Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse

Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse
Author: Joan L. Bybee
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027225856

The papers in this volume in honor of Sandra Annear Thompson deal with complex sentences, an important topic in Thompson's career. The focus of the contributions is on the ways in which the grammatical properties of complex sentences are shaped by the communicative context in which they are produced, an approach to grammatical analysis that Thompson pioneered and developed in the course of her distinguished career.

The Acquisition of Complex Sentences

The Acquisition of Complex Sentences
Author: Holger Diessel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2004-09-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1139454080

This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and nonfinite relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and coordinate clauses. His investigation shows that the development of complex sentences originates from simple non-embedded sentences and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complex sentences including complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are gradually expanded to multiple-clause constructions, and complex sentences including adverbial and coordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated in a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the semantic and syntactic complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the social-cognitive development of the child.

Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse

Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse
Author: Wendan Li
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2018-02-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004360883

In Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse Wendan Li offers a comprehensive and innovative account of how Mandarin Chinese, as a language without extensive morphological marking, highlights (or foregrounds) major events of a narrative and demotes (or backgrounds) other supporting descriptions. Qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis and examinations of authentic written text provide extensive evidence to demonstrate that various types of morpho-syntactic devices are used in a wide range of structural units in Chinese to mark the distinction between foregrounding and backgrounding. The analysis paves the way for future studies to systematically approach grounding-related issues. The typological viewpoint adopted in the chapters serves well readers from both the Chinese tradition and other languages in discourse analysis.

Information Structure and Reference Tracking in Complex Sentences

Information Structure and Reference Tracking in Complex Sentences
Author: Rik van Gijn
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2014-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027270759

This volume is dedicated to exploring the crossroads where complex sentences and information management – more specifically information structure and reference tracking – come together. Complex sentences are a highly relevant but understudied domain for studying notions of IS and RT. On the one hand, a complex sentence can be studied as a mini-unit of discourse consisting of two or more elements describing events, situations, or processes, with its own internal information-structural and referential organization. On the other hand, complex sentences can be studied as parts of larger discourse structures, such as narratives or conversations, in terms of how their information-structural characteristics relate to this wider context. The book offers new perspectives for the study of the interaction between complex sentences and information management, and moreover adds typological breadth by focusing on lesser studied languages from several parts of the world.

Children with Specific Language Impairment

Children with Specific Language Impairment
Author: Laurence B. Leonard
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2000
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780262621366

Children with Specific Language Impairment covers all aspects of SLI, including its history, possible genetic and neurobiological origins, and clinical and educational practice.

Exploring Linguistic Science

Exploring Linguistic Science
Author: Allison Burkette
Publisher:
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108424805

Introduces students to the scientific study of language, using the basic principles of complexity theory.

Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures
Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3112316002

No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

Grammatical Complexity in Academic English

Grammatical Complexity in Academic English
Author: Douglas Biber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2016-05-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 110700926X

Using corpus-based analyses, the book challenges widely held beliefs about grammatical complexity, academic writing, and linguistic change in written English.

Sentence and Discourse

Sentence and Discourse
Author: Jacqueline Guéron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2015-10-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019105982X

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.