Author: Marika Kalyuga Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 9811552169 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 311
Book Description
The book presents a comprehensive study of Russian prepositions, with a focus on expressing spatial characteristics. It primarily deals with how metaphorical and metonymical transfers motivate the use of Russian prepositional phrases, explaining the collocations of prepositional phrases with verbs as a realisation of a conceptual metaphor or a metonymy. The author confronts a problem that is attracting growing attention within present-day linguistics: the semantics of prepositions and cases. The book seeks to clarify the conceptual motivations for the use of the combinations of Russian primary prepositional phrases, as well as to demonstrate how their spatial meanings are extended into non-spatial domains. This book incorporates an analysis of a large number of items, including 30 combinations of primary prepositions with cases. An original contribution, the book is of interest to teachers and students studying Slavic languages, and to cognitive linguists.
Author: Alona Soschen Publisher: Universal-Publishers ISBN: 1581123426 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
This research integrates cognitively based lexical semantics and formal syntactic analyses with relation to philosophy and logic of language. It deals with a broad range of issues and contributes relevant observations and analysis by offering a new approach to lexical and syntactic representations. Different theoretical frameworks are employed within the compass of generative syntax/ semantics. Data from Russian and other languages (Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Romance languages, English, Hebrew) are analyzed to bring out the nature of the categories each language possesses. To answer the question of how semantically empty elements are interpreted by conceptual system, special attention is paid to null categories in Russian (pro of impersonal sentences, pro of existential sentences). Two subject positions on the verb's argument grid are examined, and the conclusion is drawn concerning the existing parallelism of lexical (micro-) and syntactic (macro-) models. The 'indirect', or 'null', subject position is considered more general and encompassing in both cases. The latter (macro-)model associates semantic generic/ non-generic distinction of sentences with two functional heads Tense and Agreement in English, Russian, Hebrew, and Spanish. The notion of genericity now includes a personal level, e.g. when a certain property holds in all situations possible for an individual. The study employs predication theory to relate semantic components to formal syntactic descriptions; as an example, certain adjectival predicates that do not participate in generic formation are represented as unsaturated functions of states. The research closely relates the issue of syntactic predication to a cognitive approach to lexical units as sets of categorial features, in order to enhance our understanding of categorization and the way words are combined in lexical units. Following Chomsky (2000, 2001), predication is viewed as an operation of Merge on two syntactic elements, which supports the idea of a direct connection between certain syntactic representations (e.g. small clauses) and the initial stages of language acquisition. Predication relations are re-examined as the set of ordered functions where not only their number but direction is of importance, as they apply both on the sentence level and within modified NPs. The structures of transitive vs. intransitive verbs and their arguments are investigated as a way of exploring the minimal links of predication. According to the results of this research, these models, analyzed as 'layered' in the sense that they can be projected into syntax by parts, exhibit cross-linguistic consistency. The conclusion is that lexical arguments must be assessed from the point of view of their place in the hierarchy of events/ states. A detailed analysis of the properties of the 'result' layer leads one to the issue of reflexivity. The analysis of reflexive structures in Slavic and Romance languages is followed to establish a link between the syntactic properties of reflexive verbs and the cognitive notion of our access to ourselves (following Chierchia 1989). The ultimate goal of this research is to stimulate further work towards the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language, and to contribute to our knowledge of natural language universals.
Author: Olga Kagan Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9400752245 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
The genitive/accusative opposition in Slavic languages is a decades-old linguistic conundrum. Shedding new light on this perplexing object-case alternation in Russian, this volume analyzes two variants of genitive objects that alternate with accusative complements—the genitive of negation and the intensional genitive. The author contends that these variants are manifestations of the same phenomenon, and thus require an integrated analysis. Further, that the choice of case is sensitive to factors that fuse semantics and pragmatics, and that the genitive case is assigned to objects denoting properties at the same time as they lack commitment to existence. Kagan’s subtle analysis accounts for the complex relations between case-marking and other properties, such as definiteness, specificity, number and aspect. It also reveals a correlation between the genitive case and the subjunctive mood, and relates her overarching subject matter to other instances of differential object-marking.
Author: Patrick Saint-Dizier Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1402038739 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
This is the first book to provide an integrated view of preposition from morphology to reasoning, via syntax and semantics. It offers new insights in applied and formal linguistics, and cognitive science. It underlines the importance of prepositions in a number of computational linguistics applications, such as information retrieval and machine translation. The book presents a wide range of views and applications to various linguistic frameworks.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Language and languages Languages : en Pages : 1226
Book Description
LLBA contains abstracts of the world's literature in linguistics and language-related research, book abstracts, book review listings, and enhanced bibliographic citations of relevant dissertations." Related disciplines such as anthropology, education, ethnology, information science, medicine, and communications are covered. Also includes some reference to papers in published conference proceedings.