Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar PDF Download

Author: Anne-Marie Di Sciullo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255776
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Explores the interaction of grammar with the factors reducing complexity. This book aims to bring about further understanding of the interfaces of the grammar in a broader biolinguistic sense. It anchors the formal properties of grammar at the interfaces between language and biology, language and experience, bringing about language acquisition.

Author: Anna Maria Di Sciullo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027273413
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
The theoretical proposals brought forward in this book as well as the results from the reported experimental studies present genuine contributions to the biolinguistic program. The papers contribute to our understanding of the properties of the computations and the representations derived by the language faculty, viewed as an organism of human biological. Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on Interfaces adds to the usual notion of interfaces, which is generally understood as the connection between syntax and the semantic system, between phonology and the sensorimotor system. It raises novel interface questions about how these connections are at all possible within the biolinguistic program. It anchors the formal properties of grammar at the interfaces between language and biology, language and experience, bringing about language acquisition and language variation, and it also explores the interaction of grammar with the factors reducing complexity. This book aims to bring about further understanding of the interfaces of the grammar in a broader biolinguistic sense. Written in a language accessible to a wide audience, this book will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.

Author: Ian Roberts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191643696
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description
This handbook provides a critical guide to the most central proposition in modern linguistics: the notion, generally known as Universal Grammar, that a universal set of structural principles underlies the grammatical diversity of the world's languages. Part I considers the implications of Universal Grammar for philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and examines the history of the theory. Part II focuses on linguistic theory, looking at topics such as explanatory adequacy and how phonology and semantics fit into Universal Grammar. Parts III and IV look respectively at the insights derived from UG-inspired research on language acquisition, and at comparative syntax and language typology, while part V considers the evidence for Universal Grammar in phenomena such as creoles, language pathology, and sign language. The book will be a vital reference for linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists.

Author: Kuniya Nasukawa
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 161451898X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Few concepts are as ubiquitous in the physical world of humans as that of identity. Laws of nature crucially involve relations of identity and non-identity, the act of identifying is central to most cognitive processes, and the structure of human language is determined in many different ways by considerations of identity and its opposite. The purpose of this book is to bring together research from a broad scale of domains of grammar that have a bearing on the role that identity plays in the structure of grammatical representations and principles. Beyond a great many analytical puzzles, the creation and avoidance of identity in grammar raise a lot of fundamental and hard questions. These include: Why is identity sometimes tolerated or even necessary, while in other contexts it must be avoided? What are the properties of complex elements that contribute to configurations of identity (XX)? What structural notions of closeness or distance determine whether an offending XX-relation exists or, inversely, whether two more or less distant elements satisfy some requirement of identity? Is it possible to generalize over the specific principles that govern (non-)identity in the various components of grammar, or are such comparisons merely metaphorical? Indeed, can we define the notion of identity in a formal way that will allow us to decide which of the manifold phenomena that we can think of are genuine instances of some identity (avoidance) effect? If identity avoidance is a manifestation in grammar of some much more encompassing principle, some law of nature, then how is it possible that what does and what does not count as identical in the grammars of different languages seems to be subject to considerable variation?

Author: Anna Maria Di Sciullo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266301
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The papers assembled in this volume aim to contribute to our understanding of the human capacity for language: the generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings via syntax. Different hypotheses about the properties of this generative procedure are under discussion, and their connection with biology is open to important cross-disciplinary work. Advances have been made in human-animal studies to differentiate human language from animal communication. Contributions from neurosciences point to the exclusive properties of the human brain for language. Studies in genetically based language impairments also contribute to the understanding of the properties of the language organ. This volume brings together contributions on theoretical and experimental investigations on the Language Faculty. It will be of interest to scholars and students investigating the properties of the biological basis of language, in terms the modeling of the language faculty, as well as the properties of language variation, language acquisition and language impairments.

Author: Virginia Hill
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004292551
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Formal approaches to DPs in Old Romanian offers the first collection of papers on this topic published in English. All the analyses adopt the conceptual tools of generative grammar to explain the syntactic peculiarities of Old Romanian nouns, synchronically and diachronically. Old Romanian noun syntax displays non-trivial peculiarities both in the internal structure of the DP (e.g., inflected possessive marker, polydefinite agreement, optional definite article on proper nouns) and in the way the DP is used in clause derivation (e.g., variable location of object pronouns, reanalysis of the relative item from phrasal to head). The analyses emphasize the relevance of the data for a finer-grained typology of Romance/Balkan languages as well as for the theory of grammar.

Author: S.J. Hannahs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317382137
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory provides a comprehensive overview of the major contemporary approaches to phonology. Phonology is frequently defined as the systematic organisation of the sounds of human language. For some, this includes aspects of both the surface phonetics together with systematic structural properties of the sound system; for others, phonology is seen as distinct from, and autonomous from, phonetics. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory surveys the differing ways in which phonology is viewed, with a focus on current approaches to phonology. Divided into two parts, this handbook: covers major conceptual frameworks within phonology, including: rule-based phonology; Optimality Theory; Government Phonology; Dependency Phonology; and connectionist approaches to generative phonology; explores the central issue of the relationship between phonetics and phonology; features 23 chapters written by leading academics from around the world. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory is an authoritative survey of this key field in linguistics, and is essential reading for students studying phonology.

Author: Stefan Müller
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961100748
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic the- orizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Gram- mar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective the- ory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothe- sis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are dis- cussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. “With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what has been a major gap in the literature.” Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft, 2012 “Stefan Müller’ s recent introductory textbook, “Grammatiktheorie”, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey of the present state of syntactic theory for beginning students.” Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 2012 “This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while. [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing.” Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 2012

Author: Cedric Boeckx
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107034094
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This book proposes a new model of syntax, in which all the fundamental units and properties of syntax are rethought.

Author: Roberto G. de Almeida
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319101129
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Verbs play an important role in how events, states and other “happenings” are mentally represented and how they are expressed in natural language. Besides their central role in linguistics, verbs have long been prominent topics of research in analytic philosophy—mostly on the nature of events and predicate-argument structure—and a topic of empirical investigation in psycholinguistics, mostly on argument structure and its role in sentence comprehension. More recently, the representation of verb meaning has been gaining momentum as a topic of research in other cognitive science branches, notably neuroscience and the psychology of concepts. The present volume is an expression of this recent surge in the investigation of verb structure and meaning from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science, with up-to-date contributions by theoretical linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists and neuroscientists. The volume presents new theoretical and empirical studies on how verb structure and verb meaning are represented, how they are processed during language comprehension, how they are acquired, and how they are neurologically implemented. Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing is a reflection of the recent collaboration between the disciplines that constitute cognitive science, bringing new empirical data and theoretical insights on a key element of natural language and conceptualization.