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A journey through linguistic time and space, from Aristotle through the twentieth century's “era of syntax,” in search of a dangerous verb and its significance. Beginning with the early works of Aristotle, the interpretation of the verb to be runs through Western linguistic thought like Ariadne's thread. As it unravels, it becomes intertwined with philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and even with mathematics—so much so that Bertrand Russell showed no hesitation in proclaiming that the verb to be was a disgrace to the human race. With the conviction that this verb penetrates modern linguistic thinking, creating scandal in its wake and, like a Trojan horse of linguistics, introducing disruptive elements that lead us to rethink radically the most basic structure of human language—the sentence—Andrea Moro reconstructs this history. From classical Greece to the dueling masters of medieval logic through the revolutionary geniuses from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment, and finally to the twentieth century—when linguistics became a driving force and model for neuroscience—the plot unfolds like a detective story, culminating in the discovery of a formula that solves the problem even as it raises new questions—about language, evolution, and the nature and structure of the human mind. While Moro never resorts to easy shortcuts, A Brief History of the Verb To Be isn't burdened with inaccessible formulas and always refers to the broader picture of mind and language. In this way it serves as an engaging introduction to a new field of cutting-edge research.
A journey through linguistic time and space, from Aristotle through the twentieth century's “era of syntax,” in search of a dangerous verb and its significance. Beginning with the early works of Aristotle, the interpretation of the verb to be runs through Western linguistic thought like Ariadne's thread. As it unravels, it becomes intertwined with philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and even with mathematics—so much so that Bertrand Russell showed no hesitation in proclaiming that the verb to be was a disgrace to the human race. With the conviction that this verb penetrates modern linguistic thinking, creating scandal in its wake and, like a Trojan horse of linguistics, introducing disruptive elements that lead us to rethink radically the most basic structure of human language—the sentence—Andrea Moro reconstructs this history. From classical Greece to the dueling masters of medieval logic through the revolutionary geniuses from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment, and finally to the twentieth century—when linguistics became a driving force and model for neuroscience—the plot unfolds like a detective story, culminating in the discovery of a formula that solves the problem even as it raises new questions—about language, evolution, and the nature and structure of the human mind. While Moro never resorts to easy shortcuts, A Brief History of the Verb To Be isn't burdened with inaccessible formulas and always refers to the broader picture of mind and language. In this way it serves as an engaging introduction to a new field of cutting-edge research.
An accessible, up-to-date account of the major changes in English syntax since its beginnings up to the present day.
Traces the evolution of the mind, from apes, Neanderthals, and human ancestors to a burst of creativity that began about fifty thousand years ago, suggesting that the mind will continue to evolve, with enhanced reasoning abilities, ethics, and other changes.
Terence and the Verb 'To Be' in Latin is the first in-depth study of the verb 'to be' in Latin (esse) and some of its hidden properties. Like the English 'be' (e.g. it's), the Latin forms of esse could undergo phonetic reduction or contraction. This phenomenon is largely unknown since classical texts have undergone a long process of transmission over the centuries, which has altered or deleted its traces. Although they are often neglected by scholars and puzzling to students, the use of contracted forms is shown to be widespread and significant. These forms expose the clitic nature of esse, which also explains other properties of the verb, including its participation in a prosodic simplification with a host ending in -s (sigmatic ecthlipsis), a phenomenon which is also discussed in the volume. After an introduction on methodology, the volume discusses the linguistic significance of such phenomena, focusing in particular on analysis of their behaviour in the plays of the ancient Roman playwright, Terence. Combining traditional scholarship with the use of digital resources, the volume explores the orthographic, phonological, semantic, and syntactic aspects of the verb esse, revealing that cliticization is a key feature of the verb 'to be' in Latin, and that contractions deserve a place within its paradigm.
When acclaimed historian Sarah Knott became pregnant, she started looking for a history of motherhood - only to find that no such book exists. For centuries, historians have concerned themselves with wars and revolutions, not the everyday details of carrying and caring for a baby. These details matter- they shape our feelings and give structure to our hours. But they leave little historical trace. Much to do with becoming a mother, past or present, is lost or forgotten.Using the arc of her own experience, from miscarriage to the birth and early babyhood of her two children, Sarah Knott explores the changing traditions, experiences and cultural implications of motherhood. Drawing on diaries and letters, paintings and songs, Mother vividly brings to life the lost stories of both ordinary and extraordinary women - from the labour pains of a South Carolina field slave to the triumphant smile of a royal mistress pregnant with a king's first son - to create a moving depiction of a universal and endlessly various human experience.
This book explores the origin and evolution of important grammatical categories of the Indo-European verb, including the markers of person, tense, number, aspect, and mood. Its central thesis is that many of these markers can be traced to original deictic particles which were incorporated into verbal structures in order to indicate the 'hic and nunc' and various degrees of remoteness from the 'hic and nunc'. The alterations to which these deictic elements were subject are viewed here in the context of an Indo-European language very different from Brugmannian Indo-European, many features of which, it is argued, appeared only in the period of dialectal development. This book challenges numerous traditional proposals about the Indo-European verb; all reconstructions contained in it are firmly based on extant data and are consonant with established principles of linguistic change.
The book traces the evolution of the English verb-particle construction (‘phrasal verb’) from Indo-European and Germanic up to the present. A contrastive survey of the basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of verb-particle constructions in the present-day Germanic languages shows that the English construction is structurally unremarkable and its analysis as a periphrastic word-formation is proposed. From a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective the Old English prefix verbs are identified as preverbs and the shift towards postposition of the particles is connected to the development of more general patterns of word order. The interplay of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic factors in the loss of the native prefixes in the history of English is investigated. In this context the question is discussed to what extent the older prefixes were replaced by particles and borrowed prefixes, how the characteristic etymological and semantic properties of the Modern English phrasal verbs can be explained and what role they play in the lexicon. The author argues that their common perception as particularly ‘English’, ‘colloquial’ and ‘informal’ has its origin in the eighteenth-century normative tradition.
This work examines both historical and comparative evidence in documenting the sweep of diachronic change in the context of serial verb constructions. Using a wide range of data from languages of West Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, it demonstrates how shifts in meaning and usage result in syntactic, morphological and lexical change. The process by which verbs lose lexical semantic content and develop case-marking functions is described; it is argued that the change is directional, from verb to preposition (or postposition) to affix, along a grammaticalization continuum. This same grammaticalization process is shown to result in the development of complementizers, adverbial subordinators, conjunctions, adverbs and auxiliaries from verbs. Strong parallels across languages are found in the meanings of the verbs that become “defective” and in the functions they come to mark. The changes are documented in detail, with examples from a number of languages illustrating the effect of the changes on typology and word order, implications for the encoding of definiteness and aspect, and the relevance of notions such as discourse topic, foreground and transitivity. With respect to theoretical assumptions and terminology, the author has taken a relatively nonpartisan approach, and the discussion is accessible to students of language as well as of interest to theoreticians.