Information Status And Noncanonical Word Order In English

Author : Betty J. Birner
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027230439
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English written by Betty J. Birner and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work provides a comprehensive discourse-functional account of three classes of noncanonical constituent placement in English — preposing, postposing, and argument reversal — and shows how their interaction is accounted for in a principled and predictive way. In doing so, it details the variety of ways in which information can be 'given' or 'new' and shows how an understanding of this variety allows us to account for the distribution of these constructions in discourse. Moreover, the authors show that there exist broad and empirically verifiable functional correspondences within classes of syntactically similar constructions. Relying heavily on corpus data, the authors identify three interacting dimensions along which individual constructions may vary with respect to the pragmatic constraints to which they are sensitive: old vs. new information, relative vs. absolute familiarity, and discourse- vs. hearer-familiarity. They show that preposed position is reserved for information that is linked to the prior discourse by means of a contextually licensed partially-ordered set relationship; postposed position is reserved for information that is 'new' in one of a small number of distinct senses; and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preverbal constituent be at least as familiar within the discourse as that represented by the postverbal constituent. Within each of the three classes of constructions, individual constructions vary with respect to whether they are sensitive to familiarity within the discourse or (assumed) familiarity within the hearer's knowledge store. Thus, although the individual constructions in question are subject to distinct constraints, this work provides empirical evidence for the existence of strong correlations between sentence position and information status. The final chapter presents crosslinguistic data showing that these correlations are not limited to English.

Author : Betty J. Birner
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027281904
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English written by Betty J. Birner and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-05-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work provides a comprehensive discourse-functional account of three classes of noncanonical constituent placement in English – preposing, postposing, and argument reversal – and shows how their interaction is accounted for in a principled and predictive way. In doing so, it details the variety of ways in which information can be 'given' or 'new' and shows how an understanding of this variety allows us to account for the distribution of these constructions in discourse. Moreover, the authors show that there exist broad and empirically verifiable functional correspondences within classes of syntactically similar constructions. Relying heavily on corpus data, the authors identify three interacting dimensions along which individual constructions may vary with respect to the pragmatic constraints to which they are sensitive: old vs. new information, relative vs. absolute familiarity, and discourse- vs. hearer-familiarity. They show that preposed position is reserved for information that is linked to the prior discourse by means of a contextually licensed partially-ordered set relationship; postposed position is reserved for information that is 'new' in one of a small number of distinct senses; and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preverbal constituent be at least as familiar within the discourse as that represented by the postverbal constituent. Within each of the three classes of constructions, individual constructions vary with respect to whether they are sensitive to familiarity within the discourse or (assumed) familiarity within the hearer's knowledge store. Thus, although the individual constructions in question are subject to distinct constraints, this work provides empirical evidence for the existence of strong correlations between sentence position and information status. The final chapter presents crosslinguistic data showing that these correlations are not limited to English.

Author : Paul Portner
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110587319
Total Pages : 633 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure written by Paul Portner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.

Author : Biljana Mišić Ilić
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443839523
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Challenging Change written by Biljana Mišić Ilić and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, Challenging Change: Literary and Linguistic Responses, is a collection of twenty-three articles which examine change – understood in the broadest sense – as the need of the modern man to redefine, revise, deconstruct and reconstruct previous theories, histories, moralities, social relationships, forms of language and language use. In these times of great change, when the only constant seems to be change itself, the authors of these essays respond to the challenge and approach the notion of change from the perspectives of literary studies and linguistics. The book opens with an introductory overview, followed by twenty-three articles divided into two sections. The authors of the articles come from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Norway.

Author : Marcus Callies
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027289484
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English written by Marcus Callies and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-04-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first detailed and comprehensive study of information highlighting in advanced learner language, echoing the increasing interest in questions of near-native competence in SLA research and contributing to the description of advanced interlanguages. It examines the production and comprehension of specific means of information highlighting in English by native speakers and German learners of English as a foreign language, presenting triangulated experimental and learner corpus data as corroborating evidence. The study focuses on learners’ use of discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, preposing, and it- and wh-clefts, an underexplored field in SLA research to date.The book also provides a critical re-assessment of the study of pragmatics within SLA. It has largely been neglected to date that L2 pragmatic knowledge includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts. Thus, the book argues for an extension of the scope of inquiry in interlanguage pragmatics beyond the cross-cultural investigation of speech acts. It also discusses pedagogical implications for foreign language teaching and will be of interest to applied linguists and SLA researchers, language teachers and curriculum designers.

Author : Betty J. Birner
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027230900
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning written by Betty J. Birner and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most lively and contentious issues in contemporary linguistic theory concerns the elusive boundary between semantics and pragmatics, and Professor Laurence R. Horn of Yale University has been at the center of that debate ever since his groundbreaking 1972 UCLA dissertation. This festvolume in honor of Horn brings together the best of current work at the semantics/pragmatics boundary from a neo-Gricean perspective. Featuring the contributions of 22 leading researchers, it includes papers on implicature (Kent Bach), inference (Betty Birner), presupposition (Barbara Abbott), lexical semantics (Georgia Green, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Steve Kleinedler & Randall Eggert), negation (Pauline Jacobson, Frederick Newmeyer, Scott Schwenter), polarity (Donka Farkas, Anastasia Giannakidou, Michael Israel), implicit variables (Greg Carlson & Gianluca Storto), definiteness (Barbara Partee), reference (Ellen Prince, Andrew Kehler & Gregory Ward), and logic (Jerrold Sadock, Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Andrew Hartline). These original papers represent not only a fitting homage to Larry Horn, but also an important contribution to semantic and pragmatic theory.

Author : Bas Aarts
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191071196
Total Pages : 752 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar written by Bas Aarts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. Following an introduction from the editors, the volume's expert contributors explore a range of core topics in English grammar, beginning with issues in grammar writing and methodology. Chapters in part II then examine the various theoretical approaches to grammar, such as cognitive, constructional, and generative approaches, followed by the chapters in part III, which comprehensively cover the different subdomains of grammar, including compounds, phrase structure, clause types, tense and aspect, and information structure. Part IV offers coverage of the relationship between grammar and other fields - lexis, phonology, meaning, and discourse - while the concluding part of the book investigates grammatical change over time, regional variation, and genre and literary variation. The handbook's wide-ranging coverage will appeal to researchers and students of English language and linguistics from undergraduate level upwards.

Author : Kristin Bech
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027270465
Total Pages : 431 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages written by Kristin Bech and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

Author : Dr Ahmed Saleh Elimam
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443853674
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Marked Word Order in the Qurān and its English Translations written by Dr Ahmed Saleh Elimam and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature on Balaghah (the art of Arabic eloquence) and commentaries on the Qurān stress that the style of the Qurān is beautiful, eloquent and inimitable. This literature identifies word order as one of the most distinctive aspects of Qurānic style. One of the main reasons for this is that, compared to English, Arabic has fewer restrictions on word order, thanks to its elaborate verb inflection system and case marking. This flexibility allows for the foregrounding of some elements within the sentence, resulting in a marked (or non-canonical) word order and fulfilling certain discursive functions, including specification, restriction, emphasis, amplification/ glorification, and denial. Marked word order is used to highlight or downplay certain elements in speech or writing. It constitutes one way of delivering meanings to the addressee, as these meanings are ordered in the mind of the speaker in terms of their importance, making the style a precise reflection of the speaker’s mind and feelings. This book is a descriptive study which attempts to examine how translations of the Qurān have handled āyahs (verses of the Qurān) that feature lexical foregrounding, focusing on ten published translations into English, carried out by translators from different ideological and linguistic backgrounds. It offers a systematic comparison of the ways in which the selected translators deal with the linguistic feature of word order variation, and examines issues relating to the translator’s style. Specifically, the book identifies and examines the following: instances of marked word order discussed by commentators on the Qurān, and the function served by each case of lexical foregrounding; secondly, the options and/or patterns employed by translators to render the different functions of marked word order; thirdly, the recurrent options and/or patterns for rendering different types of word order variation. Finally, the book explores the factors which may have influenced the choice of particular strategies by different translators, including the translators’ motivations and the various historical contexts in which the translations were made.

Author : Klaus von Heusinger
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110255073
Total Pages : 1079 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Semantics. Volume 2 written by Klaus von Heusinger and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-23 with total page 1079 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (VON HEUSINGER ET AL.) BD. 33.2 HSK E-BOOK".