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Author: Gilles Authier Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 3110227738 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 396
Book Description
This volume is a collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. The sample of languages represented in these descriptive contributions covers most of the geographical areas and linguistic families in which ergativity has been known to exist jointly with well-developed morphological voice, and some languages belonging to families in which ergativity or voice were not previously recognized or adequately described up to now.
Author: Gilles Authier Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 3110227738 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 396
Book Description
This volume is a collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. The sample of languages represented in these descriptive contributions covers most of the geographical areas and linguistic families in which ergativity has been known to exist jointly with well-developed morphological voice, and some languages belonging to families in which ergativity or voice were not previously recognized or adequately described up to now.
Author: L. I. Kulikov Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027230870 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 526
Book Description
The three concepts of case, valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, semantico-syntactic verbal classes, and the semantic correlates of transitivity. The volume unifies papers written within different theoretical frameworks and representing variegated approaches (Optimality Theory, Government and Binding, various versions of the Functional approach, Cross-linguistic and Typological analyses), containing both numerous new findings in individual languages and valuable observations and generalizations related to case, valency and transitivity.
Author: Maria Polinsky Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190256605 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.
Author: Katarzyna Janic Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027260265 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 655
Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the antipassive construction from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. The nineteen contributions assembled in this volume address a wide range of aspects pertinent to the antipassive construction, such as lexical semantics, the properties of the antipassive markers, as well as the issue of fuzzy boundaries between the antipassive construction and a range of other formally and functionally similar constructions in genealogically and areally diverse languages. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that shed light on the diachronic development of the antipassive construction and the antipassive markers. The book should be of central interest to many scholars, in particular to those working in the field of language typology, semantics, syntax, and historical linguists, as well as to specialists of the language families discussed in the individual contributions.
Author: Patience Epps Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110432730 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 734
Book Description
The goal of this handbook is to provide a comprehensive resource on the Amazonian languages that synthesizes a diverse body of work by a highly international group of linguists. It will provide a review of the current state of the art, thus laying the groundwork for future scholarship in this important area. Volume 2 will focus on theory-neutral grammatical descriptions of smaller Amazonian language families.
Author: Ljiljana Progovac Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191089974 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
In this book, Ljiljana Progovac proposes a gradualist, adaptationist approach to the evolution of syntax, subject to natural selection. She provides a specific framework for its study, combining the fields of evolutionary biology, theoretical syntax, typology, neuroscience, and genetics. The author pursues an internal reconstruction of the stages of grammar based on the syntactic theory associated with Chomskyan Minimalism and arrives at specific, testable hypotheses, which are then corroborated by an abundance of theoretically analysed 'living fossils' drawn from a variety of languages. Her approach demonstrates that these fossil structures do not just coexist alongside more modern structures, but are in fact built into the very foundation of more complex structures, leading to quirks and complexities that are suggestive of a gradualist evolutionary scenario. By reconstructing a particular path along which syntax evolved, Evolutionary Syntax sheds light on the crucial properties of language design itself, as well as on the major parameters of crosslinguistic variation. As a result, this reconstruction can be meaningfully correlated with both the hominin timeline and the ever-growing body of genetic evidence that is available.
Author: Heiko Narrog Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192515357 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processes - whereby lexical words eventually become markers of grammatical categories - converge and differ across various types of language. While grammaticalization at its core is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which the same pathways of change are replicated across languages, certain language types and language areas have distinct preferences with respect to what they grammaticalize and how. Previous work has principally addressed this question with specific reference to languages of Southeast and East Asia that do not seem to grammaticalize paradigms of categories in the same manner as Indo-European languages, or form extensive grammaticalization chains. This volume takes a broader approach and proceeds systematically area by area: specialists in the field address the processes of grammaticalization in languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages. The studies reveal a number of unique pathways of grammaticalization in each language area, as well as identifying the universal shared features of the phenomenon.
Author: Kasper Boye Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110416611 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 910
Book Description
Complementizers may be defined as conjunctions that have the function of identifying clauses as complements. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that they have additional functions. Some of these functions are semantic in the sense that they represent conventional contributions to the meanings of the complements. The present book puts a focus to these semantic complementizer functions.
Author: Daniel Siddiqi Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351810278 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 598
Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages is a one-stop reference for linguists on those topics that come up the most frequently in the study of the languages of North America (including Mexico). This handbook compiles a list of contributors from across many different theories and at different stages of their careers, all of whom are well-known experts in North American languages. The volume comprises two distinct parts: the first surveys some of the phenomena most frequently discussed in the study of North American languages, and the second surveys some of the most frequently discussed language families of North America. The consistent goal of each contribution is to couch the content of the chapter in contemporary theory so that the information is maximally relevant and accessible for a wide range of audiences, including graduate students and young new scholars, and even senior scholars who are looking for a crash course in the topics. Empirically driven chapters provide fundamental knowledge needed to participate in contemporary theoretical discussions of these languages, making this handbook an indispensable resource for linguistics scholars.