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Indefinites Between Latin and Romance
This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners between Latin and the Romance languages. It uses data from Classical and Late Latin texts and from electronic corpora of early Romance to propose a new account of the similarities in the grammar of indefinites across Romance.
Language-Specific Factors in First Language Acquisition
A growing number of studies have begun to examine the influence of language-specific factors on language acquisition. During language acquisition, German children from six years on use structures that are similar to those of adults in their language group and also encode all semantic components from an early age. In striking contrast, French children up to ten years have difficulties producing some of the complex structures that are necessary for the simultaneous expression of several semantic components. Nonetheless, in addition to these striking cross-linguistic differences, the results of this study also clearly show similar developmental progressions in other respects, suggesting the impact of general developmental determinants.
Adverbs and Adverbials
Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.
Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity in Foreign Language Studies
In the last part of the twentieth century, the human sciences witnessed three paradigmatic turns' that made it possible to comprehend each individual discipline in the light of a unitary object of study, the text: the pragmatic turn within linguistics, the linguistic turn within historical and cultural studies, and the cultural turn within literary studies. Combined with the more comprehensive nature of the texts studied (the mass media, postcolonial studies, etc.), reflection on the theoretical approach is more important today than ever as a means of interdisciplinary practice across both disciplines and languages. Most of the contributions in this book were originally presented at a conference on Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity in Foreign Language Studies. The conference took place at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, 19-20 September 2003 and was organised by The Language and Culture Network. Founded in 2002, the network promotes interdisciplinary collaboration between the traditional branches of Foreign Language Studies.
How Does it Feel?
Narratology is concerned with the study of narratives; but surprisingly it does not usually distinguish between original and translated texts. This lack of distinction is regrettable. In recent years the visibility of translations and translators has become a widely discussed topic in Translation Studies; yet the issue of translating a novel's point of view has remained relatively unexplored. It seems crucial to ask how far a translator's choices affect the novel's point of view, and whether characters or narrators come across similarly in originals and translations. This book addresses exactly these questions. It proposes a method by which it becomes possible to investigate how the point of...
Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference
Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference contains 11 studies on the grammar of noun phrases. Part One explores NP-structure and the impact of information structure, countability and number marking on interpretation, using data from Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Karitiana, Turkish, English, Catalan and Danish. Part Two examines language specific definiteness marking strategies in spoken and signed languages—differentiated definiteness marking in Germanic, double definiteness in Greek, adnominal demonstratives in Japanese, ‘weak’ definiteness in Martiniké and the special referring options made avilable by signing. Part Three examines the second-l...
French anticausatives
How do new ways of encoding valence alternations emerge, how and why do they spread, and what are the consequences of their emergence and spread for already existing patterns? This book discusses these questions on the basis of a concrete example of valence alternation, the French causative-anticausative alternation. The main focus of the proposed analysis is the anticausative member of the alternation and the relation between the two formal types of anticausative verbs in French, the reflexive and the unmarked anticausative (La branche s'est cassée vs. La branche a cassé 'The branch broke'). The emergence and spread of the reflexive anticausative, the consequences of these processes for the unmarked anticausative and the semantic relation between reflexive and unmarked anticausatives are analyzed on the basis of several corpus studies.
Connecting Grammaticalisation
Grammar is seen as a complex sign system, and, as a consequence, grammatical change always comprises semantic change. The book introduces the concept of connecting grammaticalisation to describe the formation, restructuring and dismantling of such complex paradigms. It offers a broad general discussion of theoretical issues and three case studies
The Grammar of Genres and Styles
The book provides new findings about the grammar of genres and styles. It combines new methods with different kinds of empirical material, from social reports to live TV sports commentaries or 16th century newspapers, in English, French, Latin and Spanish. The study of non-discrete units suggests new ways of seeing the linguistic variation between genres and styles and the ways in which belonging to a genre predetermines linguistic choices.
