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Salience of Information in Japanese
Provides analyses of Japanese discourse and applications of Role and Reference Grammar theory to the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface.
Salience of Information in Japanese
"Featuring a wide range of authentic language examples, this book uses the framework of Role and Reference Grammar to explore how 'salience' is conveyed in Japanese. It is essential reading for researchers and students of syntax and its interfaces with pragmatics and discourse, as well as linguists of Asian languages"--
The Acquisition of Numeral Classifiers
The book is about the numeral classifier system and the acquisition of Japanese classifiers by Japanese children. It consists of two parts. First, it provides a general typological characterization of numeral classifier phrases and discusses problems in determining what constitutes the nature of classifiers. It also discusses the semantic properties of numeral classifiers based on an analysis of four languages from four different language families. Second, it examines the acquisitions of Japanese numeral classifiers by Japanese preschool children, ages 3 to 6, with a primary emphasis on the development of comprehension. The importance of the study is that it reveals that young children have a much greater sensitivity to the conceptual underpinnings of the numeral classifier system than was previously considered to be the case. The research results also provide a converging source of evidence that young children often come to initially grasp the structure of the world in ways that are better understood in cognitive than perceptual terms. The implications will contribute to not only the area of language acquisition but also categorization and conceptual development.
Formal Properties of Measurement Constructions
This book investigates the semantics and syntax-semantics interface of measurement constructions, such as (non-)split quantifiers and comparatives. The cross-linguistic investigation reveals that seemingly diverse constructions can be categorized into two classes depending on whether they measure nominal or verbal predicates, and shows that the classification accounts for why certain constructions have certain characteristics concerning distributivity and single-event predicates. Throughout the book, particular emphasis is placed on issues of compositionality.
Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance
This book explores the discourse pragmatics of reportive evidentiality in Macedonian, Japanese and English through an empirical study of evidential strategies in narrative retelling. The patterns of evidential use (and non-use) found in these languages are attributed to contextual, cultural and grammatical factors that motivate the adoption of an 'epistemological stance' a concept that owes much to recent trends in Cognitive Linguistics. The patterns of evidential strategies found in the three languages provide a fine illustration of the balancing act between speakers' expressions of their own subjectivity, their motivations to tell a coherent and exciting story, and their motivations to be faithful retellers of someone elses' story. These pressures are further complicated by the grammatical and pragmatic conventions that are particular to each language. Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance: narrative retelling will appeal to those interested in evidentiality, grammar and pragmatics, cross-linguistics discourse analysis, linguistic subjectivity and narrative.
Friendly Connections
Friendly Connections: Philadelphia Quakers and Japan since the Late Nineteenth Century discloses the history of relations among members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, of Philadelphia and Japanese intellectuals, educators, and activists. In this book, Japanese and North American experts demonstrate that education, women’s rights, interracial equality, politics, disaster relief, reform, and peace efforts have all benefited. Seventeen chapters detail this underappreciated history. Throughout the modern era, these ties, often between women, have transformed efforts for peace, equality, and women’s rights in Japan and the United States. With a focus on “women’s work for women,” and revelations about supportive British Quakers, this book uncovers networks that sustained Japan-America ties for a century and a half.
The Alor-Pantar languages
The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Pa\-puan (Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern Indonesia. Together with the Papuan languages of Timor, they make up the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. The languages average 5,000 speakers and are under pressure from the local Malay variety as well as the national language, Indonesian. This volume studies the internal and external linguistic history of this interesting group, and showcases some of its unique typological features, such as the preference to index the transitive patient-like argument on the verb but not the agent-...
Numeral Classifier Systems
Numeral Classifier Systems considers the functional significance of the Japanese numeral system, its conclusions based on a corpus of 500 uses of classifier constructions drawn from oral and written Japanese texts. Interestingly, although the Japanese system appears to conform at least superficially to universalistic predictions about its semantic structure, this study reports that in actual usage, the semantic role of classifiers is slight only very rarely do they carry any lexical information unavailable from the context or the noun with which the classifier occurs. It does appear, however, that the system has an important role to play in providing pronoun-like anaphoric elements and in marking pragmatic distinctions such as the individuatedness of referents and the newness of numerical information. For these reasons, the classifier system is deeply involved in a number of subsystems of Japanese grammar, and the demise of the system (sometimes rumored to be impending) would have substantial implications for the structure of the language as a whole.
New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar
New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar presents a broad picture of current developments in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a version of parallel structure grammar with an emphasis on typological adequacy. Since its inception, RRG has been applied to a wide range of languages, in particular to case marking, complex clauses (e.g. control, raising, and serial verb constructions), unaccusativity/unergativity, and the interplay between syntax and information structure. The present book is a continued investigation of the intermodular correspondence in a variety of languages and comprises 13 papers, which not only contribute to the further development of the theory, but also investigate ...
Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Language is a system of communication in which grammatical structures function to express meaning in context. While all languages can achieve the same basic communicative ends, they each use different means to achieve them, particularly in the divergent ways that syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact across languages. This book looks in detail at how structure, meaning, and communicative function interact in human languages. Working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), Van Valin proposes a set of rules, called the 'linking algorithm', which relates syntactic and semantic representations to each other, with discourse-pragmatics playing a role in the linking. Using this model, he discusses the full range of grammatical phenomena, including the structures of simple and complex sentences, verb and argument structure, voice, reflexivization and extraction restrictions. Clearly written and comprehensive, this book will be welcomed by all those working on the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
