Comparative Athapaskan Syntax: Arguments and Projections . The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax
Title | Comparative Athapaskan Syntax: Arguments and Projections . The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax PDF eBook |
Author | Leslie Saxon |
Publisher | |
Pages | 9 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Linguistics |
ISBN |
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax
Title | The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax PDF eBook |
Author | Guglielmo Cinque |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 990 |
Release | 2008-10-16 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 0195136519 |
Its twenty-one commissioned chapters serve two functions: they provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and they also provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved." "This volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics."--Jacket.
Contrast and Representations in Syntax
Title | Contrast and Representations in Syntax PDF eBook |
Author | Bronwyn M. Bjorkman |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 337 |
Release | 2020-10-05 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 0198817924 |
This book explores how grammatical oppositions - for instance, the contrast between present and past tense - are encoded in the syntax of natural languages. The chapters approach the topic from a range of perspectives, drawing on data from a variety of typologically diverse languages, including Blackfoot, Greek, Onondaga, and Scottish Gaelic.
The Syntax of Aspect
Title | The Syntax of Aspect PDF eBook |
Author | Nomi Erteschik-Shir |
Publisher | OUP Oxford |
Pages | 336 |
Release | 2005-05-26 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 0191535699 |
This book investigates the way grammar deals with the representation of aspectual (aktionsart) concepts, focussing on issues of the lexicon-syntax interface. The authors' innovative analyses of this interface significantly advance our understanding of the role that syntax plays in determining verbal meaning, aspectual interpretation, and thematic information. Various theories are developed in this collection, including those that take as their starting point the lexical-syntactic framework of Hale and Keyser, prominent among which is the chapter by Hale and Keyser themselves. By examining different phenomena in a cross-linguistic perspective, this book develops insights into the general theoretical question of universal grammar and acquisition as well as into the specific nature of the lexicon-syntax interface. It is a major contribution to modern syntactic theory.
Catching Language
Title | Catching Language PDF eBook |
Author | Felix K. Ameka |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter |
Pages | 671 |
Release | 2008-08-22 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 3110197693 |
Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.
Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory
Title | Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory PDF eBook |
Author | Þórhallur Eyþórsson |
Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing |
Pages | 456 |
Release | 2008 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9789027233776 |
This book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at Rosendal, Norway, under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the volume is 'internal factors in grammatical change.' The papers focus on fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in different ways, but are generally critical of 'Grammaticalization Theory'. Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change, pinpointing both extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and more controversially internally driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on morphological change 'by itself.' A wide range of languages is covered, including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan), Zoque, and Athapaskan languages, in addition to Indo-European languages, both the more familiar ones and some less well-studied varieties.
The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America
Title | The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America PDF eBook |
Author | Carmen Dagostino |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Pages | 998 |
Release | 2023-12-18 |
Genre | Foreign Language Study |
ISBN | 3110712741 |
This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.