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"English language Grammar, Comparative Spanish."
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Deverbal Adjectives at the Interface
This volume explores the syntax, semantics, and morphology of -ble adjectives within Distributed Morphology. It presents a decompositional analysis of -ble that captures intralinguistic variation and accounts for morphologically more complex languages. It contributes novel empirical data. First, the grammaticality of -ble formations derived from unergatives and unaccusatives in Spanish is argued to be a function of their exoskeletal properties in interaction with language-specific facts and features of the grammar of cognation, degrees, quantification and Aktionsart. A previously unnoticed correlation between the Spanish data and a cognate configuration with unaccusatives in English reinforces the proposal. Second, the grammaticality of denominal -ble adjectives in Romance and their absence in English relates aspects of the internal structure of -ble to issues pertaining to the eventive properties and syntactico-semantic status of the base nouns. This crosslinguistic proposal implicates central issues in the syntax-semantics-morphology interface, e.g. cross category derivations, locus of variation, or status of impossible words.
eBook
Building coherence and cohesion : task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish
This book examines the resources that speakers employ when building conversations. These resources contribute to overall coherence and cohesion, which speakers create and maintain interactively as they build on each other's contributions. The study is cross-linguistic, drawing on parallel corpora of task-oriented dialogues between dyads of native speakers of English and Spanish. The framework of the investigation is the analysis of speech genres and their staging; the analysis shows that each stage in the dialogues exhibits different thematic, rhetorical, and cohesive relations. The main contributions of the book are: a corpus-based characterization of a spoken genre (task-oriented dialogue); the compilation of a body of analysis tools for generic analysis; application of English-based analyses to Spanish and comparison between the two languages; and a study of the characteristics of each generic stage in task-oriented dialogue.
eBook
Bilingual language acquisition : Spanish and English in the first six years
\"How do children develop bilingual competence? Do bilingual children develop language in the same way as monolinguals? Set in the context of findings on language development, this book examines the acquisition of English and Spanish by two brothers in the first six years of their lives. Based on in-depth and meticulous analyses of naturalistic data, it explores how the systems of both languages affect each other as the children develop, and how different levels of exposure to each language influence the nature of acquisition. The author demonstrates that the children's grammars and lexicons follow a developmental path similar to that of monolinguals, but that cross-linguistic interactions affecting lexical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects arise in Spanish when exposure to it diminishes around the age of four. The first of its kind, this original study is a must-read for students and researchers in bilingualism, child development, language acquisition and language contact\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Events and predication : a new approach to syntactic processing in English and Spanish
Studies on the syntactic consequences of event type in languages have shown that Aktionsart plays a role in Universal Grammar. This book contributes to the exploration of the syntax/semantics interface by presenting a thorough comparison of event and predicate types in English and Spanish. The mapping between event and syntactic predicate types, including detransitives, is given a minimalist account based on the functional categories that embed event features and on a careful analysis of the features checked by objects. As the book delves into the theoretical issue of how parameters are characterized, it presents the most comprehensive account to date of event type phenomena in Spanish, an innovative analysis of the clitic SE and a re-definition of unaccusativity. The theory is then applied to the ongoing issues in the sentence processing literature. A proposal is made for an update of the current data in light of these latest linguistic discoveries.
eBook
The Syntax-Information Structure Interface
In the last decade, the notions of topic and focus have come to play an increasingly relevant role in theoretical linguistics. Although these notions are often taken for granted, they are still poorly understood. This study offers a detailed analysis of the precise definitions of these and related terms (theme, topic, background, given information, focus, contrast, etc.) as well as of their combination into information structures such as the topic-focus and background-focus articulations. It recommends pursuing a feature-based typology of topics and argues against a dual nature of focus (i.e. presentational vs. contrastive). Central questions addressed are the analysis of subjects in Spanish and English (DP vs NP and null vs. preverbal vs. postverbal) and the nature of constructions such as topicalization, left-dislocation, and focus preposing. Further, it is proposed that in Spanish information structure can be read off the syntax: while an overt DP in the preverbal specifier subject position is interpreted as the topic in a topic-focus articulation, one or more left-or right-dislocated phrases are interpreted as part of the background in background-focus/focus-background structures.
Eugenia Casielles-Suárez received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She currently teaches at Wayne State University.
eBook
Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay : a contrastive study of requests and apologies
The first well-researched contrastive pragmatic analysis of requests and apologies in British English and Uruguayan Spanish. It takes the form of a cross-cultural corpus-based analysis using male and female native speakers of each language and systematically alternating the same social variables in both cultures.The data are elicited from a non-prescriptive open role-play yielding requests and apologies. The analysis of the speech acts is based on an adaptation of the categorical scheme developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989).The results show that speakers of English and Spanish differ in their choice of (in)directness levels, head-act modifications, and the politeness types of males and females in both cultures.Reference to an extensive bibliography and the thorough discussion of methodological issues concerning speech act studies deserve the attention of students of pragmatics as well as readers interested in cultural matters.
eBook
