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This volume addresses the constructional variability with transitive and causative verbs from the point of view of their respective action and motion patterns. Drawing on the theoretical advances registered in cognitive approaches to language (Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar and space semantics), the papers substantiate new interpretations and adduce empirical evidence from various languages to refine or adjust existing analyses of transitivity and causation. The different contributions all address the crucial question of how concrete and abstract notions of human behavior drive linguistic expressions. Cognitive linguists consider that linguistic competence functions in terms of comp...
In recent decades, corpus linguistics has experienced tremendous development in the Hispanic world, along two opposite but complementary approaches: increase in corpus size (corpus linguistics as Big Data) and improvement in document selection and data annotation (corpus linguistics as High Quality Data). The first approach has led to the creation of massive corpora such as EsTenTen; at the same time, it has promoted the use of the web and social networks as corpora. The second perspective gives rise to specialized corpora such as Post Scriptum or Oralia Diacrónica del español (ODE). The contributions gathered in this volume combine both methods in order to exploit their advantages and to overcome their possible limitations. On the one hand, it addresses the creation and design of small corpora focused on data quality; on the other hand, it offers case studies that make use of both specialized corpora and massive data extracted from the web. Highlighting the complementary nature of both methods is the main idea of this book.
This collective volume focuses on the latest developments in the study of grammaticalization and related processes of change such as degrammaticalization, constructionalization, lexicalization, and petrification. It addresses topical issues relating to the motivations, sources, defining features, and outcomes of these changes. New theoretical reflections are offered on the pragmatic motivation of grammaticalization paths, process-oriented differences between grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization, the question of gradualness and pace of grammaticalization, and deictics as a distinct source of grammaticalization. The articles describe various constructional and distributional changes affecting deictics, determiners, reflexives, clitics, nouns, affixes, adverbs and (auxiliary) verbs, mainly in the Germanic and Romance languages. The volume will be of great interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and related changes, and to all linguists working on the interface between morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.
The most up-to-date and comprehensive description of the Spanish language's phonetic and phonological system Though there has been considerable research in Spanish phonology, until now, no in-depth and complete descriptive reference work has existed. Fonética y fonología descriptivas de la lengua española Volumes 1 and 2 is a comprehensive reference, written in Spanish, describing the phonetics and phonology of Spanish. Edited by Juana Gil Fernandez and Joaquim Llisterri, this set provides a comprehensive overview for understanding segmental and suprasegmental topics in Spanish phonology, making clear what further research is needed. The international set of contributors in this essential...
This volume brings together work from leading specialists in Indo-European languages to explore the macro- and micro-dynamic factors that contribute to variation and change in alignment and argument realization. Alignment is taken to include both basic alignment patterns associated with major construction types, as well as various valency-decreasing constructions such as passives, anticausatives, and impersonals. The chapters explore synchronic and diachronic aspects of alignment morphosyntax based on data from Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Armenian, and Slavic. All have a strong empirical focus, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, and range from broad comparative studies to detailed investigations of specific constructions in individual languages. The book is one of very few studies to examine variation and change in alignment typology across languages in a single family. It contributes to a greater understanding of the roles played by analogy/extension, reanalysis, and areal factors in alignment change, and demonstrates the extent of variation found in the morphosyntax of argument realization in genetically-related languages.
Since antiquity, scholars have been fascinated by the phenomena of case. The explanation for this fascination is, as Hjelmslev already pointed out over fifty years ago, the fact that he who can unravel the meaning of case-relations, has the key to language structure as a whole.For over three years, a team of twenty scholars affiliated with the Linguistics Department of Leuven University in Belgium has concentrated on case phenomena in different languages, both Indo- and non-Indo-European. It is the first time that such a large scale investigation into case has been undertaken. Noteworthy is also its reliance on computer-stored corpora of authentic material.The results are published as a seri...
This book is the second part of a two-volume reader on the ‘Dative’. In the first part, which appeared in 1996, eleven papers were presented providing a syntactic and semantic description of the category ‘Dative’ in eleven languages. The aim of this second part is to discuss several aspects of the Dative in greater detail. It contains eight papers dealing with theoretical considerations on ‘dativity’ as well as with contrastive, typological and diachronic issues. A major concern is the relation between form (case, grammatical relation) and meaning (semantic roles or other kinds of meaning). Most contributions in this volume represent cognitive and functional views or a critical d...
The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.
This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries. The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?
This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally o...