Quantitative Approaches To Grammar And Grammatical Change

Author : Sam Featherston
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110402122
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change written by Sam Featherston and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.

Author : Sam Featherston
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110401924
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change written by Sam Featherston and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.

Author : David Correia Saavedra
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110753073
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Measurements of Grammaticalization written by David Correia Saavedra and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grammaticalization has often been described as a gradual phenomenon. While many studies have discussed the quantitative aspects of grammaticalization, there has been little to no work that has tried to propose a way of measuring degrees of grammaticalization. This book addresses this gap by proposing a corpus-based approach to the measurement of grammaticalization, using binary logistic regression modelling. Such an approach has theoretical benefits as it can provide empirical evidence for the gradience and gradualness of grammaticalization. It can help substantiate observations that have been done on the basis of case studies so far, such as the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization. In addition, as the methods proposed in this book rely on corpus-based data only, it offers a way of comparing grammaticalization across multiple languages, which is currently a challenging endeavour. What this book hopes to achieve is to start a discussion on the measurement of grammaticalization. To draw a parallel, the field of morphological productivity has greatly benefited from the discussions (and disputes) regarding how its object of study should be measured, and I believe that so will the field of grammaticalization.

Author : Dianne Jonas
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199582629
Total Pages : 397 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Grammatical Change written by Dianne Jonas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances research on grammatical change and shows the breadth and liveliness of the field. International scholars report on the nature and outcomes of all aspects of syntactic change, including grammaticalization, variation, syntactic movement, determiner-phrase syntax, pronominal systems, case systems, negation, and alignment.

Author : Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192568744
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change written by Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the ?P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.

Author : Joan Bybee
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226086658
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Evolution of Grammar written by Joan Bybee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-11-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.

Author : Douglas Biber
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316298701
Total Pages : 757 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics written by Douglas Biber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 757 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

Author : Agnes Jäger
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192543075
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German written by Agnes Jäger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into central aspects of clause structure and word order, outlining the different stages of their historical development. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis with descriptive generalizations, supported by a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. Reference is also made throughout to the more traditional descriptive model of the German clause. The volume is divided into three parts that correspond to the main parts of the clause. Part I explores the left periphery, looking at verb placement (verb second and competing orders), the prefield, and adverbial connectives, while Part II discusses the middle field, including pronominal syntax, the order of full NPs, and the history of negation. The final part examines the right periphery with chapters covering basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in historical syntax and the Germanic languages, and for both descriptive and theoretical linguists alike.

Author : Peter Collins
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027268908
Total Pages : 488 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Grammatical Change in English World-Wide written by Peter Collins and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to this volume apply and extend the techniques of corpus linguistics and diachronic linguistics to the challenge of describing and explaining grammatical change in varieties of English world-wide. The book is divided into two parts, with ten chapters on ‘Inner Circle’ varieties such as Australian, Canadian, and Irish English, and eight on ‘Outer Circle’ varieties such as Philippine, Indian, and Nigerian English. Contributors examine a range of topics including the progressive aspect, modal auxiliaries, do-support, verb morphology, and quotatives, using a wide variety of corpus resources. Overarching research questions addressed include the following: Do diachronic tendencies observed in a particular variety converge with, diverge from, or run in parallel with, those in the parent variety? What are the possible causes of changes observed (e.g. English teaching traditions, Americanisation, internal changes in registers)? This book will appeal to linguists, particularly those interested in grammatical description, corpus linguistics and World Englishes.

Author : Ewa Trutkowski
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110437244
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Topic Drop and Null Subjects in German written by Ewa Trutkowski and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph deals with argument drop in the German prefield and it presents new insights into null subjects, topic drop and the interpretation of topic dropped elements. Major issues are (inter alia) the drop of structurally vs. obliquely cased arguments and the question on which basis nominative/accusative and dative/genitive can be kept apart. Furthermore, it is shown that the (im)possibility of phi-feature mismatches concerning the antecedent and gap in topic drop dialogues allows to differentiate between coreference and "real" (quantifier) binding. Aside from topic drop, (1st/2nd vs. 3rd person) null subjects are investigated across a couple of unrelated languages, also focusing on the presence of syncretisms within verbal inflectional paradigms. It is proven that 1st/2nd person null subjects in German are not an instance of antecedent-dependent topic drop but that they are licensed by discrete verbal inflectional endings. Thus, according to this property, German can be classified as a partial pro-drop language. Next to theoretical discussions and considerations this book offers a broad (empirically covered) data basis, which makes it suitable for both theoretically and empirically interested (generative) linguists.