Language Arts & Disciplines : Grammar

A complement clause is used instead of a noun phrase; for example one can say either I heard [the result] or I heard [that England beat France]. Languages lacking complement clauses employ complementation strategies to achieve similar semantic results. Detailed studies of particular languages, including Akkadian, Israeli, Jarawara, and Pennsylvania German, are framed by R.M. W. Dixon's introduction, which sets out the range of issues, and his conclusion, which draws together the. evidence and the arguments. - ;A complement clause is used instead of a noun phrase; for example one can say either I heard [the result] or I heard [that England beat France]. Languages differ in the grammatical properties of complement clauses, and the types of verbs which take them. Some languages lack a complement clause construction but instead employ other construction types to achieve similar ends; these are called complementation strategies. The book explores the variety of types of complementation found. across the languages of the world, their grammatical properties and meanings. Detailed studies of particular languages, including Akkadian, Israeli, Jarawara, and Pennsylvania German, are framed by R. M. W. Dixon's introduction, which sets out the range of issues, and his conclusion, which draws. together the evidence and the arguments. This book will interest scholars of typology, language universals, syntax, information structure, and language contact in departments of linguistics and anthropology, as well as advanced and graduate students taking courses in these subjects. - more...

Price: $45.00

This book offers an in-depth analysis of English conditional sentences. Dancygier classifies conditional constructions according to time-reference and modality. Focused on English, the study also provides a framework that can be extended to a range of grammatical phenomena in many other languages. more...

Price: $26.00

Language is in large part about the description of events occurring in the world around us. Relationships of different sorts may be perceived between those events. And some of these relationships can be expressed by specific verb forms--or by syntactic constructions involving specific verb forms. The present study examines this facet of the Egyptian and Coptic verbal systems in isolation, singling out three types of relationships between events and the linguistic means by which they are expressed. The first essay studies the verb form called "conjunctive," arguing that the function of the conjunctive is to "con-join" a chain of two or more events into a single--though compound--notion. The second essay shows how a certain syntactic construction can be used to refer to events that are contiguous, that is, events that succeed one another rapidly in time. The third essay examines verb forms that refer to events whose occurrence is contingent on the occurrence of other events implied or explicitly mentioned in the context. The respective grammatical phenomena are labeled conjunction, contiguity, and contingency. This study constitutes a significant advancement in our understanding of the ancient language of Egypt, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Egyptology, Coptology, and the Ancient Near East, as well as linguists, Byzantinists and Classicists.  more...

Price: $150.00

This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work. The research here is concerned with both synchrony and diachrony, with the relationship between Construction Grammar and other linguistic theories, and with a number of issues in the study of grammar, such as raising and control phenomena, transitivity, relative clause structure, the syntax of gerunds, attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, modality, and grammaticalization. Some of the articles are written within a constructional framework, while others highlight potential problems with constructional approaches to English grammar; some of the articles are based on data collected from corpora, some on introspection; some of the articles suggest potential developments for diachronic construction grammar, while others seek to compare Construction Grammar with other cognitive linguistic theories, most particularly Word Grammar. The research reported in this volume presents a series of ways of looking at the relationship between constructions and patterns in English grammar, either now or in the past. The book addresses scholars and advanced students who are interested in English grammar, constructional approaches to language, and the relationship between functional and formal issues in linguistic description and theory. more...

Price: $158.00

This book provides a detailed study and a novel Minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences. On the assumption that Merge is defined in the simplest way possible, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are a(nti)symmetrical. One of the copular sentence types is analyzed as a poster child for symmetrical structures, while the other type is treated as asymmetrical. The originality of this study lies in treating the copula in the two types of copular sentences neither as completely identical nor as two distinct lexical items; instead, the two types of copula are derived through the process of semantic bleaching. Furthermore, it is argued that the two types of the copula need to combine with post-copular phrases of different categories. It is concluded that Russian draws a distinction between saturated DPs and unsaturated NPs, in spite of its renowned lack of overt articles. more...

Price: $69.95