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Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics
Taking the broadest and most general definitions of the terms functional and structural, this series aims to present linguistic and interdisciplinary research that relates language structure — at any level of analysis from phonology to discourse — to broader functional considerations, whether cognitive, communicative, pragmatic or sociocultural. Preference will be given to studies that focus on data from actual discourse, whether speech, writing or other nonvocal medium.
Volumes 1-42 were published under the series title Linguistic & Literary Studies in Eastern Europe (LLSEE).
37 results
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Advances in Functional Linguistics
Editor(s): Joseph Davis, Radmila J. Gorup and Nancy SternPublication Date December 2006More LessThis collection carries the functionalist Columbia School of linguistics forward with contributions on linguistic theory, semiotics, phonology, grammar, lexicon, and anthropology. Columbia School linguistics views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its users, and considers contextual, pragmatic, physical, and psychological factors in its analyses. This volume builds upon three previous Columbia School anthologies and further explores issues raised in them, including fundamental theoretical and analytical questions. And it raises new issues that take Columbia School “beyond its origins.” The contributions illustrate both consistency since the school’s inception over thirty years ago and innovation spurred by groundbreaking analysis. The volume will be of interest to all functional linguists and historians of linguistics. Languages analyzed include Byelorussian, English, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Swahili.
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The Arabic Verb
Author(s): Warwick DanksPublication Date May 2011More LessThe Arabic verbal system is, for most grammarians, the keystone of the language. Notable for the regularity of its patterns, it presents the linguist with an unparalleled opportunity to explore the Saussurean notion of the indivisible sign: form and meaning. Whilst Arabic forms are well-documented, the elucidation of the corresponding meanings has proved more challenging. Beginning with an examination of the verbal morphology of Modern Standard Arabic, including an evaluation of the significance of the consonantal root, this volume then concentrates on establishing the function of the vowel-lengthening verbal patterns (III and VI). It explores issues of mutuality and reciprocity, valency and transitivity, ultimately focusing on atelic lexical aspect as the unified meaning of these patterns. This study is rich in data and relies extensively upon contemporary examples (with transliteration and translation) to illustrate its arguments, adopting an empirical structuralist approach which is aimed both at general linguists and at specialist Arabists.
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Body, Language and Meaning in Conflict Situations
Author(s): Orit Sônia WaismanPublication Date November 2010More LessThis original research applies semiotics to linguistic and non-linguistic segments in a text in search of potential correlations between them. The resultant mapping is applied to cases of gesture-word mismatches that are evident in conflict situations. The current study adopts the word systems approach, a sign-based theory that is naturally designed for the analysis of linguistic signs, and extends it to non-linguistic units, borrowing analytical tools from the field of dance movement therapy. The variety of interdisciplinary metaphorical and literal interpretations of the analyzed signs enriches the theoretical framework and facilitates examination of the instances of mismatches. Hence, this study makes a meaningful contribution to the understanding of linguistic/non-linguistic mismatches in situations of conflict. Further, it makes more general claims: the semiotic system underlying this study paves the way for further research of correlations (or lack thereof) between a range of phenomena cutting across sociology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and political science.
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Case in Russian
Author(s): Alexandra BeytenbratPublication Date September 2015More LessThis volume presents an analysis of Russian case from a sign-oriented perspective. The study was inspired by William Diver’s analysis of Latin case and follows the spirit of the Columbia School of linguistics. The fundamental premise that underlies this volume is that language is a communicative tool shaped by human behavior.In this study, case is viewed as a semantic entity. Each case is assigned an invariant meaning within a larger semantic system, which is validated through numerous examples from spoken language and literary texts to illustrate that the distribution of cases is semantically motivated and defined by communicative principles that can be associated with human behavior.
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Cognitive and Communicative Approaches to Linguistic Analysis
Editor(s): Ellen Contini-Morava, Robert S. Kirsner and Betsy Rodríguez-BachillerPublication Date December 2004More LessThis volume is the product of a Columbia School Linguistics Conference held at Rutgers University in October 1999, where the plenary speaker was Ronald W. Langacker, a founder of Cognitive Linguistics. The goal of the book is to promote two kinds of dialogue. First, dialogue between Cognitive Grammar and the particular sign-based approach to language known as the Columbia School. While they share certain basic assumptions, the “maximalist” CG and the “minimalist” CS differ both theoretically and methodologically. Given that philosophers from Mill to Kuhn to Feyerabend have stressed the importance to any discipline of dialogue between opposing views, the dialogue begun here cannot fail to bear fruit. The second kind of dialogue is that among several sign-based approaches themselves and also between them and two competitors: grammaticalization theory and generic functionalism. Topics range from phonology to discourse. Analytical problems are taken from a wide range of languages including English, German, Guarani, Hebrew, Hualapai, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Mandarin, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Urdu, and Yaqui.
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Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century
Editor(s): Nancy Stern, Ricardo Otheguy, Wallis Reid and Jaseleen SacklerPublication Date October 2019More LessThis collection is the fifth volume of selected papers to emerge from Columbia School (CS) linguistics conferences. A radically functionalist approach, CS shares with Cognitive linguistics the view that grammar is composed of form-meaning correspondences. CS views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its users. The volume includes papers on methodological issues and innovative analyses on English, Spanish, and Mandarin that illustrate the value of the strict application of clearly spelled out theoretical principles to the execution of linguistic analysis. Four of the volume’s eleven papers are written in Spanish, and all papers have abstracts in both English and Spanish. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical premises of CS, and their differences from and similarities with cognitive-functional approaches. The collection will be of interest to researchers and laymen who aim to understand the role of language in human communication.
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Connecting Grammaticalisation
Author(s): Jens Nørgård-Sørensen, Lars Heltoft and Lene SchøslerPublication Date December 2011More LessThis monograph presents a view on grammaticalisation radically different from standard views centering around the cline of grammaticality. Grammar is seen as a complex sign system, and, as a consequence, grammatical change always comprises semantic change. What unites morphology, topology (word order), constructional syntax and other grammatical subsystems is their paradigmatic organisation. The traditional concept of an inflexional paradigm is generalised as the structuring principle of grammar. Grammatical change involves paradigmatic restructuring, and in the process of grammatical change morphological, topological and constructional paradigms often connect to form complex paradigms. The book introduces the concept of connecting grammaticalisation to describe the formation, restructuring and dismantling of such complex paradigms. Drawing primarily on data from Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, the book offers both a broad general discussion of theoretical issues (part one) and three case studies (part two).
As of March 2017, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. It is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license.
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Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics
Editor(s): María de los Ángeles Gómez González, J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Elsa M. González ÁlvarezPublication Date December 2008More LessThis book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.
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Dictionary of the Prague School of Linguistics
Author(s): Josef VachekEditor(s): Libuše DuškováPublication Date June 2003More LessThis is the first English version of a text out of print for more than 40 years, summarising the positions and key concepts of an influential stream of linguistic thought. Using quotations as entries, J. Vachek (1909-1997), a leading advocate of the Prague School, employed more than 160 sources, papers and monographs, by well over 30 representatives of the school (Mathesius, Trnka, Skalička, Daneš, Dokulil, Mukařovský, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Isachenko, and others). The dictionary both captures the pioneering efforts and achievements of the school from its foundation in 1926, and provides a framework for assessing the current state of affairs, attesting to its originality and serving as a preventive to treading paths already explored. The headword concepts are provided with French, German and Czech equivalents and Vachek's original preface is supplemented by a foreword which traces the development of the school up to the present date and puts it into perspective.
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Dramatized Discourse
Author(s): Zhuo Jing-SchmidtPublication Date August 2005More LessLanguage is a symbolic system of meanings evoked by linguistic forms. The choice of forms in communication is non-arbitrary. Rather, speakers pick those forms whose meanings best convey their discourse intention. The meaning of the Mandarin ba-construction, argues Jing-Schmidt, is discourse dramaticity, a concept that includes high conceptual salience and subjectivity. The ba-construction and its "syntactic variations" are never interchangeable because contrast in their meanings determines difference in their functions. Quantitative analyses based on authentic data validate the postulation of discourse dramaticity. By taking discourse pragmatics seriously, the dramaticity hypothesis enables a unitary explanation that transcends sentence grammar. The diachronic treatment reveals the syntactic change of the ba-construction as an adaptive process of pragmatization, which raises the issue of linguistic evolution as a result of socio-cultural development.
This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the interaction between grammar and pragmatics and to teachers confronting the controversy of the ba-construction in foreign language pedagogy.
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Expressing the Same by the Different
Author(s): Igor DreerPublication Date September 2007More LessThis volume offers an alternative, sign-oriented analysis of the distribution of the French Indicative and Subjunctive. It rejects both government and functions, attributed to both moods, and shows that the distribution of the Indicative and the Subjunctive is motivated by their invariant meanings. The volume illustrates the close interaction between the Indicative and the Subjunctive, as linguistic signs, and signs of other grammatical systems, contextually associated with the invariant meanings of both moods. Special consideration is given to the use of the Indicative and the Subjunctive in texts of different styles and genres.This volume also deals with the diachronic disfavoring of the Subjunctive and especially of the Imperfect Subjunctive that occurred from Old French to Contemporary French. It is argued that this disfavoring was motivated by the narrowing of the invariant meaning of the Contemporary French Subjunctive. All hypotheses are supported by contextualized examples and frequency counts.
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Follow the Signs
Author(s): Rodney B. SangsterPublication Date February 2020More LessIn this his latest book, Sangster presents a comprehensive theory that takes the cognitive view of language in a promising new direction, based upon how linguistic signs relate to one another at different levels of consciousness. At the rational level, where signs are necessarily experienced in context, they are primarily polysemic. At the transpersonal or pre-contextual level, however, they are monosemic, constituting a dynamic and self-organizing relational structure capable of producing a potentially infinite variety of contextual applications. The two levels are united by a stochastic or somatic selection process called contextualization, where feedback from experience assures the evolution of the system. The relational structure itself is composed of archetypes of space and time consciousness that derive from the evolution of the linguistic sign from the signaling behavior of antecedent species. Detailed analyses are provided to explain how the archetypes structure meaning in both the grammatical and lexical spheres, as well as in syntax.
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Issues in Mathematical Linguistics
Editor(s): Carlos Martín-VidePublication Date November 1999More LessThis brief collection of refereed papers approaches several technical as well as methodological aspects of the mathematical formalization of natural language, particularly in syntax and in semantics. Such kind of investigation is a prerequisite for the computational processing of language and is narrowly related to current developments in other disciplines, namely theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. The volume offers a coherent picture of recent research on the mathematics of language, and may be of interest to a wide audience, from linguists to mathematicians. Detailed indexes of authors and topics provide an easy access to the contents.
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Language and Function
Editor(s): Josef HladkýPublication Date April 2003More LessThe present volume, originally prepared to celebrate Jan Firbas' 80th birthday, unfortunately is presented only belatedly, to commemorate one of the most outstanding personalities of functional and structural linguistics. Its contributors have been inspired by the richness and penetrating invention of Firbas, contained in his analysis of functional sentence perspective and of many other aspects of sentence and discourse.
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Language and Meaning
Author(s): Christopher BeedhamPublication Date November 2005More LessThis book illustrates the structuralist idea that language creates the reality we perceive. The data presented in this volume focus on the problematic issues of the passive construction and irregular (strong) verbs, with examples taken primarily from English with separate subsections on German and Russian. The author presents a new and different analysis of these complex topics which proceeds from the levels of form to meaning rather than the traditional and generative methodologies that follow the opposite path from meaning to form. This book will be of interest to all linguists who have ever confronted the controversial question of the interaction between lexical exceptions and grammatical rules. The scope of this volume is rather broad and it compares and contrasts text grammar versus sentence grammar in an innovative way.
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Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts
Editor(s): Judith MunatPublication Date November 2007More LessThe coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words.
The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides.
The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides. Each study analyses novel formations in relation to their contexts of use and inevitably leads to the crucial question of creativity vs. productivity. By focussing on creative lexical formations at the level of parole, these studies provide insights into morphological theory at the level of langue, and ultimately seek to explain lexical creativity as a function of language use.
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Lexical meaning as a testable hypothesis
Author(s): Nadav SabarPublication Date April 2018More LessThis book offers an original treatment of the lexical form look. The work is innovative in that it establishes that the Columbia School conception of an invariant meaning – hitherto found primarily in grammar – is equally operative in core vocabulary items like look and see. The upshot is that grammar and lexicon are both amenable to synchronic monosemic analysis. The invariant meaning proposed for look explains the full range of its distribution, without the need to posit as linguistic units ‘look-noun’ and ‘look-verb’, ‘look-visual’ and ‘look-intellectual’, or constructions such as have-a-look, look-like, etc. The analysis places look in opposition with see, seem and appear for which tentative meanings are posited as well. The hypotheses are supported through qualitative analyses of attested examples and quantitative predictions tested in a massive corpus. These predictions offer new knowledge about the distribution of look, see and other forms that may provide useful for other scholars.
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Lexicalization patterns in color naming
Editor(s): Ida Raffaelli, Daniela Katunar and Barbara KerovecPublication Date October 2019More LessThe volume presents sixteen chapters focused on lexicalization patterns used in color naming in a variety of languages. Although previous studies have dealt with categorization and perceptual salience of color terms, few studies have been consistently conducted in order to investigate phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic devices languages use to form color terms.
The aim of this volume is to approach color data from a relativist and typological perspective and to address some novel viewpoints in the research of color terms, such as: (a) the focus on language structure per se in the study of lexicalization data; (b) investigation of inter- and intra-language structural variation; (c) culture and language contact as reflected in language structure.
Topics of this book have a broad appeal to researchers working in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
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Linguistic Theory and Empirical Evidence
Editor(s): Bob de Jonge and Yishai TobinPublication Date June 2011More LessThis volume further elaborates the empirical tradition of Columbia School (CS) Linguistics by offering diverse empirical analyses for a wide variety of languages. These studies open a much needed debate advocating the necessity of the independent validation of linguistic hypotheses. This research exemplifies how such a validation should be conducted by determining which forms underlie the analyses and extracting those observations that are considered to be objective. The volume consists of two parts: a section on synchronic and diachronic grammatical problems and a section on Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB), the Columbia School version of phonology, applied to evolutionary, developmental and clinical issues and the phonotactics of the selected lexicon of a literary text. It provides a wealth of useful empirical data and in-depth and sophisticated qualitative and quantitative analyses of a broad range of languages from diverse families: French, Spanish, Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Polish, Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew.
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Mathematical and Computational Analysis of Natural Language
Editor(s): Carlos Martín-VidePublication Date October 1998More LessIn the last decade, computational linguistics has produced a revival of the interest in the mathematical study of the various levels of human language. This volume contains a selection of recent research papers approaching mathematical and computational topics in natural languages, with a special attention being paid to syntax and semantics. According with their main focus, the papers are distributed into four parts: Syntax, Semantics, Natural language processing and Varia, which cover a vast range of problems. The book may be of interest to all those who intend to know which kind of mathematics is used when giving account of natural language, as well as to people working on computational issues involving human-machine interaction.
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Meaning Predictability in Word Formation
Author(s): Pavol ŠtekauerPublication Date March 2005More LessThis book aims to contribute to a growing interest amongst psycholinguists and morphologists in the mechanisms of meaning predictability. It presents a brand-new model of the meaning-prediction of novel, context-free naming units, relating the wordformation and wordinterpretation processes. Unlike previous studies, mostly focussed on N+N compounds, the scope of this book is much wider. It not only covers all types of complex words, but also discusses a whole range of predictability-boosting and -reducing conditions. Two measures are introduced, the Predictability Rate and the Objectified Predictability Rate, in order to compare the strength of predictable readings both within a word and relative to the most predictable readings of other coinages. Four extensive experiments indicate inter alia the equal predicting capacity of native and non-native speakers, the close interconnection between linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, the important role of prototypical semes, and the usual dominance of a single central reading.
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The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs
Author(s): Erica C. GarcíaPublication Date September 2009More LessThis detailed study challenges the claim that syntax is arbitrary and autonomous, as well as the assumption that Spanish clitic clusters constitute grammaticalized units. Diverse--apparently unrelated--restrictions on clitic clustering in both simplex VP's and Accusative cum Infinitive structures are shown to be cognitively motivated, given the meaning of the individual clitics, and the compositional/interpretative routines those meanings motivate. The analysis accounts, in coherent and principled fashion, for the absolute non-occurrence of some clusters, and the interpretation-dependent acceptability of all remaining clitic combinations: cluster acceptability depends on the ease with which the given clitic combination can be processed to yield a congruent message; there is no point in combining clitics whose meanings preclude speedy processing of the cluster. The monograph goes beyond previous work on Spanish clitics in its wealth of data, the range of syntactic phenomena discussed, and its analytic scope.
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An Onomasiological Theory of English Word-Formation
Author(s): Pavol ŠtekauerPublication Date December 1998More LessPavol Štekauer presents an original approach to the intricate problems of English word-formation. The emphasis is on the process of coining new naming units (words). This is described by an onomasiological model, which takes as its point of departure the naming needs of a speech community, and proceeds through conceptual reflection of extra-linguistic reality and semantic analysis to the form of a new naming unit. As a result, it is the form which implements options given by semantics by means of the so-called Form-to-Meaning Assignment Principle.
Word-formation is conceived of as an independent component, interrelated with the lexical component by supplying it with new naming units, and by making use of the word-formation bases of naming units stored in the Lexicon. The relation to the Syntactic component is only mediated through the Lexical component.
In addition, the book presents a new approach to productivity. It is maintained that word-formation processes are as productive as syntactic processes. This radically new approach provides simple answers to a number of traditional problems of word-formation.
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Phonetics and Phonology of Tense and Lax Obstruents in German
Author(s): Michael JessenPublication Date January 1999More LessKnowing that the so-called voiced and voiceless stops in languages like English and German do not always literally differ in voicing, several linguists — among them Roman Jakobson — have proposed that dichotomies such as fortis/lenis or tense/lax might be more suitable to capture the invariant phonetic core of this distinction. Later it became the dominant view that voice onset time or laryngeal features are more reasonable alternatives. However, based on a number of facts and arguments from current phonetics and phonology this book claims that the Jakobsonian feature tense was rejected prematurely. Among the theoretical aspects addressed, it is argued that an acoustic definition of distinctive features best captures the functional aspects of speech communication, while it is also discussed how the conclusions are relevant for formal accounts, such as feature geometry. The invariant of tense is proposed to be durational, and its ‘basic correlate’ is proposed to be aspiration duration. It is shown that tense and voice differ in their invariant properties and basic correlates, but that they share a number of other correlates, including F0 onset and closure duration. In their stop systems languages constitute a typology between the selection of voice and tense, but in their fricative systems languages universally tend towards a syncretism involving voicing and tenseness together. Though the proposals made here are intended to have general validity, the emphasis is on German. As part of this focus, an acoustic study and a transillumination study of the realization of /p,t,k,f,s/ vs. /b,d,g,v,z/ in German are presented.
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Phrasal Constructions and Resultativeness in English
Author(s): Marina GorlachPublication Date December 2004More LessEat up the apple or Eat the apple up? Is there any difference in the messages each of these alternative forms sends? If there isn’t, why bother to keep both? On the other hand, is there any semantic similarity between eat the apple up and break the glass to pieces? This study takes a fresh look at a still controversial issue of phrasal verbs and their alternate word order applying sign-oriented theory and methodology. Unlike other analyses, it asserts that there is a semantic distinction between the two word order variants phrasal verbs may appear in. In order to test this distinction, the author analyzes a large corpus of data and also uses translation into a language having a clear morphological distinction between resultative/non-resultative forms (Russian). As follows from the analysis, English has morphological and syntactic tools to express resultative meaning, which allows suggesting a new lexico-grammatical category – resultativeness.
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Qualitative-Quantitative Analyses of Dutch and Afrikaans Grammar and Lexicon
Author(s): Robert S. KirsnerPublication Date February 2014More LessSharing certain assumptions but differing in theory and practice, both Columbia School linguistics (CS) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) have increasingly supported their analyses with quantitative evidence. Citation of individual sentences, in isolation or in context, has been supplemented with counts of linguistic forms in texts, informant questionnaires, and perception tests. The present volume, continuing a dialogue between CS and CG, offers six such qualitative-quantitative studies, one on Afrikaans and five on Dutch. Topics include (a) demonstratives, (b) pragmatic particles and imperatives, (c) a puzzling “dismissive” idiom, (d) progressive aspect, and (e) indirect objects. While CS is better suited for analyzing relatively closed systems (e.g. tense, pronouns), CG provides more insight into the vagaries of the amorphous lexicon. The author also offers personal remarks on “linguistics as a path” and discusses how in one case a wrong prediction reflects his dual role as both linguist and student of Dutch as a foreign language.
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Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry
Editor(s): Naomi L. Shin and Daniel ErkerPublication Date November 2018More LessAcross the world, professional linguistic inquiry is in full bloom, largely as result of pioneering thinkers who helped rapidly modernize the study of human language in the last century. As the field continues to move forward, further solidifying its position as a conduit of insight into the human condition, it is essential to take stock of the theoretical primitives that have given linguistics its intellectual foundation. This volume does precisely that, inspecting the load-bearing components of the edifice upon which contemporary linguistics has been constructed. The volume’s authors – whose expertise spans the Generativist, Functionalist, and Variationist research traditions – remind us of the need to revisit the conceptual bedrock of the field, clarifying and assessing our primary theoretical moves, including those relating to such elemental components as the ‘linguistic sign’, ‘a language’, ‘structural relations’, ‘grammatical category’, ‘acquisition’, ‘bilingual’, ‘competence’, and ‘sociolinguistic variable’.
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The Regularity of the 'Irregular' Verbs and Nouns in English
Author(s): Elena Even-Simkin and Yishai TobinPublication Date September 2013More LessThis volume presents an in-depth study of the so-called irregular Past Tense (sing/sang) and Noun Plural (foot/feet) forms with Internal Vowel Alternation (IVA) in English demonstrating that they possess both a fixed phonological and semantic regularity. The innovative sign-oriented analysis and inductive methodology employed in this study are further supported by additional first language acquisition data, experimental studies and historical evidence. The data culled from multiple linguistic anthologies, dictionaries and thesauri have shown that although the IVA process comprises a relatively small number of nominal and verbal forms in Modern English, IVA, originally, was a prevalent and productive process in Old English, Indo-European and other language families. The results of this empirical study present and introduce a novel classification based on the regular and systematic iconic-phonological and semantic nature of all these diverse IVA processes both nominal and verbal that has been maintained throughout the history of English.
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Semantic Structure in English
Author(s): Jim FeistPublication Date September 2016More LessSyntax puts our meaning (“semantics”) into sentences, and phonology puts the sentences into the sounds that we hear and there must, surely, be a structure in the meaning that is expressed in the syntax and phonology. Some writers use the phrase “semantic structure”, but are referring to conceptual structure; since we can express our conceptual thought in many different linguistic ways, we cannot equate conceptual and semantic structures.
The research reported in this book shows semantic structure to be in part hierarchic, fitting the syntax in which it is expressed, and partly a network, fitting the nature of the mind, from which it springs. It is complex enough to provide for the emotive and imaginative dimensions of language, and for shifts of standard meanings in context, and the “rules” that control them.
Showing the full structure of English semantics requires attention to many currently topical issues, and since the underlying theory is fresh, there are fresh implications for them. The most important of those issues is information structure, which is given full treatment, showing its overall structure, and its relation to semantics and the whole grammar of English.
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Signal, Meaning, and Message
Editor(s): Wallis Reid, Ricardo Otheguy and Nancy SternPublication Date July 2002More LessThis is the second volume of papers on sign-based linguistics to emerge from Columbia School linguistics conferences. One set of articles offers semantic analyses of grammatical features of specific languages: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary do; Italian pronouns egli and lui; the Celtic-influenced use of on (e.g., ‘he played a trick on me’); a monosemic analysis of the English verb break. A second set deals with general theoretical issues: a solution to the problem that noun class markers (e.g. Swahili) pose for sign-based linguistics; the appropriateness of statistical tests of significance in text-based analysis; the word or the morpheme as the locus of paradigmatic inflectional change; the radical consequences of Saussure’s anti-nomenclaturism for syntactic analysis; the future of ‘minimalist linguistics’ in a maximalist world. A third set explains phonotactic patterning in terms of ease of articulation: aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants in Urdu; initial consonant clusters in more than two dozen languages. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical points of each article and their relation to the Columbia School framework. The collection is relevant to cognitive semanticists and functionalists as well as those working in the sign-based Jakobsonian and Guillaumist frameworks.
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Spanish Phonology and Morphology
Author(s): David EddingtonPublication Date December 2004More LessUnlike most monographs on Spanish phonology and morphology that approach these topics from a structuralist or generativist framework, this volume is written from a less traditional point of view. More specifically, it emphasizes quantitative evidence from sources such as usage-based studies, psycholinguistic experiments, corpus data, and computer simulations. Arguments are presented to demonstrate that these kinds of evidence are crucial for establishing theories of language that relate to the psychological mechanisms involved in producing and comprehending speech, in contrast to theories about abstract linguistic structure. A range of topics is covered including morphological parsing, nominalization, stress, syllable structure, diphthongization, gender, morphophonemic alternations, and epenthesis. An appendix is included that serves as a primer on quantitative linguistic research. It discusses how some of the cited experiments were carried out, provides an introduction to statistical analysis, and discusses tools that are available for conducting quantitative research on the Spanish language.
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The Substance and Value of Italian Si
Author(s): Joseph DavisPublication Date September 2017More LessThis book offers an original treatment of the Italian clitic si. Sharply separating encoded grammar from inference in discourse, it proposes a unitary meaning for si, including impersonals, passives, and reflexives. Si signals third-person participancy but makes no distinctions of number, gender, or case role. The analysis advances the Columbia School framework by relying on just these straightforward oppositions, attributing variety of interpretation largely to language use rather than to grammar. The analysis places si within a network of oppositions involving all the other clitics. Data come primarily from twentieth-century and more recent published and on-line literature. The book will be of interest to functional linguists, students of reflexivity, and scholars of the Italian language.
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Textplicating Iconophones
Author(s): Nurit LevyPublication Date April 2016More LessThis volume applies a sign-oriented approach to the description of articulatory and acoustic iconic phenomena in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In its hypothesis, the greater the role of sensory experience in the message of a text, the more likely it is to employ linguistic representation in articulated sounds iconically to affect sensory experience. Ulysses is presented as a work of art whose emphasis on sensual impression and sensory experience is reflected in the composition and distribution of its phonemes.
Four English phonemes are examined, each in several contexts in Ulysses. A systematic association of resemblance is found between the manner and effort involved in the articulation of each phoneme relative to other phonemes and sounds, and the manner in which semantic content is arranged in the scenes and themes of the book. The different emphases of semantic arrangement associated with each of the examined phonemes are maintained across diverse themes, varied scopes of reference and opposed manners of contextualization. The phonological unit is therefore perceived to carry a semantic impact to complement its differentiating role in linguistic signification. It also offers an innovative approach to Ulysses and exposes new semantic nuances in its narration and characterization techniques.
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Theory and Practice in Functional-Cognitive Space
Editor(s): María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco Gonzálvez-García and Angela DowningPublication Date July 2014More LessThe differences among functionalist, cognitivist and/or constructionist models are generally taken to be not absolute, but rather a matter of emphasis and degree, with an increasing permeability between paradigms arising from cross-fertilizing influences. This book further explores this burgeoning area of research through the notion of functional-cognitive space, namely, the topography of the space occupied by functional, cognitivist and/or constructionist models against the background of formalist approaches in general and of Chomsky’s Minimalism in particular. Specifically, the twelve contributions in the present volume update the reader on recent developments in functionalism (Systemic Functional Grammar, Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar) and cognitivism (Word Grammar, (Cognitive) Construction Grammar and the Lexical Contructional Model). Plotting cognitive-space proves particularly adequate for situating the six models represented in this volume, not only in relation to each other, but also potentially with respect to a wide spectrum of functionalist, cognitivist and/or constructionist models.
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Third Person References
Author(s): Jenny DumontPublication Date February 2016More LessThis volume, a case study on the grammar of third person references in two genres of spoken Ecuadorian Spanish, examines from a discourse-analytic perspective how genre affects linguistic patterns and how researchers can look for and interpret genre effects. This marks a timely contribution to corpus linguistics, as many linguists are choosing to work with empirical data. Corpus based approaches have many advantages and are useful in the comparison of different languages as well as varieties of the same language, but what is often overlooked in such comparisons is the genre of language under examination. As this case study shows, genre is an important factor in interpreting patterns and distributions of forms.
The book also contributes toward theories of anaphora, referentiality and Preferred Argument Structure. It is relevant for scholars who work with referentiality, genre differences, third person references, and interactional linguistics, as well as those interested in Spanish morphosyntax.
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Toward a Calculus of Meaning
Editor(s): Edna Andrews and Yishai TobinPublication Date December 1996More LessThis volume contains papers presented at a symposium in honor of Cornelis H. van Schooneveld and invited papers on the topics of invariance, markedness, distinctive feature theory and deixis. It is not a Festschrift in the usual sense of the word, but more of a collection of articles which represent a very specific way of defining and viewing language and linguistics. The specific approach presented in this volume has its origins and inspirations in the theoretical and methodological paradigm of European Structuralism in general, and the sign-oriented legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce and the functional and communication-oriented approach of the Prague School in particular.
The book is divided in three sections: Theoretical and Methodological Overview: Cornelis H. van Schooneveld; Anatoly Liberman; Petr Sgall; Alla Bemova and Eva Hajicova; Robert Kirsner. Studies in Russian and Slavic Languages: Edna Andrews; Lawrence E. Feinberg; Annie Joly Sperling; Ronald E. Feldstein; Irina Dologova and Elena Maksimova; Stefan M. Pugh. Applications to Other Languages, Language Families, and Aphasia: Ellen Contini-Morava; Barbara A. Fennell; Victor A. Friedman; Robert Fradkin; Yishai Tobin; Mark Leikin.
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Usage-Based Approaches to Language Change
Editor(s): Evie Coussé and Ferdinand von MengdenPublication Date July 2014More LessUsage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework, but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage is crucial for our understanding of language and linguistic structures, language change and variation inevitably take centre stage in linguistic analysis. Along these lines, the volume presents eight studies by international authors that discuss various approaches to studying language change from a usage-based perspective. Both theoretical issues and empirical case studies are well-represented in this collection. The case studies cover a variety of different languages – ranging from historically well-studied European languages via Japanese to the Amazonian isolate Yurakaré with no written history at all. The book provides new insights relevant for scholars interested in both functional and cognitive linguistic theory, in historical linguists and in language typology.
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