Author: Zlatka Guentchéva Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027267618 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 740
Book Description
This volume brings together a collection of articles exploring tense and aspect phenomena in a variety of non-related languages: Indo-European (Albanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, English, Norwegian, Hindi), Hamito-Semitic (Berber, Zenaga Berber, Arabic varieties, Neo-Aramaic), African (Wolof, Langi), Asian (Badaga, Korean, Mongolian languages – Khalkha, Buriat, Kalmuck – Thaï, Tibetic languages), Amerindian (Yucatec Maya, Sikuani), Greenlandic (Eskimo) and Oceanian (Nêlêmwa). Each article is grounded in solid empirical knowledge. It offers an in-depth study of aspectual and temporal devices as manifested in many diverse and complex ways from a cross-linguistic perspective and seeks to contribute to our understanding of the domain under consideration and more broadly to linguistic typology and theoretical linguistics, especially the enunciative approach. The book gives readers access to a collection of data and is of particular interest to scholars working on aspectuality and temporality, on pragmatics, on areal linguistics and on typology.
Author: Sarah Dessì Schmid Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110564106 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
This synchronic study presents a new onomasiological, frame-theoretical model for the description, classification and theoretical analysis of the cross-linguistic content category aspectuality. It deals specifically with those pieces of information, which, in their interplay, constitute the aspectual value of states of affairs. The focus is on Romance Languages, although the model can be applied just as well to other languages, in that it is underpinned by a principle grounded in a fundamental cognitive ability: the delimitation principle. Unlike traditional approaches, which generally have a semasiological orientation and strictly adhere to a semantic differentiation between grammatical aspect and lexical aspect (Aktionsart), this study makes no such differentiation and understands these as merely different formal realisations of one and the same content category: aspectuality.
Author: Henk J. Verkuyl Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521564526 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
Sentences may pertain to states or processes or events. They may express duration, frequency, habituality, and many other forms of temporality. How do they do this? It is the aspectual properties of sentences in natural languages which allow the user to express a temporal structure, and Henk Verkuyl presents a unified formal system to account for them. He explains aspectuality in terms of the opposition between terminative aspect and durative aspect, and describes the way in which terminative aspect is compositionally formed on the basis of semantic information expressed by different syntactic elements, in particular the verb and its arguments. The aim is to determine which semantic conditions make a sentence terminative; but at least ten different forms of durative aspectuality are also treated. All are drawn into a theory which can account for both terminative and durative aspectuality together. A Theory of Aspectuality draws together into a coherent whole the author's thinking on the subject over the last twenty years, and will interest all those working on aspect and the semantics of noun phrases. It promises to be a major new contribution to our understanding of the subject.
Author: Alan Cienki Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027263698 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
The book provides a nuanced, multimodal perspective on how people express events via certain grammatical forms of verbs in speech and certain qualities of movement in manual gestures. The volume is the outcome of an international project that involved three teams: one each from France, Germany, and Russia, including scholars from the Netherlands and the United States. Aspect and gesture use are studied in three Indo-European languages, i.e. French, German, and Russian. The book also summarizes the main points and arguments from French, German, and Russian works on aspect in relation to tense, bringing these historical traditions together for an English-speaking reading audience. The work rekindles some fundamental theorizing about events and aspect, reinvigorating it in a new light with the use of recent theorizing from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, as well as new research methods applied to new data from actual spoken, interactive language use. It illustrates the value of researching the variably multimodal nature of communication – as well as theoretical issues in connection with thinking for speaking and mental simulation – from an empirical point of view.
Author: Simon C. Dik Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 9783110154047 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 536
Book Description
Introduction When one takes a functional approach to the study of natural languages, the ultimate questions one is interested in can be formulated as: How does the natural language user (NLU) work? How do speakers and addressees succeed ...
Author: Bettina Zeisler Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 3110908182 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 1012
Book Description
This study presents a comparative approach to a universal theory of TENSE, ASPECT and MOOD, combining the methods of comparative and historical linguistics, fieldwork, text linguistics, and philology. The parts of the book discuss and describe (i) the concepts of TENSE, ASPECT and MOOD; (ii) the Tibetan system of RELATIVE TENSE and aspectual values, with main sections on Old and Classical Tibetan, “Lhasa” Tibetan, and East Tibetan (Amdo and Kham); and (iii) West Tibetan (Ladakhi, Purik, Balti); Part (iv) presents the comparative view. Discussing the similarities and differences of temporal and aspectual concepts, the study rejects the general claim that ASPECT is a linguistic universal. A new linguistic concept, FRAMING, is introduced in order to account for the aspect-like conceptualisations found in, e.g., English. The concept of RELATIVE TENSE or taxis, may likewise not be universal. Among the Tibetan varieties, West Tibetan is unique in having fully grammaticalized the concept of ABSOLUTE TENSE. West Tibetan is compared diachronically with Old and Classical Tibetan (documented since the mid 8th century) and synchronically with several contemporary Tibetan varieties. The grammaticalized forms of each variety are described on the basis of their employment in discourse. The underlying general function of the Tibetan verbal system is thus shown to be that of RELATIVE TENSE. Secondary aspectual functions are described for restricted contexts. A special focus on the pragmatic or metaphorical use of present tense constructions in Tibetan leads to a typology of narrative conventions. The last part also offers some suggestions for the reconstruction of the Proto-Tibetan verb system.
Author: Janine Klinge Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3656024324 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 49
Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: This paper aims at a closer examination of aspectuality in English. It illustrates the importance of a category which has only scarcely received attention in the study of the English language (cf. Binnick 1991). When it comes to the analysis of situations, the focus is on the verbal category 'tense,' which relates the temporal location of the situation to other points in time. The category of 'aspect' is closely connected to tense, because it provides important information about the internal temporal structure of situations. Nonetheless it is often less familiar to speakers of the English language, referring to, among others, the works of Comrie (1967), Brinton (1988), Binnick (1991) and Kortmann (1991). According to their studies, English lacks formal markers of aspect, whereas the realization of tense in English is quite obvious and thus much discussed. 1.1 Central Questions Based on Binnick's (1991) description of 'aspectuality,' it is necessary to clarify this concept in detail. The central questions for this examination will be: 1. How can aspectuality be inferred from utterances when English lacks aspectual markers? 2. Are there systematic approaches that are concerned with the interaction of 'aspect' and 'Aktionsart' as defined by Comrie (1976) and Vendler (1957)? 3. In which ways do aspectual properties influence or change the semantic meaning of utterances and why? 4. What are the combination options of aspectual perspectives and properties and are there any restrictions consequent on the interaction of different aspectual values? This paper serves not just to answer these questions, but also tries to differentiate between the various subcategories of aspectuality,' which are in general difficult to distinguish properly. [...]
Author: Lihua Zhang Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften ISBN: Category : Contrastive linguistics Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
This study systematically contrasts aspectuality in German, English, and Chinese by investigating a set of rich data from literary texts. It uses a cognitive approach to examine aspectual semantics and relationships between meaning and form involving the expression and categorization of aspectual situations in three languages. It elucidates language-specific realizations of aspectual conceptualization in each of the three languages and reveals aspectually motivated regularities in translations among these languages.
Author: Masayoshi Shibatani Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027228892 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 721
Book Description
This volume brings together 18 original papers dealing with voice-related phenomena.The languages dealt with represent both typological and geographic diversity, ranging from accusative-type languages to ergative-type and Philippine-type languages, and from Australia to Africa and Siberia. The studies presented here open up many possibilities for theorizing and offer data inviting formal treatments, but the most important contribution they make is in terms of the insights they offer for a better understanding of the fundamentals of voice phenomena.
Author: Lotte Hogeweg Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027255318 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
Preface -- 1. The semantics of tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world / Lotte Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop & Andrej Malchukov -- 2. Incompatible categories: Resolving the 'present perfective paradox' / Andrej L. Malchukov -- 3. The perfective/imperfective distinction: Coercion or aspectual operators? / Corien Bary -- 4. Lexical and compositional factors in the aspectual system of Adyghe / Peter M. Arkadiev -- 5. Event structure of non-culminating accomplishments / Sergei Tatevosov & Mikhail Ivanov -- 6. The grammaticalised use of the Burmese verbs la 'come' and .wà 'go' / Nicoletta Romeo -- 7. Irrealis in Yurakaré and other languages: On the cross-linguistic consistency of an elusive category / Rik van Gijn & Sonja Gipper -- 8. On the selection of mood in complement clauses / Rui Marques -- 9. 'Out of control' marking as circumstantial modality in St'át'imcets / Henry Davis, Lisa Matthewson & Hotze Rullmann -- 10. Modal geometry: Remarks on the structure of a modal map / Kees de Schepper & Joost Zwarts -- 11. Acquisitive modals / Johan van der Auwera, Petar Kehayov & Alice Vittrant -- 12. Conflicting constraints on the interpretation of modal auxiliaries / Ad Foolen & Helen de Hoop -- 13. Modality and context dependence / Fabrice Nauze -- 14. Verbal semantic shifts under negation, intensionality, and imperfectivity: Russian genitive objects / Barbara H. Partee & Vladimir Borschev -- 15. The Estonian partitive evidential: Some notes on the semantic parallels between aspect and evidential categories / Anne Tamm -- Index.
Author: Zlatka Guentchéva
Author: Sarah Dessì Schmid
Author: Henk J. Verkuyl
Author: Alan Cienki
Author: Simon C. Dik
Author: Bettina Zeisler
Author: Janine Klinge
Author: Lihua Zhang
Author: Masayoshi Shibatani
Author: Lotte Hogeweg