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Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World
The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.
eBook
A Two-Tiered Theory of Control
This book revives and reinterprets a persistent intuition running through much of the classical work: that the unitary appearance of Obligatory Control into complements conceals an underlying duality of structure and mechanism. Idan Landau argues that control complements divide into two types: In attitude contexts, control is established by logophoric anchoring, while non-attitude contexts it boils down to predication. The distinction is also syntactically represented: Logophoric complements are constructed as a second tier above predicative complements.The theory derives the obligatoryde sereading of PRO as a special kind ofde reattitude without ascribing any inherent feature to PRO. At the same time, it provides a principled explanation, based on feature transmission, for the agreement properties of PRO, which are stipulated on competing semantic accounts. Finally, it derives a striking universal asymmetry: the fact that agreement on the embedded verb blocks control in attitude contexts but not in non-attitude contexts. This book is unique in being firmly grounded in both the formal semantic and the syntactic studies of control, offering an integrated view that will appeal to scholars in both areas. By bringing to bear current sophisticated grammatical analyses, it offers new insights into the classical problems of control theory.
eBook
The Oxford handbook of event structure
This handbook deals with research into the nature of events, and how we use language to describe events. The study of event structure over the past 60 years has been one of the most successful areas of lexical semantics, uniting insights from morphology and syntax, lexical and compositional semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence to develop insightful theories of events and event descriptions. This volume provides accessible introductions to major topics and ongoing debates in event structure research, exploring what events are, how we perceive them, how we reason with them, and the role they play in the organization of grammar and discourse. The chapters are divided into four parts: the first covers metaphysical issues related to events; the second is concerned with the relationship between event structure and grammar; the third is a series of crosslinguistic case studies; and the fourth deals with links to cognitive science and artificial intelligence more broadly. 0The book is strongly interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science, and will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards.
Book
Deconstructing the English Passive
This book analyzes the form and function of the English passive from a verb-based point of view. It takes the position that the various surface forms of the passive (with or without thematic subject, with or without object, with or without by-phrase, with or without auxiliary) have a common source and are determined by the interplay of the syntactic properties of the verb and general syntactic principles. Each structural element of the passive construction is examined separately, and the participle is considered the only defining component of the passive.
Special emphasis is put on the existence of an implicit argument (ususally an agent) and its representation in the passive. A review of data from syntax, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics shows that the implicit agent is not just a conceptually understood argument. It is argued that it is represented at the level of argument structure and that this is what sets the passive apart from other patient-subject constructions.
A corpus-based case study on the use of the passive in academic writing analyzes the use of the passive in this particular register. One of the findings is that about 20-25% of passives occur in constructions that do not require an auxiliary, a result that challenges corpus studies on the use of the passive that only consider full be-passives. It is also shown that new active-voice constructions have emerged that compete with the passive without having a more visible agent. The emergence of these constructions (such as \"This paper argues...\") is discussed in the context of changes in the rhetoric of scientific discourse.
The book is mainly of interest to linguists and graduate students in the areas of English syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
eBook
On the syntactic composition of manner and motion
Unlike many books and articles that discuss the relation between constructional meaning and the lexicon, 'On the Syntactice Composition of Manner and Motion' examines one phenomenon in detail: the articulation of manner and motion, in three distinct language families - Germanic, Korean, and Romance.
eBook
The Regularity of the 'Irregular' Verbs and Nouns in English
This volume presents an in-depth study of the so-called irregular Past Tense (sing/sang) and Noun Plural (foot/feet) forms with Internal Vowel Alternation (IVA) in English demonstrating that they possess both a fixed phonological and semantic regularity. The innovative sign-oriented analysis and inductive methodology employed in this study are further supported by additional first language acquisition data, experimental studies and historical evidence. The data culled from multiple linguistic anthologies, dictionaries and thesauri have shown that although the IVA process comprises a relatively small number of nominal and verbal forms in Modern English, IVA, originally, was a prevalent and productive process in Old English, Indo-European and other language families. The results of this empirical study present and introduce a novel classification based on the regular and systematic iconic-phonological and semantic nature of all these diverse IVA processes both nominal and verbal that has been maintained throughout the history of English.
eBook