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Studies in Language Companion Series (vols. 1–171, 1978–2015)
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Studies in Language Companion Series (vols. 1–171, 1978–2015)
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Collection Contents
41 - 60 of 171 results
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Shared Grammaticalization
Editor(s): Martine Robbeets and Hubert CuyckensMore LessThis book offers fresh perspectives on “shared grammaticalization”, a state whereby two or more languages have the source and the target of a grammaticalization process in common. While contact-induced grammaticalization has generated great interest in recent years, far less attention has been paid to other factors that may give rise to shared grammaticalization. This book intends to put this situation right by approaching shared grammaticalization from an integrated perspective, including areal as well as genealogical and universal motivations and by searching for ways to distinguish between these factors. The volume offers a wealth of empirical facts, presented by internationally renowned specialists, on the Transeurasian languages (i.e. Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic) — the languages in focus —as well as on various other languages. Shared Grammaticalization will appeal to scholars and advanced students concerned with linguistic reconstruction, language contact and linguistic typology, and to anyone interested in grammaticalization theory.
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Grammaticalization and Language Change
Editor(s): Kristin Davidse, Tine Breban, Lieselotte Brems and Tanja MortelmansMore LessThis collective volume focuses on the latest developments in the study of grammaticalization and related processes of change such as degrammaticalization, constructionalization, lexicalization, and petrification. It addresses topical issues relating to the motivations, sources, defining features, and outcomes of these changes. New theoretical reflections are offered on the pragmatic motivation of grammaticalization paths, process-oriented differences between grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization, the question of gradualness and pace of grammaticalization, and deictics as a distinct source of grammaticalization. The articles describe various constructional and distributional changes affecting deictics, determiners, reflexives, clitics, nouns, affixes, adverbs and (auxiliary) verbs, mainly in the Germanic and Romance languages. The volume will be of great interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and related changes, and to all linguists working on the interface between morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.
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The Dialect Laboratory
Editor(s): Gunther De Vogelaer and Guido SeilerMore LessMuch theorizing in language change research is made without taking into account dialect data. Yet, dialects seem to be superior data to build a theory of linguistic change on, since dialects are relatively free of standardization and therefore more tolerant of variant competition in grammar. In addition, as compared to most cross-linguistic and diachronic data, dialect data are unusually high in resolution. This book shows that the study of dialect variation has indeed the potential, perhaps even the duty, to play a central role in the process of finding answers to fundamental questions of theoretical historical linguistics. It includes contributions which relate a clearly formulated theoretical question of historical linguistic interest with a well-defined, solid empirical base. The volume discusses phenomena from different domains of grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax) and a wide variety of languages and language varieties in the light of several current theoretical frameworks.
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Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations
Editor(s): Pirkko Suihkonen, Bernard Comrie and Valery SolovyevMore LessThis book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of ‘give’ (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument structure, typology of the Amdo Sprachbund, spatial realtors (Northeastern Turkic), core argument patterns (languages of Northern California), and typology of grammatical relations (LENCA) are the topics of articles based on cross-linguistic data. The broad empirical sweep and the fine-tuned theoretical analysis highlight the central role of argument structure and grammatical relations with respect to a plethora of linguistic phenomena.
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Reflexive Marking in the History of French
Author(s): Richard WaltereitWhile French reflexive clitics have been widely studied, other forms of expressing co-reference within the clause have not received much attention. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the wider system of clause-mate co-reference in French, including the stressed pronouns, their suffixed form {soi/lui/elle}-même, and also the intensifier use of the latter. Its empirical backbone is a corpus analysis of the gradual replacement of stressed reflexive soi with the personal pronoun lui/elle from Old to Modern French. Apart from offering insights into the history of the language, this is important for current issues in theoretical linguistics, in particular binding, specificity, and the interaction of grammar and discourse. Within a cognitive-semantic framework, a number of analyses will help elucidate some long-standing puzzles in the study of French reflexives, while contributing to the wider theory of reflexivity and related issues. This book is of interest to the fields of French linguistics, semantics, discourse studies, and historical linguistics.
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Semantics
Author(s): Igor Mel’čukEditor(s): David Beck and Alain PolguèreMore LessThis 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.
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Impersonal Constructions
Editor(s): Andrej L. Malchukov and Anna SiewierskaMore LessThis volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages, but also includes considerations of several African, American, South-East Asian, Australian, and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive, or from active to passive, or participant-to event-centered construction.
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Loanwords in Japanese
Author(s): Mark IrwinLoanwords in Japanese is the first monograph in a Western language to offer a systematic and coherent overview of the vast number of words borrowed into Japanese since the mid-16th century. Its publication is timely given the fact that the loanword stratum’s recent exponential growth has given rise to recent Japanese government publications seeking to outlaw foreign vocabulary or, at the very least, offer native translations. Beginning with a history of loanwords, chapters cover loanword phonology, loanword morphology, loanword orthography and official and public attitudes to Japanese loanwords. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, scholars and students of the Japanese language.
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Studies on German-Language Islands
Editor(s): Michael T. PutnamMore LessThe contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands, or Sprachinseln, throughout the world. The individual topics of study in this volume focus on various aspects of these German-language islands such as (but not limited to) phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of these languages under investigation. Collectively, the body of research contained in this volume explores significantly under-researched topics in the fields of language contact and language attrition and illustrates how this on-going research can be enhanced through the application of formal theoretical frameworks and structural analyses.
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The Chain of Being and Having in Slavic
Author(s): Steven J. ClancyThe complex diachronic and synchronic status of the concepts be and have can be understood only with consideration of their full range of constructions and functions. Data from modern Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian) provides a window into zero copulas, non-verbal have expressions, and verbal constructions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, be and have are analyzed in terms of a blended prototype model, wherein existence/copula for be and possession/relationship for have are inseparably combined. These concepts are related to each other in their functions and meanings and serve as organizing principles in a conceptual network of semantic neighbors, including give, take, get, become, make, and verbs of position and motion. Renewal and replacement of be and have occur through processes of polysemization and suppletization involving lexical items in this network. Topics include polysemy, suppletion, tense/mood auxiliaries, modality, causatives, evidentiality, function words, contact phenomena, syntactic calques, and idiomatic constructions.
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Mood in the Languages of Europe
Editor(s): Björn Rothstein and Rolf ThieroffMore LessThis book is the first comprehensive survey of mood in the languages of Europe. It gives readers access to a collection of data on mood. Each article presents the mood system of a specific European language in a way that readers not familiar with this language are able to understand and to interpret the data. The articles contain information on the morphology and semantics of the mood system, the possible combinations of tense and mood morphology, and the possible uses of the non-indicative mood(s). The papers address the explanation of mood from an empirical and descriptive perspective. This book is of interest to scholars of mood and modality, language contact, and areal linguistics and typology.
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Clause Linking and Clause Hierarchy
Editor(s): Isabelle BrilMore LessThis collective volume explores clause-linkage strategies in a cross-linguistic perspective with greater emphasis on subordination. Part I presents some theoretical reassessment of syntactic terminologies and distinctive criteria for subordination, as well as typological methods based on sets of variables and statistics allowing cross-linguistic comparability. Part II deals with strategies relating to clause-chaining, conjunctive conjugations, converbial constructions, masdars. Part III centers on the interaction between the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of clause-linking and subordination, in relation to informational structure, to referential hierarchy, and correlative constructions. Part IV presents insights in the clause-linking and subordinating functions of some T.A.M. markers, verbal inflectional morphology and conjugation systems, which may also interact with informational hierarchy, via the backgrounding effects and lack of illocutionary force of some aspect and mood forms. The volume is of particular interest to linguists and typologists working on clause-linkage systems and on the interface between syntax, pragmatics, and semantics.
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Grammaticalization
Editor(s): Katerina Stathi, Elke Gehweiler and Ekkehard KönigMore LessThis volume contains a selection of papers on grammaticalization from a broad perspective. Some of the papers focus on basic concepts in grammaticalization research such as the concept of 'grammar' as the endpoint of grammaticalization processes, erosion, (uni)directionality, the relation between grammaticalization and constructions, subjectification, and the relation between grammaticalization and analogy. Other papers shed a critical light on grammaticalization as an explanatory parameter in language change. New case studies of micro-processes of grammaticalization complete the selection. The empirical evidence for (and against) grammaticalization comes from diverse domains: subject control, clitics, reciprocal markers, pronouns and agreement markers, gender markers, auxiliaries, aspectual categories, intensifying adjectives and determiners, and pragmatic markers. The languages covered include English and its varieties, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, Slavonic languages, and Turkish. The book will be valuable to scholars working on grammaticalization and language change as well as to those interested in individual languages.
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New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion
Editor(s): Victoria Hasko and Renee PerelmutterMore LessThis volume unifies a wide breadth of interdisciplinary studies examining the expression of motion in Slavic languages. The contributors to the volume have joined in the discussion of Slavic motion talk from diachronic, typological, comparative, cognitive, and acquisitional perspectives with a particular focus on verbs of motion, the nuclei of the lexicalization patterns for encoding motion. Motion verbs are notorious among Slavic linguists for their baffling idiosyncratic behavior in their lexical, semantic, syntactical, and aspectual characteristics. The collaborative effort of this volume is aimed both at highlighting and accounting for the unique properties of Slavic verbs of motion and at situating Slavic languages within the larger framework of typological research investigating cross-linguistic encoding of the motion domain. Due to the multiplicity of approaches to the linguistic analysis the collection offers, it will suitably complement courses and programs of study focusing on Slavic linguistics as well as typology, diachronic and comparative linguistics, semantics, and second language acquisition.
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Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose
Author(s): Olga SpevakLatin is a language with variable (so-called 'free') word order. Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose (Caesar, Cicero, and Sallust) presents the first systematic description of its constituent order from a pragmatic point of view. Apart from general characteristics of Latin constituent order, it discusses the ordering of the verb and its arguments in declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences, as well as the ordering within noun phrases. It shows that the relationship of a constituent with its surrounding context and the communicative intention of the writer are the most reliable predictors of the order of constituents in a sentence or noun phrase. It differs from recent studies of Latin word order in its scope, its theoretical approach, and its attention to contextual information. The book is intended both for Latinists and for linguists working in the fields of the Romance languages and language typology.
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Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns
Author(s): Susanne MühleisenPostulated word-formation rules often exclude formations that can nevertheless be found in actual usage. This book presents an in-depth investigation of a highly heterogeneous word-formation pattern in English: the formation of nouns by suffixation with -ee. Rather than relying on a single semantic or syntactic framework for analysis, the study combines diachronic, cognitive and language-contact perspectives in order to explain the diversity in the formation and establishment of -ee words. It also seeks to challenge previous measurements of productivity and proposes a new way to investigate the relationship between actual and possible words. By making use of the largest and most up-to-date electronic corpus – the World Wide Web – as a data source, this research adds substantially to the number of attested -ee words. It furthermore analyses this word-formation pattern in different varieties of English (British vs. American English; Australian English). Due to the multiplicity of approaches and analyses it offers, the study is suitable for courses in English word-formation, lexicology, corpus linguistics and historical linguistics.
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Modality and Subordinators
Author(s): Jackie NordströmThis book connects two linguistic phenomena, modality and subordinators, so that both are seen in a new light, each adding to the understanding of the other. It argues that general subordinators (or complementizers) denote propositional modality (otherwise expressed by moods such as the indicative-subjunctive and epistemic-evidential modal markers). The book explores the hypothesis both on a cross-linguistic and on a language-branch specific level (the Germanic languages). One obvious connection between the indicative-subjunctive distinction and subordinators is that the former is typically manifested in subordinate clauses. Furthermore, both the indicative-subjunctive and subordinators determine clause types. More importantly, however, it is shown, through data from various languages, that subordinators themselves often denote the indicative-subjunctive distinction. In the Germanic languages, there is variation in many clause types between both the indicative and the subjunctive and that and if depending on the speaker’s and/or the subject’s certainty of the truth of the proposition.
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Aspect and the Categorization of States
Author(s): David Brian RobyIn this work, the Spanish copulae ser and estar are argued to be aspectual morphemes. Their binary opposition reflects the universal aspectual values [±Perfective], which are the same ones overtly expressed by the preterite and imperfect past tense forms in Spanish. It can therefore be shown that different types of states, just like different types of events, can be categorized based on their aspectual composition. Additionally, the inherent semantic differences between events and states can be accounted for by analyzing aspect as applying to events internally and to states externally. A useful resource for the beginning linguist as well as the most seasoned analyst, this work is written in language that is easy to understand while remaining faithful to all of the appropriate relevant technical terminology. Anyone who is seriously interested in exploring why the Spanish verbs ser and estar are used the way they are should read this book.
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Introducing Maltese Linguistics
Editor(s): Bernard Comrie, Ray Fabri, Elizabeth Hume, Manwel Mifsud, Thomas Stolz and Martine VanhoveMore LessThis collection of articles highlights a selection of on-going research projects. Phonological, morphological, and syntactic issues are addressed by international experts on Maltese. The diachronic development of Maltese, its age-long contact with Italo-Romance, and the present diglossic situation with co-official English are the topics of a variety of contributions to this volume. The repercussions that the promotion of Maltese to the status of official working language of the EU has on the Maltese lexicon are discussed. A project on the sociolinguistics of non-native Maltese-English is presented. The problems posed by the creation of electronic resources for Maltese are equally focused upon. The papers amply demonstrate that Maltese Linguistics can stand on its own outside the traditional field of Oriental Studies.
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Focus and Background in Romance Languages
Editor(s): Andreas Dufter and Daniel JacobMore LessFocus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.
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