diachrony on the one hand and biological diversity and evolution on the other. It is then suggested that as in biology synchronic universals of grammar are exercised and instantiated primarily as constraints on development, and are thus merely the apparent by-products of universal constraints on grammaticalization.
This volume assembles contributions addressing clausal complementation across the entire South Slavic territory. The main focus is on particular aspects of complementation, covering the contemporary standard languages as well as older stages and/or non-standard varieties and the impact of language contact, primarily with non-Slavic languages. Presenting in-depth studies, they thus contribute to the overarching collective aim of arriving at a comprehensive picture of the patterns of clausal complementation on which South Slavic languages profile against a wider typological background, but also diverge internally if we look closer at details in the contemporary stage and in diachronic development. The volume divides into an introduction setting the stage for the single case-studies, an article developing a general template of complementation with a detailed overview of the components relevant for South Slavic, studies addressing particular structural phenomena from different theoretical viewpoints, and articles focusing on variation in space and/or time.
