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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.
Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.
The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?
Prosodies, in the broad Firthian sense, covers phenomena that extend over stretches of segmental and featural units that must be examined with respect to their interaction with other features to fully appreciate their role in the phonetics and phonology of a given language. The papers deal with a wide range of subjects, from intonational prominence and prosodic phrasing to the acoustic properties of segments and features. Prosodies significantly broadens our knowledge of languages and dialect varieties that as yet have not been carefully investigated such as Cairene and Lebanese Arabic, Catalan including Central Catalan and the insular dialects of Majorcan, Minorcan and Alguer Catalan, Galic...
The cartographic project considers evidence for a functional head in one language as evidence for it in universal grammar. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self contained case studies.
Expressing negation is a universal property of all human languages. There is considerable variation, however, in the exact ways negation materializes cross-linguistically. Strict Negative Concord differs both from the Negative Polarity Item strategy and the Asymmetric Negative Concord strategy in that the sentence becomes negative only if the sentence negator is overtly expressed in it, irrespective of how many negative expressions are used. The central aim of this book is to describe Strict Negative Concord in some Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. In particular, the volume gives an insight into the forms Strict Negative Concord manifests itself in Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian (Slavic), Finnish, Hungarian, Mari (Finno-Ugric) and the closely related Selkup (Samoyedic) to a wide linguistic community. It aims to create a platform for comparison with similar phenomena in well-described European languages.
This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.
This book provides a detailed and up to date review of the framework of phases (Chomsky 2000 and subsequent work). It explores the interaction between the narrow syntactic computation and the external systems from a minimalist perspective. As has sometimes been noted, "Phase Theory" is the current way to study the cyclic nature of the system, and 'phases' are therefore the natural locality hallmark, being directly relevant for phenomena such as binding, agreement, movement, islands, reconstruction, or stress assignment. This work discusses the different approaches to phases that have been proposed in the recent literature, arguing in favor of the thesis that the points of cyclic transfer are to be related to uninterpretable morphology (the ?-features on the heads C and v*). This take on phases is adopted in order to investigate raising structures, binding, subjunctive dependents, and object shift (word order) in Romance languages, as well as the nature of islands.
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.
The present volume presents a selection of the revised and peer-reviewed proceedings articles of the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 50) which was hosted virtually by the faculty and students from the University of Texas at Austin. With contributions from rising and senior scholars from Europe and the Americas, the volume demonstrates the breadth of research in contemporary Romance linguistics with articles that apply corpus-based and laboratory methods, as well as theory, to explore the structure, use, and development of the Romance languages. The articles cover a wide range of fields including morphosyntax, semantics, language variation and change, sociophonetics, historical linguistics, language acquisition, and computational linguistics. In an introductory article, the editors document the sudden transition of LSRL 50 to a virtual format and acknowledge those who helped them to ensure the continuity of this annual scholarly meeting.