Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy PDF Download

Author: Delia Bentley
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198745265
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides the first ever large-scale comparative treatment of there sentences (there copula NP), in over 100 Italo-Romance and Sardinian dialects spoken in Italy. It comprises detailed discussions of focus structure, predication and argument realization, definiteness effects, and the linking between semantics and syntax in there sentences, advancing novel proposals in each case. The authors test influential hypotheses on existential constructions against first-hand dialect evidence; they argue that existential and locative there sentences differ in focus structure and semantics, even though they display similar morphosyntactic features. The volume also provides the historical background of Romance there sentences, relying on the findings of the analysis of a substantial corpus of early Italo-Romance vernacular texts. Couched in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, the discussion fully engages with the vast available literature on existentials and locatives, thus being of interest to linguists of any theoretical persuasion. Through the investigation of existentials and locatives, the volume addresses key issues in linguistic theory, while offering an invaluable source of data for research on the Romance languages and a model in fieldwork-based microvariational analysis.

Author: Wang Yong
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040051359
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book investigates the existential clause (EC) from a cross-linguistic perspective and within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The prototypical EC in the less familiar languages is identified through its functional equivalents in the more familiar ones, which share the common semantic basis of ‘there exists something in some location’. Topics addressed include the morpho-syntactic features of the EC, the subject of the EC, the definiteness effect and its manifestations in the EC, the EC as impersonals, the distinction between entity- vs. event-existentials, and the EC and its related constructions. Drawing on both cross-linguistic observations based on the language sample and in-depth investigations in particular languages (e.g., in Chinese and English), the study aims to unravel how the lexico-grammar of EC is related to its meanings and functions, that is, how meaning is realised in form. The title will appeal to scholars and students in the field of linguistics, especially functional linguistics, and syntax.

Author: Hakyung Jung
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255555
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book is the first attempt to provide a unified account of the "be-"possessive syntax and its extension to the modal and the perfect constructions in Russian/North Russian within a generative framework. Apparently diverse constructions are construed as deriving from the "have/be" parameter, which depends on the utilization of the prepositional complementizer with a Case feature. The "be"-perfect structure provides an adequate environment where ergativity is encoded via verbal nominalization. The relevance of the "be"-perfect structure for a split ergative pattern shows that the ergative system is a syntactically conditioned phenomenon rather than a purely morphological diversity. This volume also offers the diachronic study of the "be"-syntax, investigating the evolution of the "be"-perfect and "be"-modal constructions, which has rarely been explored within a formal framework. Concrete scenarios are proposed for the developmental paths of the "be"-perfect and the "be"-modal constructions, based on textual evidence in old North Russian.

Author: Jutta Hartmann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789078328551
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"This thesis refutes the generally accepted claim within Generative Grammar that English there is an expletive (meaningless element) that is only present to satisfy a syntactic requirement. Instead it is argued that there is a proform that picks up a situation (or location) from the context. There is a part of the predication structure in existential sentences, which state about the situation that it contains an individual (or amount of a property) specified by the postverbal noun phrase. New data that are relevant for the definiteness effect are presented and it is demonstrated that we need to distinguish between two types of there-sentences: the results of a Magnitude Estimation Experiment for example show that these so-called there-BE and there-V sentences behave differently with respect to wh-movement (among other differences). Therefore, the two construction types are analysed differently: in there-BE sentences, there is proposed to function as the subject of predication, whereas it functions as the predicate in there-V sentences (just like in the locative inversion construction). The thesis concludes with applying the result of the investigation of English there to German da, and shows that also da is a proform that can pick up locations, times and complex situations in the context. The study offers new insights into the analysis of existential sentences and has implications for the analysis of potential subject positions, the EPP, and the classification of expletives in the Germanic languages. It is therefore interesting for scholars working in these fields and syntax in general."--P. [4] of cover.

Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205914
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

Author: Hakyung Jung
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290644
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This book is the first attempt to provide a unified account of the be-possessive syntax and its extension to the modal and the perfect constructions in Russian/North Russian within a generative framework. Apparently diverse constructions are construed as deriving from the have/be parameter, which depends on the utilization of the prepositional complementizer with a Case feature. The be-perfect structure provides an adequate environment where ergativity is encoded via verbal nominalization. The relevance of the be-perfect structure for a split ergative pattern shows that the ergative system is a syntactically conditioned phenomenon rather than a purely morphological diversity. This volume also offers the diachronic study of the be-syntax, investigating the evolution of the be-perfect and be-modal constructions, which has rarely been explored within a formal framework. Concrete scenarios are proposed for the developmental paths of the be-perfect and the be-modal constructions, based on textual evidence in old North Russian.

Author: Janebová, Markéta
Publisher: Palacký University Olomouc
ISBN: 8024465086
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The latest volume of OLINCO proceedings is a selected set of sixteen papers that grew from presentations at OLINCO 2023 - the international Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium held at Palacký University in June 2021. The papers collected here are unified by the topic of the colloquium: Language Use and Linguistic Structure, in that they all, in one way or the other, address the central questions of the study of human language. They all use standard scientific methodology and theory and solidly researched empirical evidence in favor of formalized structural representations of the language system.

Author: Susan Pintzuk
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198250272
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This text reflects developing trends in linguistic research, specifically the study of syntax and its pivotal position in current theories of language acquisition.

Author: Theresa Biberauer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255156
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Against the background of the past half century s typological and generative work on comparative syntax, this volume brings together 16 papers considering what we have learned and may still be able to learn about the nature and extent of syntactic variation. More specifically, it offers a multi-perspective critique of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic variation, evaluating the merits and shortcomings of the pre-Minimalist phase of this enterprise and considering and illustrating the possibilities opened up by recent empirical and theoretical advances. Contributions focus on four central topics: firstly, the question of the locus of variation, whether the attested variation may plausibly be understood in parametric terms and, if so, what form such parameters might take; secondly, the fate of one of the most prominent early parameters, the Null Subject Parameter; thirdly, the matter of parametric clusters more generally; and finally, acquisition issues.

Author: Theresa Biberauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886953
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. This book is a defence of the parametric approach to linguistic variation, set within the framework of the Minimalist Program.