Syntactic Change And Syntactic Reconstruction
Download Syntactic Change And Syntactic Reconstruction full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online free Syntactic Change And Syntactic Reconstruction ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Author | : Gisella Ferraresi |
Publisher | : John Benjamins Publishing |
Total Pages | : 240 |
Release | : 2008 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 9027248184 |
This is a collection of state-of-the-art papers in the field of syntactic reconstruction. It treats a range of topics which are representative of current debates in historical syntax. The novelty and merit of the present book is, the editors believe, that, in contrast to most previous work on diachronic syntax, it combines the perspectives of the traditional philological research on syntactic reconstruction with the insights of modern syntactic theory, as it is emphasised in the Foreword by Giuseppe Longobardi. The volume includes articles by well-recognized researchers in historical linguistics with a focus on syntactic change. In the present volume syntactic reconstruction is discussed from a variety of angles, including historical linguistics, phenomena of language contact, generative approaches as well as typological and variationist research. In the articles, languages from a diverse range of families are discussed, including Indo-European, North and South Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, and Turkic.
Author | : Carlotta Viti |
Publisher | : John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Total Pages | : 353 |
Release | : 2015-04-15 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 9027268932 |
This volume discusses topics of historical syntax from different theoretical perspectives, ranging from Indo-European studies to generative grammar, functionalism, and typology. It examines mechanisms of syntactic change such as reanalysis, analogy, grammaticalization, independent drift, and language contact, as well as procedures of syntactic reconstruction. More than one factor is considered to explain a syntactic phenomenon, since it is maintained that an accurate account of multiple causations, of both structural and social nature, is to be preferred to considerations of economy. Special attention is given to the relationship between principles of syntactic theory and a search for data reliability through the methods of corpus linguistics. Data are drawn from a variety of languages, including Hittite, Vedic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Romance, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Austroasiatic, Gulf of Guinea creoles. The book may be therefore of interest for specialists of these languages in addition to scholars and advanced students of syntax and historical linguistics.
Author | : Jóhanna Barðdal |
Publisher | : Brill's Studies in Historical |
Total Pages | : 377 |
Release | : 2020 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 9789004391994 |
"During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot's (2002: 625) conclusion: "[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we'll eat the pudding." This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, showcasing the results in the introduction and eight articles. These examples are offered as both tastier and also more nourishing than the pudding Lightfoot had in mind when discarding the viability of reconstructing syntax"--
Author | : George Walkden |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
Total Pages | : 296 |
Release | : 2014 |
Genre | : Foreign Language Study |
ISBN | : 0198712294 |
This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-)occurrence of null pronominal subjects and objects. Although previous studies have looked at the lexical and phonological reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, little is currently known about the syntax of the language, and it has even been argued that the reconstruction of syntax is impossible. Dr Walkden uses extensive evidence from the early Germanic languages - Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Gothic - to show that syntactic reconstruction is not only possible but also profitable. He argues that while the reconstruction of syntax differs from lexical-phonological reconstruction due to the so-called 'correspondence problem', this is not insurmountable. In fact, the approach taken in current Minimalist theories, in which syntactic variation is attributed to the properties of lexical items, opens the door for syntactic reconstruction as lexical reconstruction. The book also discusses practical solutions for circumventing the correspondence problem, in particular the use of both distributional properties of lexical items and the phonological forms of such items in order to establish cognacy. The book will be of interest to historical linguists working on syntactic reconstruction and the Germanic languages, from graduate level upwards, as well as to advanced students of syntactic change more generally.
Author | : Don Daniels |
Publisher | : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Total Pages | : 356 |
Release | : 2020-03-09 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 3110616211 |
There is still widespread disagreement among historical linguists about how, or whether, syntactic reconstruction can be done. This book presents a comprehensive methodology for syntactic reconstruction, grounded in a constructional understanding of language. The author then uses that methodology to reconstruct Proto-Sogeram, the ancestor to ten languages in Papua New Guinea. Chapters are devoted to phonology, lexicon, verbal morphosyntax, nominal morphosyntax, and syntactic constructions. The work culminates in a sketch of Proto-Sogeram grammar. Based largely on the author's original fieldwork, this is an innovative application of a novel methodology to new data, and the most complete reconstruction of a Papuan proto-language to date. It will be of interest to scholars of language change, language reconstruction, typology, and Papuan languages.
Author | : Alice C. Harris |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 512 |
Release | : 1995-09-21 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 9780521478816 |
In this major new work Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell set out to establish a general framework for the investigation of linguistic change. Systematic cross-linguistic comparison of syntactic change across a wide variety of languages is used to construct hypotheses about the universals and limits of language change more generally. In particular, the authors seek to move closer towards describing the range of causes of syntactic change to develop an understanding of the mechanisms of syntactic change, and to provide an understanding of why some languages undergo certain changes and not others. The authors draw on languages as diverse as Pipil and French, Georgian and Estonian, and the data presented is one of the book's great strengths. Rigor and precision are combined here with a great breadth of scholarship to produce a unique resource for the study of linguistic change, which will be of use to scholars and students alike.
Author | : Adam Ledgeway |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 1321 |
Release | : 2017-03-09 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 1316720586 |
Change is an inherent feature of all aspects of language, and syntax is no exception. While the synchronic study of syntax allows us to make discoveries about the nature of syntactic structure, the study of historical syntax offers even greater possibilities. Over recent decades, the study of historical syntax has proven to be a powerful scientific tool of enquiry with which to challenge and reassess hypotheses and ideas about the nature of syntactic structure which go beyond the observed limits of the study of the synchronic syntax of individual languages or language families. In this timely Handbook, the editors bring together the best of recent international scholarship on historical syntax. Each chapter is focused on a theme rather than an individual language, allowing readers to discover how systematic descriptions of historical data can profitably inform and challenge highly diverse sets of theoretical assumptions.
Author | : Charles N. Li |
Publisher | : University of Texas Press |
Total Pages | : 641 |
Release | : 2014-09-10 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 1477301054 |
Historical linguistics, the oldest field in linguistics, has been traditionally dominated by phonological and etymological investigations. Only in the late twentieth century have linguists begun to focus their interest and research on the area of syntactic change and the insight it provides on the nature of language. This volume represents the first major contribution on the mechanisms of syntactic change. The fourteen articles that make up this volume were selected from the Symposium on the Mechanisms of Syntactic Change held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976, one of a series of three conferences sponsored by the National Science Foundation. These papers clearly demonstrate that the generative approach to the study of language does not explain diachronic processes in syntax. This collection is enlightening, provocative, and carefully documented with data drawn from a great variety of language families.
Author | : David Lawrence Payne |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 586 |
Release | : 1981 |
Genre | : Campa language |
ISBN | : |
Author | : Anthony Fox |
Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
Total Pages | : 394 |
Release | : 1995 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 9780198700012 |
"Anthony Fox's new textbook is primarily for students with an elementary knowledge of general linguistics who need an up-to-date introduction to historical linguistics, particularly to new developments in the theory and practice of linguistic reconstruction." -- Back cover.