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The annual Going Romance conference has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are tested. The twenty-third Going Romance conference was a very special one: for the first time it was not hosted by one of the Dutch universities, but was co-organized by the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and held in France at the Maison du Séminaire in Nice from 35 December 2009. The present volume contains a broad range of peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages as well as selected papers from the special workshop dealing with linguistic change in relation to linguistic theory.
This book aims to disseminate at an international level a set of innovative studies whose descriptive and applied point of reference is the Catalan language. The volume constitutes a significant contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics and also to a broad range of grammatical and cognitive issues which have been approached from the pragmatic perspective.
This volume brings together insights from leading scholars in the field of grammatical aspect to examine the multifaceted nature of this pivotal linguistic resource used to express temporal meaning. The contributors explore the many ways in which linguistic research can move beyond canonical semantic analyses of aspect, which still focus to a great extent on objective temporal features of what can be called 'situation models', i.e. integrated cognitive representations of designated states of affairs. The chapters in this volume widen this outlook by concentrating on less typical contexts in which aspectual constructions are used, e.g. for affective purposes, to mark the epistemic status of situations, or to shape narrative structures. This focus on non-prototypicality is also reflected in the languages investigated, many of which are understudied with respect to their aspectual constructions, including several African languages and the sign language Kata Kolok. The volume adopts a multidisciplinary methodological approach, and introduces possible directions for future research based on experimental studies, fieldwork research, and translation mining.
Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.
Have you ever wondered how the principles behind Shannon's groundbreaking Information Theory can be interwoven with the intricate fabric of linguistic communication? This book takes you on a fascinating journey, offering insights into how humans process and comprehend language. By applying Information Theory to the realm of natural language semantics, it unravels the connection between regularities in linguistic messages and the cognitive intricacies of language processing. Highlighting the intersections of information theory with linguistics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer science, this book serves as an inspiration for anyone seeking to understand the predictive capabilitie...
This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal.
The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great heuristic utility concerns the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby ...
This volume addresses a number of issues in current morphological theory from the point of view of diminutive formation, such as the role of phonology in diminutives and hypocoristics and consequently its place in the overall architecture of grammar, i.e. phonology-first versus syntax/morphology-first theoretical analyses, diminutives in the L1 acquisition of typologically diverse languages, and the borrowing of non-diminutive morphology for the expression of diminutive meanings, among others. Among the peculiarities of diminutive morphology discussed are the relation between diminutives and mass nouns, the avoidance of diminutives in plural contexts in some languages, and the relatively frequent semantic bleaching and reanalysis of diminutive forms cross-linguistically. Special attention is paid to the debate on the head versus modifier status of diminutive affixes (corresponding to high versus low diminutives in alternative analyses), with data from spoken and sign languages. Overall, the volume addresses a number of topics that will be of interest to scholars of almost all linguistic subfields and per
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the JSAI-isAI 2014 Workshops LENLS, JURISIN, and GABA which took place on November 2014, in Japan. The 26 contributions in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissionsfrom the 3 workshops (LENLS11, JURISIN2014, and GABA2014). LENLS (Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics) is an annual international workshop on formal semantics and pragmatics and it focused on the formal and theoretical aspects of natural language. JURISIN (Juris-informatics) 2014 was the 8th event in the series, the purpose of this workshop was to discuss fundamental and practical issues for juris-informatics, br...