Existential Sentences in English, Swedish, German, and Icelandic
Title | Existential Sentences in English, Swedish, German, and Icelandic PDF eBook |
Author | Christer Platzack |
Publisher | |
Pages | 8 |
Release | 1982 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages
Title | Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages PDF eBook |
Author | Sten Vikner |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 304 |
Release | 1995-04-13 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 0195359259 |
This book is the study of two different kinds of variation across the Germanic languages. One involves the position of the finite verb, and the other the possible positions of the "logical" subject in constructions with expletive (or "dummy") subjects. The book applies the theory of Principles-and-Parameters to the study of comparative syntax. Several languages are considered, including less frequently discussed ones like Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Yiddish.
Events, Arguments, and Aspects
Title | Events, Arguments, and Aspects PDF eBook |
Author | Klaus Robering |
Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Pages | 383 |
Release | 2014-03-15 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9027270627 |
The verb has often been considered the 'center' of the sentence and has hence always attracted the special attention of the linguist. The present volume collects novel approaches to two classical topics within verbal semantics, namely argument structure and the treatment of time and aspect. The linguistic material covered comes from a broad spectrum of languages including English, German, Danish, Ukrainian, and Australian aboriginal languages; and methods from both cognitive and formal semantics are applied in the analyses presented here. Some of the authors use a variety of event semantics in order to analyze argument structure and aspect whereas others employ ideas coming from object-oriented programming in order to achieve new insights into the way how verbs select their arguments and how events are classified into different types. Both kinds of methods are also used to give accounts of dynamical aspects of semantic interpretation such as coercion and type shifting.
Modern Icelandic Syntax
Title | Modern Icelandic Syntax PDF eBook |
Author | Joan Maling |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 464 |
Release | 2020-01-13 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9004373233 |
This comprehensive overview of Icelandic syntax contains new analyses of word order and long-distance reflexivization, detailed studies of case-marking, and the first systematic description of the -st middles. It presents a complete picture of modern Icelandic syntax as seen in the tradition of generative grammar, striking a good balance between theory and description.
Non-Projecting Words
Title | Non-Projecting Words PDF eBook |
Author | I. Toivonen |
Publisher | Springer Science & Business Media |
Pages | 264 |
Release | 2012-12-06 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9401000530 |
Focusing primarily on Swedish, a Germanic language whose particles have not previously been studied extensively, this study develops a theory of non-projecting words in which particles are morphologically independent words that do not project phrases. It identifies the violations of the basic tenets of X-bar theory and develops a formally explicit revision of X-bar theory that can accommodate the requisite "weak" projections.
Thetics and Categoricals
Title | Thetics and Categoricals PDF eBook |
Author | Werner Abraham |
Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Pages | 400 |
Release | 2020-07-22 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 9027260877 |
Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role, i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with subject inversion, subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text beginnings, jokes, stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives, thus speech acts without communicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contributions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences, but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which, in contrast to German and English, sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.
Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax
Title | Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax PDF eBook |
Author | H. Haider |
Publisher | Springer Science & Business Media |
Pages | 345 |
Release | 2013-03-09 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9401584168 |
o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless turned out to be the case. Within this theory, it is seen as highly desirable to be able to account for several differences on the surface by deriving them from fewer under lying differences. The reason is that, in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, it is assumed that not all knowledge of any given language is the result of learning, but that instead children already possess part of this knowledge at birth (the innate part of linguistic knowledge will obviously be the same for all human beings, and thus this theory also provides an explanation of language universals). The fewer "real" (i.e.