Deixis and Alignment

Deixis and Alignment
Author: Fernando Zúñiga
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027229821

This book proposes a notion of inverse that differs from two widespread positions found in descriptive and typological studies (one of them restrictive and structure-oriented, the other broad and function-centered). This third stance put forward here takes both grammar and pragmatic functions into account, but it also relates the opposition between direct and inverse verbs and clauses to an opposition between deictic values, thereby achieving two advantageous goals: it meaningfully circumvents one of the usual analytic dilemmas, namely whether a given construction is passive or inverse, and it refines our understanding of the cross-linguistic typology of inversion. This framework is applied to the description of the morphosyntax of eleven Amerindian languages (Algonquian: Plains Cree, Miami-Illinois, Ojibwa; Kutenai; Sahaptian: Sahaptin, Nez Perce; Kiowa-Tanoan: Arizona Tewa, Picurís, Southern Tiwa, Kiowa; Mapudungun).

Split Auxiliary Systems

Split Auxiliary Systems
Author: Raúl Aranovich
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027229816

The alternation between the auxiliaries BE and HAVE, which this collection examines, is often discussed in connection with generative analyses of split intransitivity. But this book's purpose is to place the phenomenon in a broader context. Well-known facts in the Romance and Germanic language families are extended with data from lesser studied languages and dialects (Romanian, Paduan), and also with experimental and historical data. Moreover, the book goes beyond the usual language families in which the phenomenon has been studied, with the inclusion of two chapters on Chinese and Korean. The theoretical background of the contributors is also broad, ranging from current Generative approaches to Cognitive and Optimality-Theoretical frameworks. Readers interested in the structural, historical, developmental, or experimental aspects of auxiliary selection should profit from this book's comprehensive empirical coverage and from the plurality of contemporary linguistic analyses it contains.

Storyworld Possible Selves

Storyworld Possible Selves
Author: María-Ángeles Martínez
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2018-03-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110571021

This volume presents a multidisciplinary approach to narrative engagement within the paradigms of cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, and social-psychology. In their basic form, storyworld possible selves, or SPSs, are blends resulting from the conceptual integration of an intra- and an extra-diegetic perspectivizer. In written narratives, SPS blends function as hybrid referents for a variety of inclusive and ambiguous linguistic expressions, which are here explored from the standpoint of interactional cognitive linguistics, as instances of SPS objectification and subjectification. The model also draws on character construction and on the social-psychology notions of self-schemas and possible selves. This allows an exploration of emotional responses to narratives not just in terms of empathy or sympathy towards fictional entities, but also in terms of narrative ethics and of culturally determined and simultaneously idiosyncratic feelings of personal relevance and self-transformation.

Reference in Discourse

Reference in Discourse
Author: A. A. Kibrik
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Typology and
Total Pages: 683
Release: 2011-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199215804

This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality, and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that referential expressions should be understood as choices made by speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees. Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the typology of referential devices, including referring expressions per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential aspects of gesticulation and signed languages. This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the operations of working memory in linguistic communication.

Typological Hierarchies in Synchrony and Diachrony

Typological Hierarchies in Synchrony and Diachrony
Author: Sonia Cristofaro
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2018-07-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027264457

Typological hierarchies are widely perceived as one of the most important results of research on language universals and linguistic diversity. Explanations for typological hierarchies, however, are usually based on the synchronic properties of the patterns described by individual hierarchies, not the actual diachronic processes that give rise to these patterns cross-linguistically. This book aims to explore in what ways the investigation of such processes can further our understanding of typological hierarchies. To this end, diachronic evidence about the origins of several phenomena described by typological hierarchies is discussed for several languages by a number of leading scholars in typology, historical linguistics, and language documentation. This evidence suggests a rethinking of possible explanations for typological hierarchies, as well as the very notion of typological universals in general. For this reason, the book will be of interest not only to the broad typological community, but also historical linguists, cognitive linguists, and psycholinguists.

Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions
Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 653
Release: 2011
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027205914

Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

Narrative Factuality

Narrative Factuality
Author: Monika Fludernik
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 790
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 311048627X

The study of narrative—the object of the rapidly growing discipline of narratology—has been traditionally concerned with the fictional narratives of literature, such as novels or short stories. But narrative is a transdisciplinary and transmedial concept whose manifestations encompass both the fictional and the factual. In this volume, which provides a companion piece to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe’s Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, the use of narrative to convey true and reliable information is systematically explored across media, cultures and disciplines, as well as in its narratological, stylistic, philosophical, and rhetorical dimensions. At a time when the notion of truth has come under attack, it is imperative to reaffirm the commitment to facts of certain types of narrative, and to examine critically the foundations of this commitment. But because it takes a background for a figure to emerge clearly, this book will also explore nonfactual types of narratives, thereby providing insights into the nature of narrative fiction that could not be reached from the narrowly literary perspective of early narratology.

A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning

A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning
Author: Korina Giaxoglou
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-06-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351976745

This book investigates how social media are reconfiguring dying, death, and mourning. Taking a narrative approach, it argues that dying, death, and mourning are shared online as small stories of the moment, which are organized around transgressive moments and events with motivational, participatory, or connective scope. Through the different case studies discussed, this book presents an empirical framework for analyzing small stories of dying, death and mourning as practices of sharing which become associated with specific modes of affective positioning, i.e. modulations of different degrees of distance or proximity to the death event and the dead, the networked audience(s), and the affective self. The book calls for the study of affect as integral to narrative activity and opens up broader questions about how stories and emotion are mobilized in digital cultures for accruing audiences, value (social or economic), and visibility. It will be of interest to researchers in narrative analysis, the anthropology and sociology of emotion, digital communication, media and cultural studies, and (digital) death and dying.

Argument structure in Kashmiri

Argument structure in Kashmiri
Author: Saartje Verbeke
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2017-11-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004346783

Argument structure of Kashmiri is a study of the grammatical patterns one finds in the Indo-Aryan language Kashmiri. Kashmiri shows several unique linguistic features which sets it aside from more well-known Indo-Aryan languages. The book focuses on the grammatical relations and their coding in case marking and in verb agreement. The occurrence of pronominal suffixation in Kashmiri is related with the universal feature of referential hierarchies and the phenomenon of verb second word order. The grammatical structure of Kashmiri is situated in the linguistic area of the Himalayas, and minority languages in the area are discussed as well. The book draws on a wealth of examples from field work, local manuscripts and secondary sources and it is a first comprehensive overview of the grammatical features of Kashmiri from a typological point of view.

The Algonquian Inverse

The Algonquian Inverse
Author: Will Oxford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192871803

This book serves as a definitive reference for inverse morphology across all documented Algonquian languages. It considers not only the morphology of the inverse construction but also its syntax and pragmatics, giving equal weight to diachronic, typological, functional, and formal perspectives.