Barayin Morphosyntax

Barayin Morphosyntax
Author: Joseph Lovestrand
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022-01-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192591835

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This volume offers a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) analysis of the morphosyntax of Barayin, a Chadic language spoken by about 6000 people in the Guera region of Chad. The core chapters of the book draw on rich empirical data to provide analyses of the basic clause, noun phrases, verb phrases, and serial verb constructions. The version of LFG adopted here includes two recent innovations: the first is minimal c-structure, which results in simpler phrase structure representations; the second is the assumption that glue semantics accounts for argument selection, rejecting the need for a level of a-structure or for Completeness and Coherence in f-structure. Argument sharing in serial verb constructions can thus be modeled in a connected s-structure. This method of modeling semantic composition in complex predicates is extended to directional and associated motion complex predicates in Choctaw and Wambaya, removing the need to appeal to a special mechanism to unite semantic forms in such constructions.

Niuean

Niuean
Author: Diane Massam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2020-04-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198793553

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This volume explores the grammar of Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand, with a focus on the issue of predication. Since Aristotle, it has been claimed that a sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. Niuean constitutes the perfect testing ground for this claim: it displays verb-subject-object word order, in which the subject interrupts the predicate, and has an ergative case system, in which subjects are not clearly distinguished from objects in their marking for grammatical case. Diane Massam uses the framework of generative grammar to carry out a detailed analysis of the internal structure of Niuean predicates and arguments, as well as the relations between them, touching on many other topics including the nature of displacement, word formation, determiners, and thematic roles. The proposal is that Niuean complex predicates are formed via successive inversion, prior to the merge of all arguments (high argument merge), and that the predicate undergoes fronting to initial position across the arguments, with the same structure found also in nominal clauses. The conclusion is that Niuean does not have a subject in the usual sense, and this is related to the fact that the language has isolating morphology, lacking all tense and agreement inflection and nominative case. Instead, the language exhibits low absolutive predication, applicative ergative agents, and predicate fronting in lieu of subject extraction. The book extends our understanding of cross-linguistic sentence structure and grammatical case, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

Ikpana Interrogatives

Ikpana Interrogatives
Author: Jason Kandybowicz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2023-03-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192845004

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This book documents the interrogative system of Ikpana, an endangered indigenous Ghana-Togo Mountain language of eastern Ghana also known as Logba. The system is notable in several respects. It exhibits features that buck certain typological trends, act as counterexamples to some claims about language universals, and exemplify fascinating patterns that are either rare or unfamiliar in interrogative systems cross-linguistically. Drawing on original fieldwork and a combination of formal/theoretical, experimental, and comparative methodologies, the book provides a theoretically-informed description and analysis of Ikpana interrogative grammar, encompassing both syntactic and phonological aspects of question formation in the language. The chapters explore a range of phenomena including polar question formation, wh- movement, wh- in-situ, interrogative intonation, and prosody, among others. The authors demonstrate that theoretically-guided language documentation does not only contribute to language description, but can also increase understanding of the human Language Faculty and expand the empirical base of language typologies: bringing formal and theoretical concerns to the fore facilitates richer descriptions of the grammar than purely descriptive approaches allow.

The Algonquian Inverse

The Algonquian Inverse
Author: Will Oxford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192699873

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This book serves as a definitive reference for the inverse morphology of the Algonquian languages, which has attracted much attention in typological and theoretical linguistics. Will Oxford describes the patterning of inverse morphology across the Algonquian family and presents a framework for understanding the structure and function of the Algonquian inverse that is empirically driven and typologically grounded. He presents data from all documented Algonquian languages and considers not only the morphology of the inverse construction but also its syntax and pragmatics, giving equal weight to diachronic, typological, functional, and formal perspectives. From the integration of these perspectives, a simple and coherent understanding of the nature of the inverse emerges. The key proposal is that the inverse is "deep" in some contexts and "shallow" in others. In interactions between two third persons, the inverse is a "deep" patient voice construction that inverts the canonical morphology, syntax, and pragmatics of a transitive clause. In interactions between a third person and a first or second person, the inverse is a "shallow" hierarchical agreement pattern implemented through a spurious use of patient voice morphology, inverting the canonical morphology of a transitive clause but having no effect on syntax or pragmatics. This split analysis, which reflects the likely diachronic development of the Algonquian inverse, is argued to have various benefits, including the resolution of a longstanding controversy over the syntactic status of the inverse.

The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar
Author: Mary Dalrymple
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 2192
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961104247

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Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.

Morphosyntax

Morphosyntax
Author: William Croft
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 725
Release: 2022-08-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1009302957

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Bringing together the results of sixty years of research in typology and universals, this textbook presents a comprehensive survey of Morphosyntax - the combined study of syntax and morphology. Languages employ extremely diverse morphosyntactic strategies for expressing functions, and Croft provides a comprehensive functional framework to account for the full range of these constructions in the world's languages. The book explains analytical concepts that serve as a basis for cross-linguistic comparison, and provides a rich source of descriptive data that can be analysed within a range of theories. The functional framework is useful to linguists documenting endangered languages, and those writing reference grammars and other descriptive materials. Each technical term is comprehensively explained, and cross-referenced to related terms, at the end of each chapter and in an online glossary. This is an essential resource on Morphosyntax for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and linguistic fieldworkers.

Barayin Morphosyntax

Barayin Morphosyntax
Author: Joseph Lovestrand
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2022-01-21
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0198851154

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This volume offers a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) analysis of the morphosyntax of Barayin, a Chadic language spoken by about 6000 people in the Guera region of Chad. The core chapters of the book draw on rich empirical data to provide analyses of the basic clause, noun phrases, verb phrases, and serial verb constructions. The version of LFG adopted here includes two recent innovations: the first is minimal c-structure, which results in simpler phrase structure representations; the second is the assumption that glue semantics accounts for argument selection, rejecting the need for a level of a-structure or for Completeness and Coherence in f-structure. Argument sharing in serial verb constructions can thus be modeled in a connected s-structure. This method of modeling semantic composition in complex predicates is extended to directional and associated motion complex predicates in Choctaw and Wambaya, removing the need to appeal to a special mechanism to unite semantic forms in such constructions.

The Morphosyntax of Gender

The Morphosyntax of Gender
Author: Ruth T. Kramer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199679932

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This book presents a new cross-linguistic analysis of gender and its effects on morphosyntax. It addresses questions including the syntactic location of gender features; the role of natural gender; and the relationship between syntactic gender features and the morphological realization of gender. Ruth Kramer argues that gender features are syntactically located on the n head ('little n'), which serves to nominalize category-neutral roots. Those gender features are either interpretable, as in the case of natural gender, or uninterpretable, like the gender of an inanimate noun in Spanish. Adopting Distributed Morphology, the book lays out how the gender features on n map onto the gender features relevant for morphological exponence. The analysis is supported by an in-depth case study of Amharic, which poses challenges for previous gender analyses and provides clear support for gender on n. The proposals generate a typology of two- and three-gender systems, with the various types illustrated using data from a genetically diverse set of languages. Finally, further evidence for gender being on n is provided from case studies of Somali and Romanian, as well as from the relationship between gender and other linguistic phenomena including derived nouns and declension class. Overall, the book provides one of the first large-scale, cross-linguistically-oriented, theoretical approaches to the morphosyntax of gender.

Roots and Patterns

Roots and Patterns
Author: Maya Arad
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2005-07-15
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9781402032431

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This book is simultaneously a theoretical study in morphosyntax and an in-depth empirical study of Hebrew. Based on Hebrew data, the book defends the status of the root as a lexical and phonological unit and argues that roots, rather than verbs or nouns, are the primitives of word formation. A central claim made throughout the book is the role of locality in word formation, teasing apart word formation from roots and word formation from existing words syntactically, semantically and phonologically. The book focuses on Hebrew, a language with rich verb morphology, where both roots and noun- and verb-creating morphology are morphologically transparent. The study of Hebrew verbs is based on a corpus of all Hebrew verb-creating roots, offering, for the first time, a survey of the full array of morpho-syntactic forms seen in the Hebrew verb. While the focus of this study is on how roots function in word-formation, a central chapter studies the information encoded by the Hebrew root, arguing for a special kind of open-ended value, bounded within the classes of meaning analyzed by lexical semanticists. The book is of wide interest to students of many branches of linguistics, including morphology, syntax and lexical semantics, as well as of to students Semitic languages.

Describing Morphosyntax

Describing Morphosyntax
Author: Thomas Edward Payne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 413
Release: 1997
Genre:
ISBN:

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