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This detailed, perceptive addition to the linguistics literature analyzes the semantic components of event predicates, exploring their fine-grained elements as well as their agency in linguistic processing. The papers go beyond pure semantics to consider their varying influences of event predicates on argument structure, aspect, scalarity, and event structure. The volume shows how advances in the linguistic theory of event predicates, which have spawned Davidsonian and neo-Davidsonian notions of event arguments, in addition to ‘event structure’ frameworks and mereological models for the eventuality domain, have sidelined research on specific sets of entailments that support a typology of event predicates. Addressing this imbalance in the literature, the work also presents evidence indicating a more complex role for scalar structures than currently assumed. It will enrich the work of semanticists, psycholinguists, and syntacticians with a decompositional approach to verb phrase structure.
This volume offers detailed accounts of current research in grammatical number in language. Following a detailed introduction, the chapters in the first three parts of the book explore the multiple research questions in the field and the complex problems surrounding the analysis of grammatical number: Part I presents the background and foundational notions, Part II the morphological, semantic, and syntactic aspects, and Part III the different means of expressing plurality in the event domain. The final part offers fifteen case studies that include in-depth discussion of grammatical number phenomena in a range of typologically diverse languages, written by - or in collaboration with - native speakers linguists or based on extensive fieldwork. The volume draws on work from a range of subdisciplines - including morphology, syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics - and will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in all areas of theoretical, descriptive, and experimental linguistics.
The Handbook of Japanese Contrastive Linguistics is a unique publication that brings together insights from three traditions—Japanese linguistics, linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics—and makes important contributions to deepening our understanding of various phenomena in Japanese as well other languages of the globe. Its primary goal is to uncover principled similarities and differences between Japanese and other languages of the globe and thereby shed new light on the universal as well as language-particular properties of Japanese. The issues addressed by the papers in this volume cover a wide spectrum of phenomena ranging from lexical to syntactic and discourse levels. The authors of the chapters, leading scholars in their respective field of research, present the state-of-the-art research from their respected field.
Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume, the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad range of data involving different kinds of motion events previously understudied, such as caused motion (e.g., kick a ball across) and even visual motion (e.g., look into a hole). Special attention is also paid to deixis, a hitherto neglected aspect of motion event descriptions. A wide range of languages is examined, including those spoken in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The results provide new insights into the patterns languages deploy to represent motion events. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in language universals and typology, as well as the relationship between language and thought.
In recent years, the focus of linguistic research has shifted from sentence to larger units such as text and discourse and accordingly from syntax to semantics and pragmatics. This has led to the development and application of corresponding discourse semantic and pragmatic theories such as, for instance, (S)DRT, Centering Theory, Accessibility Theory, QUD, Generalized Conversational Implicatures, Super Monsters and Gesture Semantics and new empirical approaches in the framework of experimental semantics and pragmatics or corpus linguistic discourse analysis. The contributions to this collected volume build on these developments and investigate the linguistic foundations of narration from various perspectives. The contributions address topics such as speech and thought representation, free indirect speech, information structure, anaphora resolution, co-speech gestures, classifier constructions as well as role shift and constructed action. The volume provides new insights in the linguistic structures underlying narration in written, spoken, and sign languages from an experimental, developmental, historical, typological, and theoretical perspective. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, sign language linguists, typologists, literary scholars, psycholinguists, and philosophers.
The study departs from the observation that in expressing ideas, some languages encode more details than others. It investigates whether languages encode events and/or objects at a coarse-grained (e.g., put, glass) as opposed to a fine-grained (e.g., lay, wine glass) level systematically. The level of detail is termed granularity, which is viewed as a cline from fine-grained (semantic specificity) to coarse-grained meaning (semantic generality). Four languages are investigated: German, English, Greek, and Turkish. The study draws on elicited data from a naming task. The verbalization of events is based on event and object descriptions in selected semantic domains. The results reveal significant granularity effects between languages and language types (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed). The study is relevant for scholars interested in linguistic typology, lexical and semantic typology, contrastive linguistics, event representation, psycholinguistics, and cognitive semantics.
Much recent influential work within Generative grammar argues that syntax plays a key role in grammar and meaning composition, whereas the role of the lexicon is minimal. This book provides evidence that supports a more balanced division of labor between syntax and the lexicon in the creation of meaning. The author argues that grammatical theory can only ignore lexical meaning at its own peril and defends a theoretical standpoint which is underrepresented in much of the current work in this area . This book explores a wide range of relevant empirical data and makes a compelling case for a theory that can make adequate predictions about possible linguistic structures by allowing the lexicon and the grammar to dynamically interact and impose restrictions on each other.
This book explores relationships and maps out intersections between discussions on causation in three scientific disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The book is organized in five thematic parts, investigating connections between philosophical and linguistic studies of causation; presenting novel methodologies for studying the representation of causation; tackling central issues in syntactic and semantic representation of causal relations; and introducing recent advances in philosophical thinking on causation. Beyond its thematic organization, readers will find several recurring topics throughout this book, such as the attempt to reduce causality to other non-causal terms; causal pluralism vs. one all-encompassing account for causation; causal relations pertaining to the mental as opposed to the physical realm, and more. This collection also lays the foundation for questioning whether it is possible to evaluate available philosophical approaches to causation against the variety of linguistic phenomena ranging across diverse lexical and grammatical items, such as bound morphemes, prepositions, connectives, and verbs. Above all, it lays the groundwork for considering whether the fruits of the psychological-cognitive study of the perception of causal relations may contribute to linguistic and philosophical studies, and whether insights from linguistics can benefit the other two disciplines.
In Revisiting Aspect and Aktionsart, Francis G.H. Pang employs a corpus approach to analyze the relationship between Greek aspect and Aktionsart. Recent works have tried to predict the meanings that emerge when a certain set of clausal factors and lexical features combine with one of the grammatical aspects. Most of these works rely heavily on Zeno Vendler's telicity distinction. Based on empirical evidence, Pang argues that telicity and perfectivity are not related in a systematic manner in Koine Greek. As a corollary, Aktionsart should be considered an interpretive category, meaning that its different values emerge, not from the interaction of only one or two linguistic parameters, but from the process of interpreting language in context.
This book contributes to the growing work on scale-based formal semantic approaches to verbal phenomena. It presents a new scale-based framework for both aspectual classes and grammatical aspect with the aim of offering an analysis of achievements in the progressive. In order to analyse these, the temporal trace function is relativised to a granularity parameter, and the semantics of the progressive operator is assumed to involve partitivity over scales of change. To this end, a novel concept of a scale of change is adopted, building on a bottom-up idea of associating scales with events and characterising verbal predicates via event-level scales. As a crucial departure from former scale-based approaches, predicates like "arrive" are associated with both two-valued and multi-valued scales of change. The new framework can then capture fine-grained aspectual class differences and predict the interpretations of the progressive for different aspectual classes.