The Nominal Structure in Slavic and Beyond

The Nominal Structure in Slavic and Beyond
Author: Lilia Schürcks
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2013-12-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1614512795

The contributions in this volume shed new light on the discussion of whether the DP hypothesis applies universally or not. The issue is prominent not only for Slavic languages. Drawing on evidence from many other languages, Greek, East Asian, and Basque among them, the book has important implications for answering fundamental questions about the nature of definiteness and quantification.

Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond

Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond
Author: Mojmír Dočekal
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 506
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961103143

The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages.

Semantics with Assignment Variables

Semantics with Assignment Variables
Author: Alex Silk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2021-06-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108875173

This pioneering study combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context - assignment variables - in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of 'shifting' phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and non-local contextual dependencies with quantifiers, attitude ascriptions, conditionals, questions, and relativization. The result is an innovative philosophically informed compositional semantics compatible with the truth-conditional paradigm. At the forefront of contemporary interdisciplinary research into meaning and communication, Semantics with Assignment Variables is essential reading for researchers and students in a diverse range of fields.

Formal Studies in Slovenian Syntax

Formal Studies in Slovenian Syntax
Author: Franc Lanko Marušič
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902726628X

Although in the early days of generative linguistics Slovenian was rarely called on in the development of theoretical models, the attention it gets has subsequently grown, so that by now it has contributed to generative linguistics a fair share of theoretically important data. With 13 chapters that all build on Slovenian data, this book sets a new milestone. The topics discussed in the volume range from Slovenian clitics, which are called on to shed new light on the intriguing Person-Case Constraint and to provide part of the evidence for a new generalization relating the presence of the definite article and Wackernagel clitics, to functional elements such as the future auxiliary and possibility modals, the latter of which are discussed also from the perspective of language change. Even within the relatively well-researched topics like wh-movement, new findings are presented, both in relation to the structure of the left periphery and to the syntax of relative clauses.

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2018

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2018
Author: Andreas Blümel
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3985540187

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2018 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks presented at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13) or at the parallel Workshop on the Semantics of Noun Phrases, which were held on December 5–7, 2018, at the University of Göttingen. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as situation relativization with adverbial clauses (causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose), clause-embedding by means of a correlate, agreeing vs. transitive ‘need’ constructions, clitic doubling, affixation and aspect, evidentiality and mirativity, pragmatics coming with the particle li, uniqueness, definiteness, maximal interpretation (exhaustivity), kinds and subkinds, bare nominals, multiple determination, quantification, demonstratives, possessives, complex measure nouns, and the NP/DP parameter. The set of object languages comprises Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Torlak Serbian. The numerous topics addressed demonstrate the importance of Slavic linguistics. The original analyses prove that substantial progress has been made in major fields of research.

From Sounds to Structures

From Sounds to Structures
Author: Roberto Petrosino
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2018-09-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501506730

The term ‘Maya’, in Indian traditions, refers to our sensory perception of the world and, as such, to a superficial reality (or ‘un–reality’) that we must look beyond to find the inner reality of things. Applied to the study of language, we perceive sounds, a superficial reality, and then we seek structures, the underlying reality in what we call phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume starts with an introduction by the editors, which shows how the various papers contained in the volume reflect the spectrum of research interests of Andrea Calabrese, as well as his influence on the work of colleagues and his students. Contributors, united in their search for the abstract structures that underlie the appearances of languages include linguists such as Adriana Belletti, Paola Benincà, Jonathan Bobaljik, Gugliemo Cinque, David Embick, Mirko Grimaldi, Harry van der Hulst, Michael Kenstowicz, Maria Rita Manzini, Andrew Nevins, Elizabeth Pyatt, Luigi Rizzi, Leonardo Savoia, Laura Vanelli, Bert Vaux, Susi Wurmbrand, as well as a few junior researchers including Mariachiara Berizzi, Giuliano Bocci, Stefano Canalis, Silvio Cruschina, Irina Monich, Beata Moskal, Diego Pescarini, Joseph Perry, Roberto Petrosino, and Kobey Schwayder.

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXIV

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXIV
Author: Mahmoud Azaz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2023-01-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902725494X

This volume brings together eleven peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The contributions fall under three areas of linguistics: Phonology and phonetics; syntax and semantics; and language acquisition, language contact, and diglossia. They reflect some various perspectives and emphases. Including data from North African, Levantine, and Gulf varieties, Standard Arabic, as well as Arabic varieties spoken in diaspora, these articles address issues that range from sibilant merging, raising, lexicalization, agreement, to diglossia, dialect contact, and language acquisition in heritage speakers. The book is valuable reading for linguists in general and for those working on descriptive and theoretical aspects of Arabic linguistics in particular.

Headedness and/or grammatical anarchy?

Headedness and/or grammatical anarchy?
Author: Ulrike Freywald
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2022-10-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961103925

In most grammatical models, hierarchical structuring and dependencies are considered as central features of grammatical structures, an idea which is usually captured by the notion of “head” or “headedness”. While in most models, this notion is more or less taken for granted, there is still much disagreement as to the precise properties of grammatical heads and the theoretical implications that arise of these properties. Moreover, there are quite a few linguistic structures that pose considerable challenges to the notion of “headedness”. Linking to the seminal discussions led in Zwicky (1985) and Corbett, Fraser, & Mc-Glashan (1993), this volume intends to look more closely upon phenomena that are considered problematic for an analysis in terms of grammatical heads. The aim of this book is to approach the concept of “headedness” from its margins. Thus, central questions of the volume relate to the nature of heads and the distinction between headed and non-headed structures, to the process of gaining and losing head status, and to the thought-provoking question as to whether grammar theory could do without heads at all. The contributions in this volume provide new empirical findings bearing on phenomena that challenge the conception of grammatical heads and/or discuss the notion of head/headedness and its consequences for grammatical theory in a more abstract way. The collected papers view the topic from diverse theoretical perspectives (among others HPSG, Generative Syntax, Optimality Theory) and different empirical angles, covering typological and corpus-linguistic accounts, with a focus on data from German.

Turn Initiating Elements in Everyday Conversations

Turn Initiating Elements in Everyday Conversations
Author: Peter Kosta
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-08-08
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1498588050

This book focuses on conversation analysis in Czech, including the prosody-syntax-interface and online-syntax in real time that deals with turn initiating elements in everyday conversations. By combining a pragmatic formal theory with a formal syntax model, this book serves as a guide to the problems of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of spoken everyday talk and as a handbook on conversational analysis.