Information Status And Noncanonical Word Order In English

Author : Betty J. Birner,Gregory L. Ward
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 1998-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027230430

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Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English by Betty J. Birner,Gregory L. 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 : Betty J. Birner,Gregory Ward
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 51,5 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 : Paul Portner,Claudia Maienborn,Klaus von Heusinger
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 633 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2019-02-19
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110587319

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Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure by Paul Portner,Claudia Maienborn,Klaus von Heusinger Pdf

Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.

Author : Biljana Mišić Ilić,Vesna Lopičić
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2012-04-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781443839525

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Challenging Change by Biljana Mišić Ilić,Vesna Lopičić Pdf

This book, Challenging Change: Literary and Linguistic Responses, is a collection of twenty-three articles which examine change – understood in the broadest sense – as the need of the modern man to redefine, revise, deconstruct and reconstruct previous theories, histories, moralities, social relationships, forms of language and language use. In these times of great change, when the only constant seems to be change itself, the authors of these essays respond to the challenge and approach the notion of change from the perspectives of literary studies and linguistics. The book opens with an introductory overview, followed by twenty-three articles divided into two sections. The authors of the articles come from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Norway.

Author : Marcus Callies
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2009-04-08
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027289483

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Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English by Marcus Callies Pdf

This book presents the first detailed and comprehensive study of information highlighting in advanced learner language, echoing the increasing interest in questions of near-native competence in SLA research and contributing to the description of advanced interlanguages. It examines the production and comprehension of specific means of information highlighting in English by native speakers and German learners of English as a foreign language, presenting triangulated experimental and learner corpus data as corroborating evidence. The study focuses on learners’ use of discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, preposing, and it- and wh-clefts, an underexplored field in SLA research to date.The book also provides a critical re-assessment of the study of pragmatics within SLA. It has largely been neglected to date that L2 pragmatic knowledge includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts. Thus, the book argues for an extension of the scope of inquiry in interlanguage pragmatics beyond the cross-cultural investigation of speech acts. It also discusses pedagogical implications for foreign language teaching and will be of interest to applied linguists and SLA researchers, language teachers and curriculum designers.

Author : Dr Ahmed Saleh Elimam
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2013-10-28
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781443853675

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Marked Word Order in the Qurān and its English Translations by Dr Ahmed Saleh Elimam Pdf

The literature on Balaghah (the art of Arabic eloquence) and commentaries on the Qurān stress that the style of the Qurān is beautiful, eloquent and inimitable. This literature identifies word order as one of the most distinctive aspects of Qurānic style. One of the main reasons for this is that, compared to English, Arabic has fewer restrictions on word order, thanks to its elaborate verb inflection system and case marking. This flexibility allows for the foregrounding of some elements within the sentence, resulting in a marked (or non-canonical) word order and fulfilling certain discursive functions, including specification, restriction, emphasis, amplification/ glorification, and denial. Marked word order is used to highlight or downplay certain elements in speech or writing. It constitutes one way of delivering meanings to the addressee, as these meanings are ordered in the mind of the speaker in terms of their importance, making the style a precise reflection of the speaker’s mind and feelings. This book is a descriptive study which attempts to examine how translations of the Qurān have handled āyahs (verses of the Qurān) that feature lexical foregrounding, focusing on ten published translations into English, carried out by translators from different ideological and linguistic backgrounds. It offers a systematic comparison of the ways in which the selected translators deal with the linguistic feature of word order variation, and examines issues relating to the translator’s style. Specifically, the book identifies and examines the following: instances of marked word order discussed by commentators on the Qurān, and the function served by each case of lexical foregrounding; secondly, the options and/or patterns employed by translators to render the different functions of marked word order; thirdly, the recurrent options and/or patterns for rendering different types of word order variation. Finally, the book explores the factors which may have influenced the choice of particular strategies by different translators, including the translators’ motivations and the various historical contexts in which the translations were made.

Author : Bas Aarts,Jill Bowie,Gergana Popova
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 752 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2019-11-14
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191071195

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The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar by Bas Aarts,Jill Bowie,Gergana Popova Pdf

This handbook provides an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. Following an introduction from the editors, the volume's expert contributors explore a range of core topics in English grammar, beginning with issues in grammar writing and methodology. Chapters in part II then examine the various theoretical approaches to grammar, such as cognitive, constructional, and generative approaches, followed by the chapters in part III, which comprehensively cover the different subdomains of grammar, including compounds, phrase structure, clause types, tense and aspect, and information structure. Part IV offers coverage of the relationship between grammar and other fields - lexis, phonology, meaning, and discourse - while the concluding part of the book investigates grammatical change over time, regional variation, and genre and literary variation. The handbook's wide-ranging coverage will appeal to researchers and students of English language and linguistics from undergraduate level upwards.

Author : Betty J. Birner,Gregory L. Ward
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2006-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027230904

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Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning by Betty J. Birner,Gregory L. Ward Pdf

One of the most lively and contentious issues in contemporary linguistic theory concerns the elusive boundary between semantics and pragmatics, and Professor Laurence R. Horn of Yale University has been at the center of that debate ever since his groundbreaking 1972 UCLA dissertation. This festvolume in honor of Horn brings together the best of current work at the semantics/pragmatics boundary from a neo-Gricean perspective. Featuring the contributions of 22 leading researchers, it includes papers on implicature (Kent Bach), inference (Betty Birner), presupposition (Barbara Abbott), lexical semantics (Georgia Green, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Steve Kleinedler & Randall Eggert), negation (Pauline Jacobson, Frederick Newmeyer, Scott Schwenter), polarity (Donka Farkas, Anastasia Giannakidou, Michael Israel), implicit variables (Greg Carlson & Gianluca Storto), definiteness (Barbara Partee), reference (Ellen Prince, Andrew Kehler & Gregory Ward), and logic (Jerrold Sadock, Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Andrew Hartline). These original papers represent not only a fitting homage to Larry Horn, but also an important contribution to semantic and pragmatic theory.

Author : Kristin Bech,Kristine Gunn Eide
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 431 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2014-05-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027270467

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Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages by Kristin Bech,Kristine Gunn Eide Pdf

The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

Author : Klaus von Heusinger,Claudia Maienborn,Paul Portner
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 1079 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2011-12-23
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110255072

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Semantics. Volume 2 by Klaus von Heusinger,Claudia Maienborn,Paul Portner Pdf

No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (VON HEUSINGER ET AL.) BD. 33.2 HSK E-BOOK".

Author : Andreas Dufter,Elisabeth Stark
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 977 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2017-09-25
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110377088

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Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax by Andreas Dufter,Elisabeth Stark Pdf

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

Author : Ans van Kemenade,Bettelou Los
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 678 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2009-02-09
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781405187862

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The Handbook of the History of English by Ans van Kemenade,Bettelou Los Pdf

The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language. organizes the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language innovatively and applies recent insights to old problems surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research

Author : Rolf Kreyer
Publisher : Gunter Narr Verlag
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3823362275

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Inversion in Modern Written English by Rolf Kreyer Pdf

Author : Yan Huang
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 800 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2017-01-19
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191065217

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The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics by Yan Huang Pdf

This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure. The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of pragmatics of all theoretical stripes. It will also be a valuable resource for linguists in other fields, including philosophy of language, semantics, morphosyntax, prosody, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, and for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.

Author : Betty J. Birner
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2023-03-31
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781000841138

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Meaning by Betty J. Birner Pdf

Meaning addresses the fundamental question of human language interaction: what it is to mean, and how we communicate our meanings to others. Experienced textbook writer and eminent researcher Betty J. Birner gives balanced coverage to semantics and pragmatics, emphasizing interactions between the two, and discusses other fields of language study such as syntax, neurology, philosophy of language, and artificial intelligence in terms of their interfaces with linguistic meaning. Comics and diagrams appear throughout to keep the reader engaged; and end-of-chapter quizzes, data-collection exercises, and opinion questions are employed along with more traditional exercises and discussion questions. In addition, the book features copious examples from real life and current events, along with boxes describing linguistic issues in the news and interesting and accessible research on topics like swearing, politics, and animal communication. Students will emerge ready for deeper study in semantics and pragmatics – and more importantly, with an understanding of how all of these fields serve the fundamental purpose of human language: the communication of meaning. Meaning is an ideal textbook for courses in linguistic meaning that focus on both semantics and pragmatics in equal parts, with special attention on philosophical questions, related subfields of linguistics, and interfaces among these various areas. Appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate-level courses in semantics, pragmatics, and general linguistics, Meaning is essential reading for all students of linguistic meaning.