Manual of Romance Word Classes

Manual of Romance Word Classes
Author: Anna-Maria De Cesare
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 826
Release: 2024-09-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110746476

Word classes are linguistic categories serving as basis in the description of the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. While important publications are regularly devoted to their definition, identification, and classification, in the field of Romance linguistics we lack a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the current research. This Manual offers an updated and detailed discussion of all relevant aspects related to word classes in the Romance languages. In the first part, word classes are discussed from both a theoretical and historical point of view. The second part of the volume takes as its point of departure single word classes, described transversally in all the main Romance languages, while the third observes the relevant word classes from the point of view of specific Romance(-based) varieties. The fourth part explores Romance word classes at the interface of grammar and other fields of research. The Manual is intended as a reference work for all scholars and students interested in the description of both the standard, major Romance languages and the smaller, lesser described Romance(-based) varieties.

Elementary Predicates and Related Categories

Elementary Predicates and Related Categories
Author: Ludovico Franco
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2024-07-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027246629

This book offers a fresh perspective on how natural languages encode grammatical relations, by delving into the interplay between oblique cases, adpositions, serial verbs, and applicatives. This book reveals, through a series of case studies, the pervasive role of the 'inclusion' relator across diverse linguistic contexts. Departing from traditional views that obliques lack interpretive content, this work presents a unified conceptual framework of relations in grammar. Drawing on minimalist principles, the book posits a preeminence of the lexicon in syntactic projection, shedding light on the underlying ontology of language. By exploring cross-categorial variation and syncretism, it outlines an inventory of primitives shaping morpho-syntactic derivations.

The Routledge Handbook of Theoretical and Experimental Sign Language Research

The Routledge Handbook of Theoretical and Experimental Sign Language Research
Author: Josep Quer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 853
Release: 2021-03-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317624270

The Routledge Handbook of Theoretical and Experimental Sign Language Research bridges the divide between theoretical and experimental approaches to provide an up-to-date survey of key topics in sign language research. With 29 chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, this Handbook covers the following key areas: On the theoretical side, all crucial aspects of sign language grammar studied within formal frameworks such as Generative Grammar; On the experimental side, theoretical accounts are supplemented by experimental evidence gained in psycho- and neurolinguistic studies; On the descriptive side, the main phenomena addressed in the reviewed scholarship are summarized in a way that is accessible to readers without previous knowledge of sign languages. Each chapter features an introduction, an overview of existing research, and a critical assessment of hypotheses and findings. The Routledge Handbook of Theoretical and Experimental Sign Language Research is key reading for all advanced students and researchers working at the intersection of sign language research, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics.

Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages

Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages
Author: Associate Professor of Linguistics Ivano Caponigro
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0197518370

This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of varieties of headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families, all Mesoamerican languages spoken in Mexico and Guatemala and one Chibchan language spoken in Honduras. Headless relative clauses are clauses that often resemble interrogative clauses or headed relative clauses in their morpho-syntactic shape, but whose meaning brings them close to nominal constructions. For the vastmajority of the languages in this volume, many of which are endangered and all of which are understudied, the work presented here represents the only published material on the subject.

Urban Matters

Urban Matters
Author: Arne Ziegler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027258287

The city as a complex socio-cultural structure plays a central role, economically, administratively as well as culturally. Factors such as higher population density, a more expansive infrastructure, and larger social and cultural diversity compared to rural areas have a substantial impact on urban society and urban communication. Focusing on the latter, the contributions to this volume discuss the characteristics and dynamics of urban language use, considering aspects such as contact, variation and change, as well as identity, indexicality, and attitudes, but also spatial factors including mobility, urbanisation/counterurbanisation, and diffusion processes. The collected articles provide an update of ‘first wave’ approaches of variationist sociolinguistics, but also establish a connection to ‘third wave’ research for readers from a broad range of fields, especially sociolinguistics, variationist linguistics, and dialectology. The book presents modern methodological and conceptual ideas and a wealth of new findings but also serves as a reference work, combining theoretical discussions with results from recent empirical studies.

Chinese Lexical Semantics

Chinese Lexical Semantics
Author: Minghui Dong
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3031067037

The two-volume proceedings, LNCS 13249 and 13250, constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 22nd Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2021, held in Nanjing, China in May 2021. The 68 full papers and 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 261 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical Semantics and General Linguistics; Natural Language Processing and Language Computing; Cognitive Science and Experimental Studies; Lexical Resources and Corpus Linguistics.

Variable Properties in Language

Variable Properties in Language
Author: David W. Lightfoot
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2019-07-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 162616665X

This edited volume, based on papers presented at the 2017 Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics (GURT), approaches the study of language variation from a variety of angles. Language variation research asks broad questions such as, "Why are languages' grammatical structures different from one another?" as well as more specific word-level questions such as, "Why are words that are pronounced differently still recognized to be the same words?" Too often, research on variation has been siloed based on the particular question—sociolinguists do not talk to historical linguists, who do not talk to phoneticians, and so on. This edited volume seeks to bring discussions from different subfields of linguistics together to explore language variation in a broader sense and acknowledge the complexity and interwoven nature of variation itself.

Wh-Questions: A Case Study in Czech

Wh-Questions: A Case Study in Czech
Author: Veselovská, Ludmila
Publisher: Palacký University Olomouc
Total Pages: 241
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 8024459663

In the empirical, descriptive sections of this monograph the author develops standard argumentation in favour of the structurally-based transformational nature of Wh-questions in English and Czech. She demonstrates how Wh-questions in Slavic languages first impacted the theoretical discussion and how their description challenged some earlier assumptions based on specifically English data. The study provides a historical survey of the analyses which reflect the development of the field. Individual chapters are devoted to comparing extraction domains, locality conditions, and constraints defined in terms of the structures proposed. The Wh-characteristics are compared with Focus/ Contrastive Topic re-orderings, which leads to an improved structural analysis, using the concept of a Split CP. In spite of the demonstrable progress of the research, many so far unexplained aspects of the Wh-phenomena will without doubt continue to provide an interesting source for future research on the structure of human language.