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This compilation of invited contributions, gathering an international collection of cognitive and functional linguists, offers an outline of original empirical work carried out in grounding theory. Grounding is a central notion in cognitive grammar that addresses the linking of semantic content to contextual factors that constitute the subjective ground (or situation of speech). The volume illustrates a growing concern with the application of cognitive grammar to constructions establishing deixis and reference. It proposes a double focus on nominal and clausal grounding, as well as on ways of integrating analyses across these domains.
This collective volume contains a selection of research contributions, presented at the 30th Deutscher Romanistentag [German Conference on Romance languages and literatures] in 2007 in Vienna in the section “Mood and Modality in Romance”. The Romance languages studied here include Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan and French. All contributions thematically explore the status and importance of modality and mood and their reciprocal relationships with reference to theoretical approaches.
The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions. Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language. Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments. The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.
This volume assembles contributions addressing clausal complementation across the entire South Slavic territory. The main focus is on particular aspects of complementation, covering the contemporary standard languages as well as older stages and/or non-standard varieties and the impact of language contact, primarily with non-Slavic languages. Presenting in-depth studies, they thus contribute to the overarching collective aim of arriving at a comprehensive picture of the patterns of clausal complementation on which South Slavic languages profile against a wider typological background, but also diverge internally if we look closer at details in the contemporary stage and in diachronic development. The volume divides into an introduction setting the stage for the single case-studies, an article developing a general template of complementation with a detailed overview of the components relevant for South Slavic, studies addressing particular structural phenomena from different theoretical viewpoints, and articles focusing on variation in space and/or time.
In this volume Silvio Cruschina uses a comparative analysis to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with discourse-related features, and to account for the marked word orders found in Romance - particularly in the fronting phenomena. Several language-specific analyses of discourse-related phenomena have been proposed in the literature, including studies on the notions of topic and focus in Romance, but the lack of a uniform definition of these notions, together with different assumptions in relation to the triggering features, has led to the perception that the Romance languages show many distinct and heterogeneous properties with respect to dislocation and fronting constructions. This volume is intended to complement the existing literature by integrating recent work on the topic and by emphasizing original and unifying reflections that combine and coordinate diverse elements. Cruschina's investigations clarify fundamental notions such as topic, focus, and contrast, drawing on new data from Sicilian, Sardinian, and other Romance varieties.
This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.
The volumes Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory published in the series Current Issues in Linguistic Theory contain the selected papers of the Going Romance conferences, a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001 is the third such volume. It presents a selection of the papers that have been presented at the occasion of Going Romance 2001 (XV) which was held at the University of Amsterdam on December 6-8, 2001. The three-day program included a workshop on Determiners. The volume contains articles on specifics of one or more Romance languages or varieties: the architecture of the Determiner Phrase and properties of determiners, the left periphery of the sentence and clause structure, null elements and their interpretation, clitics, and other interesting phenomena in the Romance languages.
This volume explores multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change, including the diachrony of negation, the internal structure of wh-words, and changes in argument structure. It combines descriptions of novel data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will appeal to historical linguists and to anyone working on language variation and change.
This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics. It gathers new work from senior and young researchers and is organized along three main areas of study: the generic and individuals; genericity and time; and the sources of genericity and types of judgment.
The book provides a formal analysis of root and complement clauses in Old Romanian. Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu examine the combination of Balkan syntactic patterns such as generalized subjunctive complementation on the one hand, and the Romance morphology that supplies complementizers and grammatical mood forms on the other. The consequences of this mixed typology range from root clauses with non-finite verbs to split heads and repeated recycling in clausal complements. The book argues that discourse triggers at the left periphery are responsible for fluctuations in verb movement in finite clauses, while with gerunds and imperatives verb movement follows from functional constraints. I...