Existential Constructions Across Languages

Author : Laure Sarda
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027252882
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Existential Constructions across Languages written by Laure Sarda and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2023-07-15 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction), and investigates (ii) the relationships between locative, existential, and information structure, (iii) the quantification of the pivot and (iv) the issue of negative existentials. It brings together different and complementary approaches (functional, cognitive, pragmatic, typological, comparative, diachronic, philosophical) based on a wide variety of data sources. The contributions illustrate how the so-called existential construction can take a variety of forms – more or less grammaticalized – and functions – ranging from the expression of literal existence to that of localization and discursive focus – in a wide range of languages. The book will be valuable for linguists, researchers or students, interested in the cross-linguistic manifestations of existential constructions at the interface between syntax, semantics and information structure.

Author : Michael Lumsden
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317933710
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Existential Sentences written by Michael Lumsden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between the structure of existential sentences and their meaning? How do hearers interpret existential sentences using pragmatic assumptions? This study attempts to account for the relationship between the structure of existential sentences (ES) and their meaning. The study of ES has received a great deal of attention because the construction has complex syntactic properties, is associated with restrictions of a semantic nature, and provides an interesting area for investigation at a pragmatic level.

Author : Myriam Bouveret
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 902726015X
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Give Constructions across Languages written by Myriam Bouveret and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cognitive contrastive study of ten languages (Chinese, Dalabon, English, French, Spanish, Romanian, Kurdish, Khmer, Polish, Tibetan) focuses on the concept of giving from six main points of view, namely argument structure, lexical semantics and event structure, role marking in the three argument construction and in other constructions, lexicalization, grammaticalization and constructionalization of the verb from a cognitive construction grammar point of view, and central and extended meanings. It is proposed that a continuum approach to grammar and lexicon is needed in order to describe the typological and historical facts. The volume argues for a concrete and abstract transfer ‘cluster model’ involving coverage of lexical and grammatical extension or bleaching phenomena and that the semantic extensions (metaphorical and otherwise) exploit various portions of this schema. The volume is deeply anchored in the Cognitive Construction Grammar theoretical movement, and proposes analyses of constructional phenomena to illustrate a grammar to lexicon continuum, in synchrony and diachrony: language change, grammaticalization chains, constructionalization analysis, and an invariant hypothesis of giving as a basic activity in human cognition.

Author : Susann Fischer
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443898007
Total Pages : 475 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Definiteness Effects written by Susann Fischer and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores in detail the empirical and conceptual content of the definiteness effect in grammar. It brings together a variety of relevant observations from a typological, diachronic and a bilingual/second language acquisition perspective, and provides a general overview of different approaches concerned with the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the Definiteness Effect in a series of European and non-European languages.

Author : Howard Hao-Jan Chen
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 9811957312
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Learner Corpora: Construction and Explorations in Chinese and Related Languages written by Howard Hao-Jan Chen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited book reflects the state of the art in learner corpus and related approaches to Chinese as a second language (CSL). CSL as a field has flourished in the past few decades due to the increasingly important role of the Chinese language at the world stage, yet studies of Chinese as a second language based on learner corpora have been less well developed due to the limited availability of data and lack of theoretical insights. This book represents the latest research in this area by 1) assembling a large group of active researchers from multiple international research communities (USA, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Taiwan, and France); 2) discussing the latest resources and technologies in Chinese and other Asian languages learner corpora and corpus building; 3) basing Chinese as a second language studies on data from learners of Chinese with a wide range of first language backgrounds (English, Japanese, Korean, French, among others); and 4) integrating corpus methods with a wide range of related methods in allied fields—language acquisition, usage-based linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. This comprehensive collection is indispensable for anyone who is interested in corpus approaches to CSL and Chinese applied language studies in general.

Author : María J. Arche
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192565427
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages written by María J. Arche and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

Author : William Croft
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 900436353X
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology written by William Croft and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology, William Croft presents a unified theory of linguistic form and meaning that encompasses crosslinguistic diversity, verbalization and language change.

Author : Ulrike Zeshan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789086560042
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Possessive and Existential Constructions in Sign Languages written by Ulrike Zeshan and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Andrej Malchukov
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027287163
Total Pages : 653 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Impersonal Constructions written by Andrej Malchukov and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages, but also includes considerations of several African, American, South-East Asian, Australian, and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive, or from active to passive, or participant-to event-centered construction.

Author : Ana Aguilar-Guevara
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961101922
Total Pages : 502 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Definiteness across languages written by Ana Aguilar-Guevara and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.