Subject collection: Linguistics (2,773 titles, 1967–2015)

This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction.

The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes.

The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different albeit related point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic diversity (HCP 36) which focuses on the language-specific vis-à-vis universal aspects of linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference.

This monograph explores the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality of Korean, which has a rich verbal inflectional system, and proposes novel treatments within the framework of compositional semantics. One of the major contributions is the demonstration that Korean has two types of deictic tense—simple deictic and spatial deictic tense. Spatial deictic tense refers to the notion of the speaker’s ‘perceptual field’ (or deictic range), as well as to temporality, functioning to set up a condition for a systematic evidential distinction. The research in this volume shows that the basic paradigm of evidentiality of Korean derives from the standard TMA system combined with the notion of space. This volume also shows that perfect and past tense utilize different primitives. The intended readership of this volume extends beyond Koreanists to scholars interested specifically in tense, mood, aspect, and evidentiality as well as in general theories of grammar and semantics-pragmatics.

This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, beginning with the idea that language can be described as a system for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a correct transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, this volume discusses in detail the problems of Semantic Representation —including the semantic structure of utterances, the semantics of Causation in English, and communicative, or information, structure. Based on the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.

This volume brings together for the first time a collection of studies devoted to missionary language learning and retention. Introductory chapters provide historical perspectives on this population and on language teaching philosophy and practice in the LDS tradition. The empirical studies which follow are divided into two sections, the first examining mission language acquisition by English-speaking missionaries abroad, the second focusing on post-mission language attrition. These chapters by internationally known scholars offer cutting-edge research using a number of different target languages in addressing various issues in second language development. Finally, a comprehensive bibliography of sources on mission languages is included. The readership of this pioneering work is expected to extend beyond specialists in study abroad and missionary language training to a broader audience of applied linguists, educators, and students interested in language acquisition and attrition. In addition, the book offers useful insights to adults who want to maintain a second language.

This volume contributes a wider approach to word formation processes and sheds light on some unsolved issues. While the formal relationships established between the different constituents of a complex word have been analyzed in great depth, the semantic links have received little dedication. In order to complete the analysis, it is necessary to pay attention to the semantic properties associated to verbalization. The main purpose of the book is to integrate both the semantic proposals and the formal perspectives concerning word formation. This theoretical aim becomes the framework to study several mechanisms of lexical creation and neologisms. Furthermore, word formation is presented as a new source for Applied Linguistics. Although the volume uses Spanish as a starting point, it means to delimit formation patterns which may also be productive in other languages. This book is sure to become an important reference in the controversial field of word formation.

Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalism and Formal Semantics, this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners, which agglutinated to nouns, resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms, that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as ‘type shifting operators’ that shift Kinds into predicates, and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity, and the mapping of their form and function.

Understanding how task complexity affects second language learning, interaction and spoken and written performance is essential to informed decisions about task design and sequencing in TBLT programs. The chapters in this volume all examine evidence for claims of the Cognition Hypothesis that complex tasks should promote greater accuracy and complexity of speech and writing, as well as more interaction, and learning of information provided in the input to task performance, than simpler tasks. Implications are drawn concerning the basic pedagogic claim of the Cognition Hypothesis, that tasks should be sequenced for learners from simple to complex during syllabus design. Containing theoretical discussion of the Cognition Hypothesis, and cutting-edge empirical studies of the effects of task complexity on second language learning and performance, this book will be important reading for language teachers, graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and cognitive and educational psychology.

Die vorliegende Studie zielt darauf ab, die Metaphysik Meister Eckharts auf systematische Weise darzustellen und das gemeinsame Fundament zu ermitteln, das anzeigt, dass seine spekulativen lateinischen wie auch seine von bildhaften Ausdrucksweisen geprägten deutschen Schriften inhaltlich miteinander vereinbar sind. Das Innovative dieser Studie manifestiert sich darin, dass dieser Versuch der Systematisierung anhand des mittelalterlichen Sprachmodells mit seinen Prädikationsstruktur aufweisenden Sätzen, die zugleich die Grundthesen der Eckhart’schen Metaphysik bilden, vorgenommen wird. Die Prädikation ist gemäß der Inhärenz- oder der Identitätstheorie zu verstehen, dies bei variierendem Satzsinn. Das zeitigt wichtige Folgen für Eckharts Gottesverständnis und seine spezifische Haltung gegenüber der negativen Theologie. Schließlich wird ermittelt, welche Auswirkung die Prädikation auf die Grundsätze seiner Metaphysik besitzt, einer Metaphysik, die, wie exemplarisch gezeigt wird, auch für seine deutschen Schriften konstitutiv ist.This study aims to present Meister Eckhart’s metaphysics in a systematic way and to identify the common basis that makes apparent that his speculative Latin works and his German works, which are full of pictorial expressions, are compatible with each other. The innovative approach of this study lies in its attempt of systematization on the basis of the medieval theories of language. This approach identifies different ways of understanding Meister Eckhart’s key predicative propositions, which are the main theses of his metaphysics. Predication can be understood according to the theories of inherence, or identity, resulting in different meanings of the same sentence. This has great impact on Meister Eckhart’s concept of God and his attitude toward negative theology. The book shows in great detail how predication is at the root of understanding the main theses of Meister Eckhart’s metaphysics, which – as is exemplarily demonstrated – is also constitutive for his German works.

This book explores the syntactic and semantic properties of movement and adjunction in natural language. A precise formulation of minimalist syntax is proposed, guided by an independently motivated hypothesis about the composition of neo-Davidsonian logical forms, in which there is no atomic movement operation and no atomic adjunction operation. The terms 'movement' and 'adjunction' serve only as convenient labels for certain combinations of other, primitive operations, and as a result the system derives non-trivial predictions about how movement and adjunction should interact; in particular, it yields natural explanatory accounts of the constituency of adjunction structures, the possibility of counter-cyclic attachment, and the prohibitions on extraction from adjoined domains (adjunct islands) and from moved domains (freezing effects). This work serves as a case study in deriving explanations for syntactic patterns from a restrictive theory of semantic composition, and in using an explicit grammatical framework to inform rigourous minimalist theorising.

This book is the first attempt to provide a unified account of the be-possessive syntax and its extension to the modal and the perfect constructions in Russian/North Russian within a generative framework. Apparently diverse constructions are construed as deriving from the have/be parameter, which depends on the utilization of the prepositional complementizer with a Case feature. The be-perfect structure provides an adequate environment where ergativity is encoded via verbal nominalization. The relevance of the be-perfect structure for a split ergative pattern shows that the ergative system is a syntactically conditioned phenomenon rather than a purely morphological diversity. This volume also offers the diachronic study of the be-syntax, investigating the evolution of the be-perfect and be-modal constructions, which has rarely been explored within a formal framework. Concrete scenarios are proposed for the developmental paths of the be-perfect and the be-modal constructions, based on textual evidence in old North Russian.