You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Language Contact and the Development of Modern Hebrew is a first rigorous attempt by scholars of Hebrew to evaluate the syntactic impact of the various languages with which Modern Hebrew was in contact during its formative years. Twenty-four different innovative syntactic constructions of Modern Hebrew are analysed, and shown to originate in previous stages of Hebrew, which, since the third century CE, solely functioned as a scholarly and liturgical language. The syntactic changes in the constructions are traced to the native languages of the first Modern Hebrew learners, and later to further reanalysis by the first generation of native speakers. The contents of this volume was also publishe...
This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more...
The emergence of Modern Hebrew as a spoken language constitutes a unique event in modern history: a language which for generations only existed in the written mode underwent a process popularly called “revival”, acquiring native speakers and becoming a language spoken for everyday use. Despite the attention it has drawn, this particular case of language-shift, which differs from the better-documented cases of creoles and mixed languages, has not been discussed within the framework of the literature on contact-induced change. The linguistic properties of the process have not been systematically studied, and the status of the emergent language as a (dis)continuous stage of its historical sources has not been evaluated in the context of other known cases of language shift. The present collection presents detailed case studies of the syntactic evolution of Modern Hebrew, alongside general theoretical discussion, with the aim of bringing the case of Hebrew to the attention of language-contact scholars, while bringing the insights of the literature on language contact to help shed light on the case of Hebrew.
Drawing on the expertise of over 20 leading scholars and their empirically rich data, this book presents current thoughts on, and practical answers to, the question: What are the diagnostic signs, techniques and procedures that can be used to analyse natural language syntax?
This book contributes to the ongoing empirical, conceptual, and meta-theoretical debates regarding the merits and drawbacks of the cartographic program in linguistic theory. Although cartography has its roots in the study of the left periphery, its empirical scope has expanded significantly over the years and now covers a wide range of domains such as argument structure, modification, and constituent order. The chapters in this volume offer a critical examination of the cartographic assumption that there is a rich array of functional projections whose hierarchical order is fixed and determined by Universal Grammar. They discuss the nature of these cartographic hierarchies and their relation to the central theoretical goal of explanatory adequacy: are functional hierarchies an irreducible property of Universal Grammar (hence constituting part of the "residue" beyond the scope of principled explanation), or are they emergent, deriving from independent principles that do not require a further enrichment of Universal Grammar?
This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, with semantic and grammatical properties determined not just by templates, but also by roots.
This book deals with the category of case and where to place it in grammar. The crux of the debate lies in how the morphological expression of grammatical function should relate to formal syntax. In the generative tradition, this issue was addressed by the influential proposal that abstract syntactic Case should be dissociated from the morphological expression of case. The chapters in this book deal with a number of key issues in the ongoing debates that have emerged from this proposal. The first part discusses the modes that we need for structural case assignment, and how Case would relate to a theory of parameters. In the second part, contributors explore the division of labour between str...
This book investigates the nature and properties of roots, the core elements of word meaning. Chapters adopt different theoretical approaches to examine the interaction of roots with syntactic structure, and the role of their semantic and morpho-phonological properties in that interaction.
This book examines the distribution and interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Through a detailed analysis of simplex and complex anaphors in Dutch and English, as well as other Romance and Germanic languages, the authors show that the relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent can be captured in terms of general Minimalist principles.
This book provides a detailed cross-linguistic study of pseudo-noun incorporation, a phenomenon whereby an argument forms a 'closer than usual' relation with the verb. Imke Driemel draws on data from Tamil, Mongolian, Korean, Turkish, and German, and applies diagnostic tests across eleven noun types in each of the languages under consideration. What emerges is a coherent effect of pseudo-incorporated arguments that maps loss of case marking to obligatory narrow scope, lack of binding and control relations, and a potentially restricted movement pattern. The book provides a unifying theory that is able to capture all properties with a single assumption: pseudo-incorporation effects result from...