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The aim of this book is to investigate how definiteness is expressed in Polish, a language which is claimed to have no definite and in-definite articles. The central question is how the difference in definiteness is indicated between 'a woman' and 'the woman' in Polish. In English, the definite article 'the' and the indefinite article 'a' express the category of definiteness explicitly. Since definiteness is also relevant in articleless languages, there are other means to indicate that a nominal phrase is definite or indefinite. This study is delimited to four means for expressing definiteness in Polish, which are demonstratives, aspect, case alternation, and information structure. Each stra...
The papers collected in this book cover contemporary and original research on semantic and grammatical issues of nouns and noun phrases, verbs and sentences, and aspects of the combination of nouns and verbs, in a great variety of languages. A special focus is put on noun types, tense and aspect semantics, granularity of verb meaning, and subcompositionality. The investigated languages and language groups include Austronesian, East Asian, Slavic, German, English, Hungarian and Lakhota. The collection provided in this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students specialising in the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax, typology, and cognitive sciences.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation, TbiLLC 2013, held in Gudauri, Georgia, in September 2013. The conference series is centered around the interaction between logic, language and computation. The contributions represent these three fields and the symposia aim to foster interaction between them. The book consists of 16 papers that were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. Each paper has passed through a rigorous peer-review process before being accepted for publication. The volume also contains two summaries of the tutorials that took place at the symposium: the one on admissible rules and the one on the formal semantics of aspectual meaning from a cross-linguistic perspective.
The articles in this volume present original research on the encoding of meaning in a variety of constructions and languages. Many of the contributions take the framework of Role and Reference Grammar as a point of reference, either by applying it to the analysis of linguistic data or by discussing, extending, and challenging some of its assumptions. The topics of the articles range from general questions concerning the relation of meaning and its syntactic realization to the study of specific grammatical phenomena in a number of typologically diverse languages, including Yucatec Maya, Kabardian, Tagalog, Murik-Kopar, Avatime, Whitesands, Tundra Yukaghir, and various Indo-European languages....
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Advances in Natural Language Processing, PolTAL 2014, Warsaw, Poland, in September 2014. The 27 revised full papers and 20 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on morphology, named entity recognition, term extraction; lexical semantics; sentence level syntax, semantics, and machine translation; discourse, coreference resolution, automatic summarization, and question answering; text classification, information extraction and information retrieval; and speech processing, language modelling, and spell- and grammar-checking.
Gradation is usually considered to be a property of adjectives. Examples like 'The boy loves his mother very much' and 'The boy has grown a lot' reveal that gradation is not limited to adjectives but verbs are gradable too. Verb gradation has received considerably less attention in the literature than gradation of adjectives. The aim of the current volume is to explore the notion of verb gradation in more detail. The book presents a semantic as well as a syntactic analysis of verb gradation and combines three case studies with a general perspective on the phenomenon. Issues addressed in the volume cover, among others, the notion of scalarity in the verbal domain, the interaction of verb gradation with grammatical as well as lexical aspect and verb gradation as a subcompositional phenomenon. These topics are investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. The languages of investigation include, among others, German, Russian and French.
This detailed, perceptive addition to the linguistics literature analyzes the semantic components of event predicates, exploring their fine-grained elements as well as their agency in linguistic processing. The papers go beyond pure semantics to consider their varying influences of event predicates on argument structure, aspect, scalarity, and event structure. The volume shows how advances in the linguistic theory of event predicates, which have spawned Davidsonian and neo-Davidsonian notions of event arguments, in addition to ‘event structure’ frameworks and mereological models for the eventuality domain, have sidelined research on specific sets of entailments that support a typology of event predicates. Addressing this imbalance in the literature, the work also presents evidence indicating a more complex role for scalar structures than currently assumed. It will enrich the work of semanticists, psycholinguists, and syntacticians with a decompositional approach to verb phrase structure.
The volume proposes original semantic analyses on items marking grammatical aspect. The contributions deal with structurally divergent languages, setting to the fore some less studied forms coding aspect, revisiting or challenging certain conventionalized views on aspectual categories and shedding light on interactions between aspect and modality, another multifaceted semantic category. In doing so, the volume is intended to emphasize the diversity of aspectual systems and the fuzzy semantics of grammatical aspect and help the reader to make their own mind on a topic traditionally viewed as a subcategory of verbal aspect together with lexical aspect. Contributors are Denis Apothéloz, Trang Phan and Nigel Duffield, Galia Hatav, Jens Fleischhauer and Ekaterina Gabrovska, Stephen M. Dickey, Adeline Patard, Laura Baranzini, Jaroslava Obrtelova.
This volume brings together recent scholarship addressing a number of significant issues in linguistic theory and description, including verb classification, case marking, comparative constructions, noun phrase structure, clause linkage and reference-tracking in discourse. These topics are discussed with respect to a wide range of languages, including Bamunka (Bantu), Biblical Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, Pitjantjatjara (Australia), Russian and Taiwan Sign Language. The theoretical perspective employed in these analyses is that of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a theory which strives to describe language structure and grammatical phenomena in terms of the interaction of syntax, semantics and discourse-pragmatics. RRG differs from other parallel-architecture, constructionally-oriented theories in important ways, particularly with respect to the ability to formulate cross-linguistic generalizations. The ability of RRG to facilitate the formulation of cross-linguistic generalizations is exemplified well in the contributions to this volume. As such, this text makes important theoretical and descriptive contributions to contemporary linguistic discussions.
Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2018 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks presented at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13) or at the parallel Workshop on the Semantics of Noun Phrases, which were held on December 5–7, 2018, at the University of Göttingen. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as situation relativization with adverbial clauses (causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose), clause-embedding by means of a correlate, agreeing vs. transitive ‘need’ constructions, clitic doubling, affixation and aspect, evidentiality and mirativity, pragmatics coming with the particle li, uniq...