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This Festschrift covers a wide range of fields within linguistics, with special focus on French lexicon, morphology and syntax and more generally on semantics, language typology and contrastive linguistics. The articles have been written by friends and colleagues of Michael Herslund, Professor at Copenhagen Business School, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. They all contribute to the international dialogue he long has been part of, and together, they considerably further our knowledge of language as a system and a means of communication.
This volume is devoted to the central cases relating to the basic oppositions between subject-object and agent-patient, viz. nominative and accusative, as well as their counterparts such as ergative and absolutive. It aims at contributing to the typological investigation of these cases by providing descriptive studies of ten different languages, not only Romance and Germanic languages, but also Polish and Basque, as well as Cora, Warrwa and Ewe. These studies show that the formal devices used to mark the two nuclear cases may be quite diverse (including non-overt and 'configurational' coding), but that all the languages studied crucially display a subject-object asymmetry, even languages such as Basque and Ewe for which this had been questioned. One of the most striking subthemes to emerge from this collection is the complexity of the object-zone, both with regard to formal and functional diversity. Various studies in the volume also contribute reflections, couched mainly in broadly cognitive-functional terms, about the semantic function of the subject-object contrast and why it is so central across languages.
This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge arou...
This collection of papers offers an alternative to mainstream functional linguistics on two points. Especially in American linguistics, function and structure are often viewed almost as polar opposites; in addition, structure is often understood as being only a matter of linguistic form or expression as opposed to content. The book tries to illustrate why function and structure must be understood as mutually dependent in relation to language and why the most interesting aspect of language structure is the way it structures the content side of language. In this, the book represents a reaffirmation of traditional concerns in structural linguistics, especially with respect to the struc...
This book is an account of the variation between two possessive constructions in Danish and Swedish: the s-genitive (husets tak ‘the house’s roof’), and the prepositional construction (taket på huset ‘the roof of the house’). Present-day corpus data, as well as historical data (texts from 1250–1550) are explored. Through statistical and qualitative analysis, various factors that influence the choice between the two constructions are identified. The book offers new data on the genitive variation in Danish and Swedish. The approach is also novel as two closely related Scandinavian languages are compared from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.
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.
A survey of current issues in Denmark.