Objects and Information Structure PDF Download

Author: Mary Dalrymple
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521199859
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A cross-linguistic study of how objects are affected by information structure.

Author: Kerstin Schwabe
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027233646
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.

Author: Manfred Krifka
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311026160X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Information structure deals with the linguistic forms and techniques that support the integration of what is said into the current informational and attentional state of the addressee. This shows in categories like topic-comment structuring, focus to highlight expressions, marking of givenness and of presupposed information, and ways to indicate that the information provided is restricted. The book relates infor-mation structure to theoretical models of grammar, to computation and modelling and brings together what is known about the expression of information structure in human language with regard to its empirical investigation, its psycholinguistic aspects and the acquisition of information structure. Since the need to integrate what is said into the informational and attentional state of the addressee is central to all human communication, it is not surprising that all natural languages have developed devices to express information structural cate-gories. To illustrate this, the book also provides concrete and theory independent descriptions of the information structural encoding strategies of individual languages of different types . The book can be used as a textbook appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses; it also provides information for linguists that are not specialists in the field.

Author: Johannes Kabatek
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110716208
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : de
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Die im Jahre 1905 von Gustav Gröber ins Leben gerufene Reihe der Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie zählt zu den renommiertesten Fachpublikationen der Romanistik. Die Beihefte pflegen ein gesamtromanisches Profil, das neben den Nationalsprachen auch die weniger im Fokus stehenden romanischen Sprachen mit einschließt. Zur Begutachtung können eingereicht werden: Monographien und Sammelbände zur Sprachwissenschaft in ihrer ganzen Breite, zur mediävistischen Literaturwissenschaft und zur Editionsphilologie. Mögliche Publikationssprachen sind Französisch, Spanisch, Portugiesisch, Italienisch und Rumänisch sowie Deutsch und Englisch. Sammelbände sollten thematisch und sprachlich in sich möglichst einheitlich gehalten sein.

Author: Caroline Féry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199642672
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 993

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Book Description
This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.

Author: Peter de Swart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This dissertation shows how languages differ in their morphosyntactic sensitivity to variations in the semantics of direct objects. Whereas some languages reflect semantic changes of the direct object in its marking others do not. As a result, we observe mismatches between semantic and morphosyntactic transitivity in the latter type of languages. This becomes particularly clear in a detailed study of the cognate object construction in English. Besides, this dissertation shows that a cross-linguistically uniform phenomenon can be driven by various motivations. This is demonstrated for differential object marking, a cross-linguistically recurrent phenomenon in which direct objects are overtly case marked depending on their semantic features. Two factors appear to govern differential object marking cross-linguistically: prominence-based marking and recoverability of grammatical roles. For some languages only one of these factors can be identified to be of importance, but in other languages, they are simultaneously responsible for object marking. In order to accommodate the full pattern of differential object marking, a bidirectional optimality-theoretic model is developed in which speakers take into account the perspective of the hearer. By doing so, this study shows how typological and optimality theoretical insights can be combined in order to gain more insight in the interaction of the universal principles that guide the marking of direct objects in natural language.

Author: Olga Kagan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110841642X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Based on data from a wide range of languages, the book discusses the ways in which case interacts with meaning.

Author: Elisabeth Mayer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500880
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This volume explores the complex relationship between primary agreement by means of object marking or differential object marking (DOM), and secondary agreement through clitics in non-standardized variation data from Limeño Spanish contact varieties (LSCV). As such it is concerned with diachronic as well as synchronic morphosyntactic variation of the third person object pronoun paradigm, so called clitics, as used in Standard Spanish and non-standardized Spanish contact dialects. The argumentation as well as the data presented cross diachronic and synchronic boundaries.

Author: Johannes Mursell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259739
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

Author: Aleksandra Jarosz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004680543
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Book Description
Spoken on Kurima, a miniscule island in the Miyakojima municipality in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, Kurima-Miyako is a South Ryukyuan topolect, a regional variant of the Miyako language. With most fluent speakers aged 80 or older and the island’s depopulation progressing, the topolect of Kurima faces imminent extinction, a reflection of a common pattern in the Ryukyus, whereupon the vernaculars of small islands and isolated remote areas have been facing multifold minorization for decades on the part of the dominant variety/varieties of the area (Shimoji and Hirara in the case of Kurima), Okinawan, and standard Japanese. Responding to the urgent task of producing a comprehensive description while it still has native speakers, the present volume is the first ever attempt at a systemic presentation of the Kurima topolect in any language. It also uses comparative evidence from Ryukyuan and Mainland Japonic languages to provide new proto-language reconstructions and offer insights into the history of Japonic languages.