New applications of Role & Reference Grammar PDF Download

Author: Rolf Kailuweit
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443810657
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The first part is comprised of seven articles dealing with possible applications of RRG to diachronic syntax and grammaticalization. Beside an overview article, the papers are mainly concerned with changes either in the interaction between topic-focus structure and the Layered Structure of the Clause or in the selection of Privileged Syntactic Arguments and case assignment. The second part consists of applications of RRG to Romance languages, and most of these applications are mainly concerned with the syntax-semantics interface. Different aspects of verbs (verbs as operators, verbs as sentence predicates, verb alternations) and the syntactic and semantic structures they involve are analyzed from an RRG perspective.

Author: Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027277516
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
This volume presents research on major issues in syntactic theory within Role and Reference Grammar. This theory was first presented in detail in Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar [FSUG], and these papers represent both expansions and applications of the theory to a wide range of phenomena. The first section contains an introduction to the theory which is the most thorough statement of it since FSUG, summarizing the features of Role and Reference Grammar established there and developing new theoretical components and analyses of syntactic phenomena not discussed in the earlier work. Throughout the discussion features of RRG are compared and contrasted with comparable features of other syntactic theories. The remainder of the volume is devoted to detailed analyses of specific problems, e.g. control, case marking, in a wide variety of languages, e.g. Mandarin Chinese, Nootka, Mparntwe Arrernte and Turkish. Thus the works presented here illustrate well the strong cross-linguistic approach to syntactic theory and description in Role and Reference Grammar.

Author: Delia Bentley
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009353551
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1014

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Book Description
Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a theory of language in which linguistic structures are accounted for in terms of the interplay of discourse, semantics and syntax. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this Handbook provides a field-defining overview of RRG. Assuming no prior knowledge, it introduces the framework step-by-step, and includes a pedagogical guide for instructors. It features in-depth discussions of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, including treatments of lexical and grammatical categories, the syntax of simple clauses and complex sentences, and how the linking of syntax with semantics and discourse works in each of these domains. It illustrates RRG's contribution to the study of language acquisition, language change and processing, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, and also contains five grammatical sketches which show how RRG analyses work in practice. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how grammar interfaces with meaning.

Author: Wataru Nakamura
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443834270
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar presents a broad picture of current developments in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a version of parallel structure grammar with an emphasis on typological adequacy. Since its inception, RRG has been applied to a wide range of languages, in particular to case marking, complex clauses (e.g. control, raising, and serial verb constructions), unaccusativity/unergativity, and the interplay between syntax and information structure. The present book is a continued investigation of the intermodular correspondence in a variety of languages and comprises 13 papers, which not only contribute to the further development of the theory, but also investigate controversial areas of linguistic theory including inflectional and derivational morphology, verbal semantics and argument structure (anticausative and serial verb constructions), the argument-adjunct distinction, an extended typology of complex clauses, the syntax-information structure interface, and interactions between the lexicon and constructions. In addition, three papers illustrate how RRG may be applied to sign languages, language acquisition, and machine translation from Arabic to English.

Author: Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290334
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface presents on-going research in Role and Reference Grammar in a number of critical areas of linguistic theory: verb semantics and argument structure, the nature of syntactic categories and syntactic representation, prosody and syntax, information structure and syntax, and the syntax and semantics of complex sentences. In each of these areas there are important results which not only advance the development of the theory, but also contribute to the broader theoretical discussion. In particular, there are analyses of grammatical phenomena such as transitivity in Kabardian, the verb-less numeral quantifier construction in Japanese, and an unusual kind of complex sentence in Wari’ (Chapakuran, Brazil) which not only illustrate the descriptive and explanatory power of the theory, but also present interesting challenges to other approaches. In addition, there are papers looking at the implications and applications of Role and Reference Grammar for neurolinguistic research, parsing and automated text analysis.

Author: Michael D. Fortescue
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027250359
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
This volume contains revised and expanded versions of those papers from the 1990 Functional Grammar Conference in Copenhagen that contributed specifically to the current investigation of clause structure in terms of semantic layers. One of the key concepts in this discussion is 'reference'. Some papers discuss ways in which previous accounts of reference need to be expanded and differentiated to provide a consistent picture of referential properties. The power of layered analysis to bring out fundamental similarities between languages of very different types is the theme of another group of papers, again with the referential properties of constituents playing a central role. By some contributors layered analysis is challenged, and the question is raised as to how it might fit into a dynamic and pragmatic picture of language. The book is rounded off by a comparison between layered structure in Functional Grammar and in Government and Binding Theory.

Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027272271
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This volume contains a selection of papers dealing with constructions that have a passive-like interpretation but do not seem to share all the properties with canonical passives. The fifteen chapters of this volume raise important questions concerning the proper characterization of the universal properties of passivization and reflect the current discussion in this area, covering syntactic, semantic, psycho-linguistic and typological aspects of the phenomenon, from different theoretical perspectives and in different language families and backed up in most cases by extensive corpora and experimental studies.

Author: Gunther De Vogelaer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027273472
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Much theorizing in language change research is made without taking into account dialect data. Yet, dialects seem to be superior data to build a theory of linguistic change on, since dialects are relatively free of standardization and therefore more tolerant of variant competition in grammar. In addition, as compared to most cross-linguistic and diachronic data, dialect data are unusually high in resolution. This book shows that the study of dialect variation has indeed the potential, perhaps even the duty, to play a central role in the process of finding answers to fundamental questions of theoretical historical linguistics. It includes contributions which relate a clearly formulated theoretical question of historical linguistic interest with a well-defined, solid empirical base. The volume discusses phenomena from different domains of grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax) and a wide variety of languages and language varieties in the light of several current theoretical frameworks.

Author: Brian Nolan
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027271089
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world’s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role, place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of cross-linguistic comparison of these important discourse and syntax-related phenomena. The articles cover a variety of typologically different languages including German, Irish, Spanish, French, Japanese, Yaqui, Tepehua (Totonacan), Persian, and English, and they offer new data on the role of constructions, within the RRG theory, in these languages. Further, this volume contributes towards providing a comprehensive overview of grammatical constructions which are central to our understanding of how human languages function, in a functional linguistics perspective. This scholarly work is grounded in a functionally oriented model that makes strong claims of descriptive and typological adequacy. The book will represent a valuable step forward in linguistics research as it applies the RRG theoretical framework to the analyses of constructions.

Author: John Butt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461583683
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
(abridged and revised) This reference grammar offers intermediate and advanced students a reason ably comprehensive guide to the morphology and syntax of educated speech and plain prose in Spain and Latin America at the end of the twentieth century. Spanish is the main, usually the sole official language of twenty-one countries,} and it is set fair to overtake English by the year 2000 in numbers 2 of native speakers. This vast geographical and political diversity ensures that Spanish is a good deal less unified than French, German or even English, the latter more or less internationally standardized according to either American or British norms. Until the 1960s, the criteria of internationally correct Spanish were dictated by the Real Academia Espanola, but the prestige of this institution has now sunk so low that its most solemn decrees are hardly taken seriously - witness the fate of the spelling reforms listed in the Nuevas normas de prosodia y ortograjia, which were supposed to come into force in all Spanish-speaking countries in 1959 and, nearly forty years later, are still selectively ignored by publishers and literate persons everywhere. The fact is that in Spanish 'correctness' is nowadays decided, as it is in all living languages, by the consensus of native speakers; but consensus about linguistic usage is obviously difficult to achieve between more than twenty independent, widely scattered and sometimes mutually hostile countries. Peninsular Spanish is itself in flux.