Continuity And Change In Grammar

Download or read book Continuity and Change in Grammar written by Anne Breitbarth and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the "causes" of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the actuation problem: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection."

Download or read book Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition written by Juergen Weissenborn and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent linguistic theory, there has been an explosion of detailed studies of language variation. This volume applies such recent analyses to the study of child language, developing new approaches to change and variation in child grammars and revealing both early knowledge in several areas of grammar and a period of extended development in others. Topics dealt with include question formation, "subjectless" sentences, object gaps, rules for missing subject interpretation, passive sentences, rules for pronoun interpretation and argument structure. Leading developmental linguists and psycholinguists show how linguistic theory can help define and inform a theory of the dynamics of language development and its biological basis, meeting the growing need for such studies in programs in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science.

Download or read book Language Structure, Variation and Change written by Ian E. Mackenzie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.

Download or read book Topic Continuity in Discourse written by T. Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.

Download or read book Bilingualism in the Community written by Rena Torres Cacoullos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of bilinguals' use of two languages reveals highly adept code-switching: alternating between languages while keeping intact the separate grammars.

Download or read book Continuities and Changes in Maya Archaeology written by Charles Golden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the current state of Maya archaeology by focusing on the history of the field for the last 100 years, present day research, and forward looking prescription for the direction of the field.

Download or read book Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change written by Sam Featherston and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.