Morphology and Universals in Syntactic Change PDF Download

Author: Brian D. Joseph
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315515717
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

View

Book Description
This book, first published in 1990, is a study of both the specific syntactic changes in the more recent stages of Greek and of the nature of syntactic change in general. Guided by the constraints and principles of Universal Grammar, this hypothesis of this study allows for an understanding of how these changes in Greek syntax occurred and so provides insight into the mechanism of syntactic change. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

Author: Theresa Biberauer
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Diachronic a
ISBN: 0199687927
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 439

View

Book Description
This collection of essays provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and how it is related to the lexicon, morphology, and information structure. It draws on data from a wide variety of languages and will be of interest to linguists working on syntactic variation and change.

Author: Michelle Sheehan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262534169
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 465

View

Book Description
An examination of the evidence for and the theoretical implications of a universal word order constraint, with data from a wide range of languages. This book presents evidence for a universal word order constraint, the Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC), and discusses the theoretical implications of this phenomenon. FOFC is a syntactic condition that disallows structures where a head-initial phrase is contained in a head-final phrase in the same extended projection/domain. The authors argue that FOFC is a linguistic universal, not just a strong tendency, and not a constraint on processing. They discuss the effects of the universal in various domains, including the noun phrase, the adjective phrase, the verb phrase, and the clause. The book draws on data from a wide range of languages, including Hindi, Turkish, Basque, Finnish, Afrikaans, German, Hungarian, French, English, Italian, Romanian, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Pontic Greek, Bagirmi, Dholuo, and Thai. FOFC, the authors argue, is important because it is the only known example of a word order asymmetry pertaining to the order of heads. As such, it has significant repercussions for theories connecting the narrow syntax to linear order.

Author: Bernard Comrie
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226114330
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 286

View

Book Description
Here, Comrie (linguistics, U. of Southern Cal.) is particularly concerned with syntactico-semantic universals, devoting chapters to word order, case marking, relative clauses, and causative constructions. This second edition takes full account of new research into generative grammatical theory. Acidic paper. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Peter W. Culicover
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192634739
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
This volume explores how human languages become what they are, why they differ from one another in certain ways but not in others, and why they change in the ways that they do. Given that language is a universal creation of the human mind, the puzzle is why there are different languages at all: why do we not all speak the same language? Moreover, while there is considerable variation, in some ways grammars do show consistent patterns: why are languages similar in those respects, and why are those particular patterns preferred? Peter Culicover proposes that the solution to these puzzles is a constructional one. Grammars consist of constructions that carry out the function of expressing universal conceptual structure. While there are in principle many different ways of accomplishing this task, languages are under press to reduce constructional complexity. The result is that there is constructional change in the direction of less complexity, and grammatical patterns emerge that more efficiently reflect conceptual universals. The volume is divided into three parts: the first establishes the theoretical foundations; the second explores variation in argument structure, grammatical functions, and A-bar constructions, drawing on data from a variety of languages including English and Plains Cree; and the third examines constructional change, focusing primarily on Germanic. The study ends with observations and speculations on parameter theory, analogy, the origins of typological patterns, and Greenbergian 'universals'.

Author: Charles N. Li
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477301054
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 641

View

Book Description
Historical linguistics, the oldest field in linguistics, has been traditionally dominated by phonological and etymological investigations. Only in the late twentieth century have linguists begun to focus their interest and research on the area of syntactic change and the insight it provides on the nature of language. This volume represents the first major contribution on the mechanisms of syntactic change. The fourteen articles that make up this volume were selected from the Symposium on the Mechanisms of Syntactic Change held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976, one of a series of three conferences sponsored by the National Science Foundation. These papers clearly demonstrate that the generative approach to the study of language does not explain diachronic processes in syntax. This collection is enlightening, provocative, and carefully documented with data drawn from a great variety of language families.

Author: Ian Roberts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139435515
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

View

Book Description
The phenomenon of grammaticalization - the historical process whereby new grammatical material is created - has attracted a great deal of attention within linguistics. This is an attempt to provide a general account of this phenomenon in terms of a formal theory of syntax. Using Chomsky's Minimalist Program for linguistic theory, Roberts and Roussou show how this approach gives rise to a number of important conceptual and theoretical issues concerning the nature of functional categories and the form of parameters, as well as the relation of both of these to language change. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, they construct a general account of grammaticalization with implications for linguistic theory and language acquisition.

Author: Ricardo Mairal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139459708
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 19

View

Book Description
The discovery of 'linguistic universals' - the properties that all languages have in common - is a fundamental goal of linguistic research. Linguists face the task of accounting for why languages, which apparently differ so greatly from one another on the surface, display striking similarities in their underlying structure. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to show how different linguistic theories have approached this challenge. Drawing on work from both formal and functional perspectives, it provides a comprehensive overview of the most notable work on linguistic universals - with chapters on syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology and typology - and explores a range of central issues, such as the relationship between linguistic universals and the language faculty, and what linguistic universals can tell us about our biological make-up and cognitive abilities. Clear and succinct, it will be invaluable to anyone seeking a greater understanding of the phenomenon that is human language.

Author: Jonathan David Bobaljik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262304597
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 333

View

Book Description
An argument for, and account of linguistic universals in the morphology of comparison, combining empirical breadth and theoretical rigor. This groundbreaking study of the morphology of comparison yields a surprising result: that even in suppletion (the wholesale replacement of one stem by a phonologically unrelated stem, as in good-better-best) there emerge strikingly robust patterns, virtually exceptionless generalizations across languages. Jonathan David Bobaljik describes the systematicity in suppletion, and argues that at least five generalizations are solid contenders for the status of linguistic universals. The major topics discussed include suppletion, comparative and superlative formation, deadjectival verbs, and lexical decomposition. Bobaljik's primary focus is on morphological theory, but his argument also aims to integrate evidence from a variety of subfields into a coherent whole. In the course of his analysis, Bobaljik argues that the assumptions needed bear on choices among theoretical frameworks and that the framework of Distributed Morphology has the right architecture to support the account. In addition to the theoretical implications of the generalizations, Bobaljik suggests that the striking patterns of regularity in what otherwise appears to be the most irregular of linguistic domains provide compelling evidence for Universal Grammar. The book strikes a unique balance between empirical breadth and theoretical detail. The phenomenon that is the main focus of the argument, suppletion in adjectival gradation, is rare enough that Bobaljik is able to present an essentially comprehensive description of the facts; at the same time, it is common enough to offer sufficient variation to explore the question of universals over a significant dataset of more than three hundred languages.

Author: Jeff Good
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191538329
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

View

Book Description
This book looks at the relationship between linguistic universals and language change. Reflecting the resurgence of work in both fields over the last two decades, it addresses two related issues of central importance in linguistics: the balance between synchronic and diachronic factors in accounting for universals of linguistic structure, and the means of distinguishing genuine aspects of a universal human cognitive capacity for language from regularities that may be traced to extraneous origins. The volume brings together specially commissioned work by leading scholars, including prominent representatives of generative and functional linguistics. It examines rival explanations for linguistic universals and assesses the effectiveness of competing models of language change. The authors investigate patterns and processes of grammatical and lexical change across a wide range of languages; they consider the degree to which common characteristics condition processes of change in related languages; and examine how far differences in linguistic outcomes may be explained by cultural or external factors. This book will interest the wide range of scholars in linguistics and related fields concerned with language change, historical linguistics, linguistic typology and universals, and the nature of the human language faculty