Discourse And Word Order

Author : Pamela Downing,Michael P. Noonan
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 606 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1995-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027229212

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Word Order in Discourse by Pamela Downing,Michael P. Noonan Pdf

This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.

Author : Olga T. Yokoyama
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1987-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027278890

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Discourse and Word Order by Olga T. Yokoyama Pdf

Integrating various aspects of human communication traditionally treated in a number of separate disciplines, Olga T. Yokoyama develops a universal model of the smallest unit of informational discourse, and uncovers the regularities that govern the intentional verbal transfer of knowledge from one interlocutor to another. The author then places these processes within a new framework of Communicational Competence, which legitimizes certain nebulous but important linguistic phenomena hitherto caught in a noman's land between the formal and functional approaches to language. Russian word order, a classical problem of Slavic linguistics, is subjected to a rigorous examination within this theoretical framework; Yokoyama demonstrates how this “free word order language” can only be described by taking into account such generally neglected factors as the speakers' subjectivity and attitude. Of particular interest to Slavists is a new generative theory of Russian intonation, which is consistently incorporated into the description of Russian word order.

Author : Anneli Meurman-Solin,Maria Jose Lopez-Couso,Bettelou Los
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2012-08-02
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199860210

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Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English by Anneli Meurman-Solin,Maria Jose Lopez-Couso,Bettelou Los Pdf

The unifying topic of this volume is the role of information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics and pragmatics.

Author : Robert E. Longacre
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2013-11-21
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781489901620

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The Grammar of Discourse by Robert E. Longacre Pdf

In that The Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976) was the precursor to The Grammar of Discourse (1983), this revision embodies a third "edition" of some of the material that is found here. The original intent of the 1976 volume was to construct a hierarchical arrangement of notional categories, which find surface realization in the grammatical constructions of the various languages of the world. The idea was to marshal the categories that every analyst-regardless of theoretical bent-had to take account of as cognitive entities. The volume began with a couple of chapters on what was then popularly known as "case grammar," then expanded upward and downward to include other notional categories on other levels. Chapters on dis course, monologue, and dialogue were buried in the center of the volume. In the 1983 volume, the chapters on monologue and dialogue discourse were moved to the fore of the book and the chapters on case grammar were made less prominent; the volume was then renamed The Grammar of Discourse. The current revision features more clearly than its predecessors the intersection of discourse and pragmatic concerns with grammatical structures on various levels. It retains and expands much of the former material but includes new material reflecting current advances in such topics as salience clines for discourse, rhetorical relations, paragraph structures, transitivity, ergativity, agency hierarchy, and word order typologies.

Author : Roland Hinterhölzl,Svetlana Petrova
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9783110205916

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Information Structure and Language Change by Roland Hinterhölzl,Svetlana Petrova Pdf

The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Author : Bettelou Los,Pieter de Haan
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2017-12-14
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027264848

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Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact by Bettelou Los,Pieter de Haan Pdf

The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead, speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input, either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition, fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English, as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles, and in Romance.

Author : Feride Erkü
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 478 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : Turkish language
ISBN : MINN:31951001047125Q

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Discourse Pragmatics and Word Order in Turkish by Feride Erkü Pdf

Author : Katalin É Kiss
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Generative grammar
ISBN : 9780195088342

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Discourse Configurational Languages by Katalin É Kiss Pdf

Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.

Author : Anna Siewierska
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
ISBN : UCSC:32106008033059

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Word Order Rules by Anna Siewierska Pdf

Author : Anneli Meurman-Solin,Maria Jose Lopez-Couso,Bettelou Los
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2012-06-12
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199938483

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Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English by Anneli Meurman-Solin,Maria Jose Lopez-Couso,Bettelou Los Pdf

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English is the first book to apply information structure as it relates to language change to a corpus-based analysis of a wide range of features in the evolution of English syntax and grammars of prose in long diachrony.

Author : A. Sumru Özsoy
Publisher : Springer
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2019-02-20
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783030113858

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Word Order in Turkish by A. Sumru Özsoy Pdf

This volume is a collection of studies on various aspects of word order variation in Turkish. As a head-final, left-branching ‘free’ word order language, Turkish raises a number of significant theory-internal as well as language-particular questions regarding linearization in language. Each of the contributions in the present volume offers a fresh insight into a number of these questions, thus, while expanding our knowledge of the language-particular properties of the word order phenomena, also contribute individually to the theory of linearization in general. Turkish is a configurational language. It licenses constructions in which constituents can occur in non-canonical presubject as well as postverbal positions. Presented within the assumptions of the generative tradition, the discussion and analyses of the various aspects of the linearization facts of the language offer a novel treatment of the issues therein. The authors approach the word order phenomena from a variety of perspectives, ranging from purely syntactic treatments, to accounts as syntax-PF interface or syntax-discourse interface phenomena or as output of base generation.

Author : Jacqueline Guéron
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2015-10-29
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191059827

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Sentence and Discourse by Jacqueline Guéron Pdf

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

Author : Anita Steube
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 637 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2008-11-03
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110209303

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The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures by Anita Steube Pdf

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

Author : Betty J. Birner,Gregory Ward
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1998-05-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027281906

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Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English by Betty J. Birner,Gregory Ward Pdf

This work provides a comprehensive discourse-functional account of three classes of noncanonical constituent placement in English – preposing, postposing, and argument reversal – and shows how their interaction is accounted for in a principled and predictive way. In doing so, it details the variety of ways in which information can be 'given' or 'new' and shows how an understanding of this variety allows us to account for the distribution of these constructions in discourse. Moreover, the authors show that there exist broad and empirically verifiable functional correspondences within classes of syntactically similar constructions. Relying heavily on corpus data, the authors identify three interacting dimensions along which individual constructions may vary with respect to the pragmatic constraints to which they are sensitive: old vs. new information, relative vs. absolute familiarity, and discourse- vs. hearer-familiarity. They show that preposed position is reserved for information that is linked to the prior discourse by means of a contextually licensed partially-ordered set relationship; postposed position is reserved for information that is 'new' in one of a small number of distinct senses; and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preverbal constituent be at least as familiar within the discourse as that represented by the postverbal constituent. Within each of the three classes of constructions, individual constructions vary with respect to whether they are sensitive to familiarity within the discourse or (assumed) familiarity within the hearer's knowledge store. Thus, although the individual constructions in question are subject to distinct constraints, this work provides empirical evidence for the existence of strong correlations between sentence position and information status. The final chapter presents crosslinguistic data showing that these correlations are not limited to English.

Author : Deniz Zeyrek,Umut Özge
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2020-06-08
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110686784

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Discourse Meaning by Deniz Zeyrek,Umut Özge Pdf

The volume aims to bring together original, unpublished papers on discourse structure and meaning from different frameworks or theoretical perspectives to address research questions revolving around issues instigated by Turkish. Another goal is to offer methodologically different solutions for the research gaps identified in individual chapters. The contributions are based on empirical generalizations and make use of, for example, computerized corpora as the data, examples compiled from naturally occurring discourse, or data gathered in experimental conditions. Hence, the book has a firm theoretical standing and it is empirically well-grounded. The collection is expected to be of direct interest to the community of scholars and researchers in discourse structure and semantics as well as corpus linguistics. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and all interested readers, offering them a fresh view on various discourse-related phenomena from the perspective of Turkish.