The English Existential

Author : Gary L. Milsark
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2014-01-10
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781317931577

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Existential Sentences in English (RLE Linguistics D: English Linguistics) by Gary L. Milsark Pdf

In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word ‘existential’ in a linguistic investigation, the author reserved the term existential sentence (ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed, non-deictic, ‘existential’ there. Thus the term will be used as a characterisation of a class of syntactic objects, not as a semantic description. With ES sentences including formations such as ‘There were several people talking’ and ‘There ensued a riot’, perhaps nowhere else do we find so clearly displayed the complexity and subtlety of the syntactic and semantic interactions which determine the nature of human language.

Author : Lyle Jenkins
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2012-10-25
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783111357188

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The English existential by Lyle Jenkins Pdf

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

Author : Louise McNally
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0815325576

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A Semantics for the English Existential Construction by Louise McNally Pdf

Proposes a new semantics for English statements beginning with there, which adopts the generally rejected characterization of them as subject-predicate prepositions in which the subject is a property or description of an individual and the predicate affirms the instantiation of the property of des

Author : Louise McNally
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2016-11-25
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781315536477

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A Semantics for the English Existential Construction by Louise McNally Pdf

First published in 1997, this book addresses the question: What is the interpretation of English there-existential construction? One of the principal goals is to develop an interpretation for the construction that will specifically address other properties of the postcopular DP. After outlining the problem, the author goes on to present a syntactic motivation for the claim that the postcopular DP is the sole complement to the existential predicate, as well as for the claim that the optional final phrase is a predictive adjunct. In chapter 3 the interpretation for the basic existential construction is developed and then compared to analyses that take the postcopular DP to denote an ordinary individual or a generalised quantifier of individuals. This analysis is then augmented to account for the contribution of the final XP and shows how the predicate restriction can be derived from a more general condition on depictive/circumstantial VP-adjuncts. The final chapter contain some speculative discussion of the broader implications of the proposal in the context of data such as "list" existential and "presentational-there" sentences.

Author : Simone E. Pfenninger
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : English language
ISBN : 3034300212

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Grammaticalization Paths of English and High German Existential Constructions by Simone E. Pfenninger Pdf

Existential constructions are a fundamental feature of many Indo-European languages, and constructions with non-referential subjects have developed in all of the latter, albeit at different stages in their histories. High German does not feature a prototypical existential construction that is equivalent in syntactic and pragmatic function and semantic meaning to the English existential there-construction. How did a prototypical existential structure originate in English? Why is it that High German has never developed such a construction? Has it ever shown a tendency towards developing one? How did two closely related languages such as English and High German come to differ so much with respect to these constructions? By means of investigating a variety of historical and contemporary data this study shows that not only semantic, pragmatic and syntactic factors are involved, which decide the choice of a certain construction, but also very much the more general different linguistic development that the two languages underwent in the course of time.

Author : Michael Lumsden
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2014-02-03
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781317933717

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Existential Sentences (RLE Linguistics B: Grammar) by Michael Lumsden Pdf

What is the relationship between the structure of existential sentences and their meaning? How do hearers interpret existential sentences using pragmatic assumptions? This study attempts to account for the relationship between the structure of existential sentences (ES) and their meaning. The study of ES has received a great deal of attention because the construction has complex syntactic properties, is associated with restrictions of a semantic nature, and provides an interesting area for investigation at a pragmatic level.

Author : Louise McNally
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 546 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : English language
ISBN : UCAL:X49474

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An Interpretation for the English Existential Construction by Louise McNally Pdf

Author : Susann Fischer,Tanja Kupisch,Esther Rinke
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 475 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2016-08-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781443898003

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Definiteness Effects by Susann Fischer,Tanja Kupisch,Esther Rinke Pdf

This volume explores in detail the empirical and conceptual content of the definiteness effect in grammar. It brings together a variety of relevant observations from a typological, diachronic and a bilingual/second language acquisition perspective, and provides a general overview of different approaches concerned with the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the Definiteness Effect in a series of European and non-European languages.

Author : Michael Hannay
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2017-03-06
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783111334318

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English existentials in functional grammar by Michael Hannay Pdf

Author : Violeta Kalėdaitė
Publisher : Peter Lang Publishing
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : IND:30000087939744

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Existential Sentences in English and Lithuanian by Violeta Kalėdaitė Pdf

Existential sentences in the world's languages tend to develop specific morphological, syntactic, and lexical properties. The present work offers a contrastive functional analysis of these constructions in two typologically unrelated languages, English and Lithuanian. The study focuses on the relationship between the syntactic structure of different existential sentence types and their meaning; it also explores the semantic and pragmatic parameters relevant to the structural differences within a single language and across the two compared languages. Most importantly, a new definition of the existential sentence, which takes into account both semantic and syntactic criteria, is proposed for Lithuanian. The findings are drawn on the basis of the corpus and highlight conspicuous differences in the linguistic representations of the construction in the two languages. With respect to Lithuanian, communicative word order variations, language-specific structures (the BKI and the impersonal passive), and a wider use of lexical verbs present an area of special interest. Contents: The English existential: definition and classification -- General characteristics: structural patterns -- Semantic types -- Word order -- The interpretation of there -- Verbs in the construction -- The definiteness restriction -- Lithuanian existentials: the semantics of the basic sentence patterns -- Types of 'be' existentials -- Communicative types of existential sentences -- Semantic classes of acceptable lexical verbs -- Definite and indefinite subject NPs -- Language-specific existential structures.

Author : Ileana Comorovski,Klaus Heusinger
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2007-09-04
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781402061974

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Existence: Semantics and Syntax by Ileana Comorovski,Klaus Heusinger Pdf

This collection of essays grew out of the workshop ‘Existence: Semantics and Syntax’, which was held at the University of Nancy 2 in September 2002. The workshop, organized by Ileana Comorovski and Claire Gardent, was supported by a grant from the Reseau ́ de Sciences Cognitives du Grand Est (‘Cognitive Science Network of the Greater East’), which is gratefully acknowledged. The ?rst e- tor wishes to thank Claire Gardent, Fred Landman, and Georges Rebuschi for encouraging her to pursue the publication of a volume based on papers presented at the workshop. Among those who participated in the workshop was Klaus von Heusinger, who joined Ileana Comorovski in editing this volume. Besides papers that developed out of presentations at the workshop, the volume contains invited contributions. We are grateful to Wayles Browne, Fred Landman, Paul Portner, and Georges Rebuschi for their help with reviewing some of the papers. Our thanks go also to a Springer reviewer for the careful reading of the book manuscript. We wish to thank all the participants in the workshop, not only those whose contributions appear in this volume, for making the workshop an int- active and constructive event. Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of ‘existence’, which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases.

Author : Leiv Egil Breivik
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 484 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : English language
ISBN : STANFORD:36105039802967

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Existential There by Leiv Egil Breivik Pdf

Author : Benjamin Fondane
Publisher : New York Review of Books
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2016-05-17
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781590178997

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Existential Monday by Benjamin Fondane Pdf

Benjamin Fondane—who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges’s friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz—was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, “a torture and a spur.” Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea. Existential Monday, the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English, includes four of Fondane's most thought-provoking and important texts, "Existential Monday and the Sunday of History," "Preface for the Present Moment," "Man Before History" (co-translated by Andrew Rubens), and "Boredom." Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the enduring French philosophers of the twentieth century.

Author : Richard R. Day
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1980-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783872762450

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Issues in English Creoles by Richard R. Day Pdf

The purpose of this volume is to make more accessible, for the use of researchers and students in the field of pidgins and creoles, presentations of the third International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles in Honolulu, 1975, dealing with English-based creoles. Aside from their documentary value, the ten papers of this volume are of interest for several reasons: they contain interesting data and observations on the languages themselves, in particular Trinidadian Creole, Guyanese Creole, St. Kitts Creole, and Bahamian English. Additionally, the contributions are significant for the insights they have into the importance of variation, a topic which must be confronted by those who investigate pidgins and creoles. Apart from Bickerton s paper dealing with universals, the papers are presented according to the geographic area where the linguistic systems are used.

Author : Anita Singh
Publisher : Sarup & Sons
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Existentialism in literature
ISBN : 817625729X

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Existential Dimensions in the Novels of Anita Desai by Anita Singh Pdf

Anita Desai, b. 1937, Indo-English novelist.