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Author: Maria Polinsky Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190256583 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
Building upon theoretical innovations and extensive empirical findings, this book explains variation in the syntactic behavior of ergative arguments across languages. It offers a new analysis of ergativity by recognizing two distinct types, PP-ergative- and DP-ergative-languages. Each type is characterized by a set of correlated features which result in structural consistency.
Author: Maria Polinsky Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190256583 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
Building upon theoretical innovations and extensive empirical findings, this book explains variation in the syntactic behavior of ergative arguments across languages. It offers a new analysis of ergativity by recognizing two distinct types, PP-ergative- and DP-ergative-languages. Each type is characterized by a set of correlated features which result in structural consistency.
Author: Maria Polinsky Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190256605 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.
Author: Jessica Coon Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198739370 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 1297
Book Description
This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages. Chapters in this volume look at approaches to ergativity within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morphosyntactic building blocks of an ergative construction; related constructions such as the anti-passive; related properties such as split ergativity and word order; and extensions and permutations of ergativity, including nominalizations and voice systems. The volume also includes results from experimental investigations of ergativity, a relatively new area of research. A wide variety of languages are represented, both in the theoretical chapters and in the 16 case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.
Author: Jessica Coon Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand ISBN: 0199858748 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
In languages with aspect-based split ergativity, one portion of the grammar follows an ergative pattern, while another shows a "split." In this book, Jessica Coon argues that aspectual split ergativity does not mark a split in how case is assigned, but rather, a split in sentence structure. Specifically, the contexts in which we find the appearance of a nonergative pattern in an otherwise ergative language involve added structure — a disassociation between the syntactic predicate and the stem carrying the lexical verb stem. This proposal builds on the proposal of Basque split ergativity in Laka 2006, and extends it to other languages. The book begins with an analysis of split person marking patterns in Chol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico. Here appearance of split ergativity follows naturally from the fact that the progressive and the imperfective morphemes are verbs, while the perfective morpheme is not. The fact that the nonperfective morphemes are verbs, combined with independent properties of Chol grammar, results in the appearance of a split. In aspectual splits, ergativity is always retained in the perfective aspect. This book further surveys aspectual splits in a variety of unrelated languages and offers an explanation for this universal directionality of split ergativity. Following Laka's (2006) proposal for Basque, Coon proposes that the cross-linguistic tendency for imperfective aspects to pattern with locative constructions is responsible for the biclausality which causes the appearance of a nonergative pattern. Building on Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria's (2000) prepositional account of spatiotemporal relations, Coon proposes that the perfective is never periphrastic - and thus never involves a split - because there is no preposition in natural language that correctly captures the relation of the assertion time to the event time denoted by the perfective aspect.
Author: Maria Polinsky Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190690712 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 600
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus is an introduction to and overview of the linguistically diverse languages of southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Though the languages of the Caucasus have often been mischaracterized or exoticized, many of them have cross-linguistically rare features found in few or no other languages. This handbook presents facts and descriptions of the languages written by experts. The first half of the book is an introduction to the languages, with the linguistic profiles enriched by demographic research about their speakers. It features overviews of the main language families as well as detailed grammatical descriptions of several individual languages. The second half of the book delves more deeply into theoretical analyses of features, such as agreement, ellipsis, and discourse properties, which are found in some languages of the Caucasus. Promising areas for future research are highlighted throughout the handbook, which will be of interest to linguists of all subfields.
Author: Edith L. Bavin Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027271232 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
Ergativity is one of the main challenges both for linguistic and acquisition theories. This book is unique, taking a cross-linguistic approach to the acquisition of ergativity in a large variety of typologically distinct languages. The chapters cover languages from different families and from different geographic areas with different expressions of ergativity. Each chapter includes a description of ergativity in the language(s), the nature of the input, the social context of acquisition and developmental patterns. Comparisons of the acquisition process across closely related languages are made, change in progress of the ergative systems is discussed and, for one language, acquisition by bilingual and monolingual children is compared. The volume will be of particular interest to language acquisition researchers, linguists, psycholinguists and cognitive scientists.
Author: Michael Cysouw Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199254125 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
This book investigates paradigms of person - both independent pronouns as well as bound person marking. Based on empirical and theoretical grounds, the author argues that the notion 'number' has to be redefined to deal with the cross-linguistic variation of person marking. Equipped with a new definition, a typology of the paradigmatic structure of person marking is presented, incorporating data from around 400 languages. Nothing appears to be impossible for the paradigmatic structure, although some patterns are clearly more probable than others are. Starting from the more commonly occurring patterns, the diachronic dynamics of paradigmatic structure are investigated by comparing close relatives that differ slightly in the structure of their person paradigms.
Author: Elly van Gelderen Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019975604X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
In this volume, Elly van Gelderen examines the linguistic cycle and describes how it offers a unique perspective on the language faculty. Each chapter provides data on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages.
Author: Norma Schifano Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198804644 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
"This book provides a detailed account of verb movement across more than twenty standard and non-standard Romance varieties. Norma Schifano examines the position of the verb with respect to a wide selection of hierarchically-ordered adverbs, as laid out in Cinque's (1999) seminal work. She uses extensive empirical data to demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, it is possible to identify at least four distinct macro-typologies in the Romance languages: these macro-typologies stem from a compensatory mechanism between syntax and morphology in licensing the Tense, Aspect, and Mood interpretation of the verb. The volume adopts a hybrid cartographic/minimalist approach, in which cartography provides the empirical tools of investigation, and minimalist theory provides the technical motivations for the movement phenomena that are observed. It provides a valuable tool for the examination of fundamental morphosyntactic properties from a cross-Romance perspective, and constitutes a useful point of departure for further investigations into the nature and triggers of verb movement cross-linguistically."--Dust jacket flap.
Author: Maria Polinsky
Author: Maria Polinsky
Author: Maria Polinsky
Author: Jessica Coon
Author: Jessica Coon
Author: Maria Polinsky
Author: Edith L. Bavin
Author: Michael Cysouw
Author: Elly van Gelderen
Author: John McWhorter
Author: Norma Schifano