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In functional grammar, the lexicon plays a central role. Lexical items form the basic building blocks around which the structure of a clause is built. This book examines 5 aspects of the role of the lexicon in functional grammar.
The complex diachronic and synchronic status of the concepts "be" and "have" can be understood only with consideration of their full range of constructions and functions. Data from modern Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian) provides a window into zero copulas, non-verbal "have" expressions, and verbal constructions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, "be" and "have" are analyzed in terms of a blended prototype model, wherein existence/copula for "be" and possession/relationship for "have" are inseparably combined. These concepts are related to each other in their functions and meanings and serve as organizing principles in a conceptual network of semantic neighbors, including "give, take, get, become, make," and verbs of position and motion. Renewal and replacement of "be" and "have" occur through processes of polysemization and suppletization involving lexical items in this network. Topics include polysemy, suppletion, tense/mood auxiliaries, modality, causatives, evidentiality, function words, contact phenomena, syntactic calques, and idiomatic constructions.
The contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands, or "Sprachinseln," throughout the world. The individual topics of study in this volume focus on various aspects of these German-language islands such as (but not limited to) phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of these languages under investigation. Collectively, the body of research contained in this volume explores significantly under-researched topics in the fields of language contact and language attrition and illustrates how this on-going research can be enhanced through the application of formal theoretical frameworks and structural analyses.
Postulated word-formation rules often exclude formations that can nevertheless be found in actual usage. This book presents an in-depth investigation of a highly heterogeneous word-formation pattern in English: the formation of nouns by suffixation with "-ee." Rather than relying on a single semantic or syntactic framework for analysis, the study combines diachronic, cognitive and language-contact perspectives in order to explain the diversity in the formation and establishment of "-ee" words. It also seeks to challenge previous measurements of productivity and proposes a new way to investigate the relationship between actual and possible words. By making use of the largest and most up-to-date electronic corpus the World Wide Web as a data source, this research adds substantially to the number of attested "-ee" words. It furthermore analyses this word-formation pattern in different varieties of English (British vs. American English; Australian English). Due to the multiplicity of approaches and analyses it offers, the study is suitable for courses in English word-formation, lexicology, corpus linguistics and historical linguistics."
Volume one of a two volume set outlining and comparing three approaches to the study of language labelled 'structural-functionalist': functional grammar (FG); role and reference grammar (RRG); and systemic functional grammar (SFG).
This book explores how speakers of Japanese organize their messages into coherent units as they jointly and interactively construct conversational discourse. Specifically, it investigates the syntactic, informational, and functional structures of intonation units (IUs) as basic units of discourse production and information flow in spoken communication. It addresses various research topics: clause vs. phrase centrality, relationship between IUs and clauses, functions of independent NPs, preferred argument/clause structure and transitivity, interrelationship among functional components, and the role of new and interactional information in the shaping of IU syntax. Overall, it tries to elucidat...
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.
In this monograph, the author argues that natural languages exemplify the language type by assigning prominence to just one of the three verbal categories of tense, aspect and mood.
Prepositions and cases constitute a fruitful field of research for semantics. The historical development of their meaning can shed light on the relations among the semantic roles of participants and on the organization of conceptual space. Ancient Greek allows an in-depth study of such development. The book, based on a wide, diachronically ordered corpus, aims at providing a usage-based analysis of possible patterns of semantic extension, including the mapping of abstract domains onto the concrete domain of space. An analysis of the Greek data further highlights the interplay between specific spatial relations and the internal structure of the entities involved, and shows how case semantics may account for differences on the referential level, rather than merely express clause internal relations. The first chapter contains a typologically based discussion of semantic roles, which sets the language-specific analysis in a wider framework, showing its general relevance and applicability.
The papers collected in this volume (including a comprehensive introduction) investigate semantic and discourse-related aspects of subordination and coordination, in particular the relationship between subordination/coordination at the sentence level and subordination/coordination - or hierarchical/non-hierarchical organization - at the discourse level. The contributions in part I are concerned with central theoretical questions; part II consists of corpus-based cross-linguistic studies of clause combining and discourse structure, involving at least two of the languages English, German, Dutch, French and Norwegian; part III contains papers addressing specific - predominantly semantic - topics relating to German, English or French; and the papers in part IV approach the topic of subordination, coordination and rhetorical relations from a diachronic (Old Indic and Early Germanic) perspective. The book aims to contribute to a better understanding of information packaging on the sentence and text level related, within a particular language as well as cross-linguistically.