The Roots of Verbal Meaning

The Roots of Verbal Meaning
Author: John Beavers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2020
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198855788

This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, with semantic and grammatical properties determined not just by templates, but also by roots.

The Roots of Verbal Meaning

The Roots of Verbal Meaning
Author: John Beavers (Professor of linguistics)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2020
Genre: English language
ISBN: 9780191889417

This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, with semantic and grammatical properties determined not just by templates, but also by roots.

The Navajo Verb System

The Navajo Verb System
Author: Robert W. Young
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2000
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780826321725

Provides a summary description of the Navajo language and a detailed treatment of the inflectional morphology of its verb system.

Roots and Patterns

Roots and Patterns
Author: Maya Arad
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2005-11-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1402032447

In-depth investigation of Hebrew verb morphology in light of cutting edge theories of morphology and lexical semantics An original theory about the semantic content of roots An account of how roots function in word-formation A wide empirical basis containing a complete corpus of verb-creating roots in Hebrew

Roots of language

Roots of language
Author: Derek Bickerton
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-02-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3946234089

Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author's most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014).

A Thesaurus of English Word Roots

A Thesaurus of English Word Roots
Author: Horace Gerald Danner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 1007
Release: 2014-03-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1442233265

Horace G. Danner’s A Thesaurus of English Word Roots is a compendium of the most-used word roots of the English language. As Timothy B. Noone notes in his foreword: “Dr. Danner’s book allows you not only to build up your passive English vocabulary, resulting in word recognition knowledge, but also gives you the rudiments for developing your active English vocabulary, making it possible to infer the meaning of words with which you are not yet acquainted. Your knowledge can now expand and will do so exponentially as your awareness of the roots in English words and your corresponding ability to decode unfamiliar words grows apace. This is the beginning of a fine mental linguistic library: so enjoy!” In A Thesaurus of English Word Roots, all word roots are listed alphabetically, along with the Greek or Latin words from which they derive, together with the roots’ original meanings. If the current meaning of an individual root differs from the original meaning, that is listed in a separate column. In the examples column, the words which contain the root are then listed, starting with their prefixes, for example, dysacousia, hyperacousia. These root-starting terms then are followed by terms where the root falls behind the word, e.g., acouesthesia and acoumeter. These words are followed by words where the root falls in the middle or the end, as in such terms as bradyacusia and odynacusis.. In this manner, A Thesaurus of English Word Roots places the word in as many word families as there are elements in the word. This work will interest linguists and philologists and anyone interested in the etymological aspects of English language.

Origins of the Greek Verb

Origins of the Greek Verb
Author: Andreas Willi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 747
Release: 2018-01-18
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1107195551

This book traces the evolution of the Indo-European verbal system from the early proto-language to the period of the first Greek texts.

Locative Alternation

Locative Alternation
Author: Seizi Iwata
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2008-06-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027291047

The aim of the present volume is two-fold: to give a coherent account of the locative alternation in English, and to develop a constructional theory that overcomes a number of problems in earlier constructional accounts. The lexical-constructional account proposed here is characterized by two main features. On the one hand, it emphasizes the need for a detailed examination of verb meanings. On the other, it introduces lower-level constructions such as verb-class-specific constructions and verb-specific constructions, and makes full use of these lower-level constructions in accounting for alternation phenomena. Rather than being a completely new version of construction grammar, the proposed lexical-constructional account is an automatic consequence of the basic tenet of constructional approaches as being usage-based.

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning
Author: Ray Jackendoff
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2012-02-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0191620688

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is the author's most important book since the groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.

Frame-Constructional Verb Classes

Frame-Constructional Verb Classes
Author: Ryan Dux
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2020-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261016

While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar. On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions. This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.