The Semantics of Coordination

The Semantics of Coordination
Author: Ewald Lang
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 301
Release: 1984-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027230080

This study is an attempt to explain coordinate conjoining as a rule-governed process of establishing specific semantic relations within and between sentences. Coordination is thus conceived of both as a basic device of linguistic complex formation and as a rather fundamental principle underlying the creation of the text. From the point of view of achieving coherence, coordinate conjoining is described in this monograph as an integrative process. Described are the conditions governing this process, the rules according to which take place, in short: the complex interaction of various linguistically identifiable features displayed by coordinate structures. Coordinate conjoining is regarded here as the result of the interplay of three factors which belong to distinct levels of semantic description: the meaning of the conjuncts, the relation between the meaning of the conjuncts and the meaning of the connectors. The step-by-step explication of the interaction of these levels in determining the semantic interpretation of coordinate structures forms the core of the present study.

Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond

Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond
Author: Caterina Mauri
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2008-11-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110211491

This book examines the coding of the three coordination relations of combination, contrast and alternative between states of affairs on the basis of a 74 language sample, with special focus on the languages spoken in Europe. It constitutes the first systematic inquiry so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of coordination, as defined in cognitive and pragmatic terms. This research shows that the 'and-but-or' coding system which is typical of Central-Western Europe appears to be extremely rare outside Europe, where a great variation in the coding of coordination is attested. This cross-linguistic variation, however, is not random, but is crucially constrained by the interaction of economic principles with the semantic properties of the individual relations expressed. A fine-grained functional systematization of coordination is proposed and described by means of implicational patterns and semantic maps. This work brings together a broad cross-linguistic perspective and a detailed semantic analysis, largely based on new and comparable data collected by means of questionnaires, all accessible in the appendix of the book. It represents the first systematic attempt towards a unified typology of coordination relations.

'Subordination' Versus 'coordination' in Sentence and Text

'Subordination' Versus 'coordination' in Sentence and Text
Author: Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027231093

The papers collected in this volume (including a comprehensive introduction) investigate semantic and discourse-related aspects of subordination and coordination, in particular the relationship between subordination/coordination at the sentence level and subordination/coordination - or hierarchical/non-hierarchical organization - at the discourse level. The contributions in part I are concerned with central theoretical questions; part II consists of corpus-based cross-linguistic studies of clause combining and discourse structure, involving at least two of the languages English, German, Dutch, French and Norwegian; part III contains papers addressing specific - predominantly semantic - topics relating to German, English or French; and the papers in part IV approach the topic of subordination, coordination and rhetorical relations from a diachronic (Old Indic and Early Germanic) perspective. The book aims to contribute to a better understanding of information packaging on the sentence and text level related, within a particular language as well as cross-linguistically.

Coordinating Constructions

Coordinating Constructions
Author: Martin Haspelmath
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2004-07-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027295247

This is the first book on coordinating constructions that adopts a broad cross-linguistic perspective. Coordination has been studied intensively in English and other major European languages, but we are only beginning to understand the range of variation that is found world-wide. This volume consists of a number of general studies, as well as fourteen case studies of coordinating constructions in languages or groups of languages: Africa (Iraqw, Fongbe, Hausa), the Caucasus (Daghestanian, Tsakhur, Chechen), the Middle East (Persian and other Western Iranian languages), Southeast Asia (Lai, Karen, Indonesian), the Pacific (Lavukaleve, Oceanic, Nêlêmwa), and the Americas (Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan). A detailed introductory chapter summarizes the main results of the volume and situates them in the context of other relevant current research.

Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions

Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions
Author: Giuliana Giusti
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2022-03-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027257930

Verbal Pseudo-Coordination (as in English ‘go and get’) has been described for a number of individual languages, but this is the first edited volume to emphasize this topic from a comparative perspective, and in connection to Multiple Agreement Constructions more generally. The chapters include detailed analyses of Romance, Germanic, Slavic and other languages. These contributions show important cross-linguistic similarities in these constructions, as well as their diversity, providing insights into areas such as the morphology-syntax and syntax-semantics interfaces, dialectal variation and language contact. This volume establishes Pseudo-Coordination as a descriptively important and theoretically challenging cross-linguistic phenomenon among Multiple Agreement Constructions and will be of interest to specialists in individual languages as well as typologists and theoreticians, serving as a foundation to promote continued research.

Coordination and the Syntax DS Discourse Interface

Coordination and the Syntax DS Discourse Interface
Author: Daniel Altshuler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2022-07-09
Genre: Discourse analysis
ISBN: 0198804237

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

Coordination Programming: Mechanisms, Models And Semantics

Coordination Programming: Mechanisms, Models And Semantics
Author: Jean-marc Andreoli
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 397
Release: 1996-08-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1783262680

Coordination, considered abstractly, is an ubiquitous notion in computer science: for example, programming languages coordinate elementary instructions; operating systems coordinate accesses to hardware resources; database transaction schedulers coordinate accesses to shared data; etc. All these situations have some common features, which can be identified at the abstract level as “coordination mechanisms”. This book focuses on a class of coordination models where multiple pieces of software coordinate their activities through some shared dataspace. The book has three parts. Part 1 presents the main coordination models studied in this book (Gamma, LO, TAO, LambdaN). Part 2 focuses on various semantics aspects of coordination, applied mainly to Gamma. Part 3 presents actual implementations of coordination models and an application.

The Structure of Coordination

The Structure of Coordination
Author: J. Camacho
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9401001197

This book analyzes the structure of coordination from two perspectives: the symmetrical properties the construction imposes on its conjuncts, and how conjuncts interact with other categories outside coordination with respect to agreement and other grammatical phenomena. A substantial amount of data represented in this book are taken from varieties of Spanish. Unlike English, Spanish has a rich pattern of overt agreement between the subject and the verb, between nouns and adjectives, and also between clitics and lexical DP objects and indirect objects. Spanish agreement paradigms reveal very interesting patterns of agreement mismatch that provide important theoretical insights. Unless otherwise specified, it can be assumed that non-English examples are from Spanish. IX CHAPTER #1 INTRODUCTION Although coordination has figured more or less steadily in the Generative tradition beginning with Chornsky's (1957) Conjunction Transformation (later known as Conjunction Reduction), until recently, the two prevailing areas of research had been ellipsis (see, for example, Van Oirsouw 1987) and the semantic interpretation of conjuncts.' The internal structure of coordination was usually left unanalyzed, or assumed to be ternary branching, as in (I).

Coordination in Syntax

Coordination in Syntax
Author: Niina Ning Zhang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2010
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0521767555

Addresses the syntactic issues raised by coordinate pairings, with particularly emphasis on their properties in English and Chinese.

Rethinking the Coordinate-Subordinate Dichotomy

Rethinking the Coordinate-Subordinate Dichotomy
Author: Jean-Christophe Verstraete
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2011-12-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110918196

This study argues that the domain traditionally covered by 'coordination' and 'subordination' in English can be subdivided into four distinct construction types. The constructions are defined on the basis of differences in their 'interpersonal' structure, i.e. the grammatical encoding of speaker-attitude and speaker-interlocutor interaction. It is shown that the four types constitute syntactically, semantically and pragmatically coherent categories, with differences in interpersonal structure defining and motivating distinct syntactic behaviour, distinct pragmatic functions and distinct semantic classes of clause linkage. The validity of the analysis is demonstrated in three ways. First, it is shown that the analysis can make sense of the wide range of apparently conflicting criteria found in the literature on complex sentences, which can now be explained as reflections of four different construction types rather than as alternative perspectives on one single contrast between coordination and subordination. Second, it is shown how the analysis can deal with two specific problems in the more general area of clause combining, viz. the syntactic basis of the distinction between 'content', 'epistemic' and 'speech act' levels of clause linkage, and the distinct discursive functions associated with initial and final position of adverbial clauses. Finally, it is also shown that the proposed analysis is useful beyond the analysis of English, with parallels in a number of cross-linguistically recurrent phenomena of clause linkage. The book is mainly of interest to linguistics researchers in the areas of syntax, semantics and pragmatics as well as to graduate students with a focus on these fields.