Explaining Language Structure Through Systems Interaction

Explaining Language Structure Through Systems Interaction
Author: Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027229632

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This book proposes a framework for describing languages through the description of relationships among lexicon, morphology, syntax, and phonology. The framework is based on the notion of formal coding means; the principle of functional transparency; the notion of functional domains; and the notion of systems interaction in the coding of functional domains. The study is based on original analyses of cross-linguistic data.The fundamental finding of the study is that different languages may code different functional domains, which must be discovered by analyzing the formal means available in each language. The first part of the book proposes a methodology for discovering functional domains and the second part describes the properties of various functional domains. The book presents new cross-linguistic analyses of theoretical issues including agreement; phenomena attributed to government; nominal classification; prerequisites for and implications of linear order coding; and defining characteristics of lexical categories. The study also contributes new analyses of specific problems in individual languages.

Split Auxiliary Systems

Split Auxiliary Systems
Author: Raúl Aranovich
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2007-03-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027292566

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The alternation between the auxiliaries BE and HAVE, which this collection examines, is often discussed in connection with generative analyses of split intransitivity. But this book's purpose is to place the phenomenon in a broader context. Well-known facts in the Romance and Germanic language families are extended with data from lesser studied languages and dialects (Romanian, Paduan), and also with experimental and historical data. Moreover, the book goes beyond the usual language families in which the phenomenon has been studied, with the inclusion of two chapters on Chinese and Korean. The theoretical background of the contributors is also broad, ranging from current Generative approaches to Cognitive and Optimality-Theoretical frameworks. Readers interested in the structural, historical, developmental, or experimental aspects of auxiliary selection should profit from this book's comprehensive empirical coverage and from the plurality of contemporary linguistic analyses it contains.

Adpositions

Adpositions
Author: Dennis Kurzon
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2008-05-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027290245

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This book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation – prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian. Adpositions are treated by some authors from a semantic perspective, by others as syntactic units, and a third group of authors distinguishes adpositions from the point of view of their pragmatic function. This work is of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as to those who have a special interest in any of the languages treated.

Modality in Grammar and Discourse

Modality in Grammar and Discourse
Author: Joan L. Bybee
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 586
Release: 1995-08-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027285721

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This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers that look into the expression of modality in the grammars of natural languages, with an emphasis on its manifestations in naturally occurring discourse. Though the individual contributions reflect a diversity of languages, of synchronic and diachronic foci, and of theoretical orientations — all within the broad domain of functional linguistics — they nonetheless converge around a number of key issues: the relationship between 'mood' and 'modality'; the delineation of modal categories and their nomenclature; the grounding of modality in interactive discourse; the elusive category 'irrealis'; and the relationship of modal notions and categories to other categories of grammar.

Tense-aspect

Tense-aspect
Author: Paul J. Hopper
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1982-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027228655

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The verbal categories of tense and aspect have been studied traditionally from the point of view of their reference to the timing and time-perspective of the speaker s reported experience. They are universal categories both in terms of the semantic-functional domain they cover as well as in terms of their syntactic and morphological realization. Nevertheless, their treatment in contemporary linguistics is often restricted and narrow based, often involving mere recapitulatoin of traditional semantic and morphotactic studies.The present volume arises out of a symposium held at UCLA in May 1979, in which a group of linguists gathered to re-open the subject of tense-and-aspect from a variety of perspectives, including in addition to the traditional semantics also discourse-pragmatics, psycholinguistics, child language, Creolization and diachronic change. The languages discussed in this volume include Russian, Turkish, English, Indonesian, Ameslan, Eskimo, various Creoles, Mandari, Hebrew, Bantu and others. The emphasis throughout is not only on the description of language-specific tense-aspect phenomenon, but more on the search for universal categories and principles which underlie the cross-language variety of tense and aspect. In particular, many of the participants address themselves to the relationship between propositional-semantics and discourse-pragmatics, in so far as these two functional domains interact within tense-aspect systems.

Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation

Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation
Author: Steven Brown
Publisher: University of Michigan Press ELT
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Language and languages
ISBN: 9780472035410

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Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation is an introduction to the study of language and applied linguistics for students who have had a minimum of exposure to the discipline of linguistics. Using clear, easy-to-understand explanations and examples, this text avoids the in-depth theoretical coverage found in texts written for those who specialize in linguistics or SLA. As a result, this book is perfect for students whose chosen fields require them to be acquainted with the ways language works--such as future teachers, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists--but who do not intend to become linguists. The text is also suitable for English or ESL/EFL teachers who need a reference volume about various aspects of language, particularly as it applies to teaching. Each chapter includes research projects and further readings. The third edition of Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation features a new design and reorganization. All content has been significantly revised and updated. Each chapter also debunks a common language myth and now incorporates exercises that, for prior editions, appeared in a supplementary workbook. Extra practice for students is available online, as is additional materials for teachers. (There is no workbook for the third edition.)

Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition

Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition
Author: Shawn Loewen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1136305920

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Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition is the first book to present a cohesive view of the different theoretical and pedagogical perspectives that comprise instructed second language acquisition (ISLA), defined as any type of learning that occurs as a result of the manipulating the process and conditions of second language acquisition. The book begins by considering the effectiveness of ISLA and the differences between ISLA and naturalistic L2 learning. It then goes on to discuss the theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical aspects of such key issues in ISLA as grammar learning; interaction in the classroom; focus on form, function and meaning; vocabulary learning; pronunciation learning; pragmatics learning; learning contexts; and individual differences. This timely and important volume is ideally suited for the graduate level ISLA course, and provides valuable insights for any SLA scholar interested in the processes involved in second language learning in classroom settings.

Partitioned Representations

Partitioned Representations
Author: J. Dinsmore
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-03-07
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9401135746

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Cognitive science is a field that began with the realization that researchers in varied disciplines-psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, formal semantics, neuroscience, and others-had taken on a common set of problems in representation and meaning, in reasoning and language. Nevertheless, cognitive science as a whole enjoys no common methodology or theoretical framework, and is in danger of becoming even more fragmented with time. There are two reasons for this. First, cognitive science is built on existing methodologies that have different historical origins. AB a result, the psychologist's truth is different from the linguist's truth. The artificial intelligence researcher's truth is different from the philosopher's truth. The neuroscientist's truth is different from the formal semanticist's truth. All too often there is little or no recognition of the relevance of work in other disciplines to one's own concerns. Second, cognitive scientists tend to develop theories around isolated problems. For instance, there are theories about how humans categorize concepts, about how humans analyze linguistic expressions syntactically, about how the English tense system works semantically, about how humans reason about space or reason about time, about how goal-directed problem solving occurs, about how the brain computes, and so on.

Structure Discovery in Natural Language

Structure Discovery in Natural Language
Author: Chris Biemann
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2011-12-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642259235

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Current language technology is dominated by approaches that either enumerate a large set of rules, or are focused on a large amount of manually labelled data. The creation of both is time-consuming and expensive, which is commonly thought to be the reason why automated natural language understanding has still not made its way into “real-life” applications yet. This book sets an ambitious goal: to shift the development of language processing systems to a much more automated setting than previous works. A new approach is defined: what if computers analysed large samples of language data on their own, identifying structural regularities that perform the necessary abstractions and generalisations in order to better understand language in the process? After defining the framework of Structure Discovery and shedding light on the nature and the graphic structure of natural language data, several procedures are described that do exactly this: let the computer discover structures without supervision in order to boost the performance of language technology applications. Here, multilingual documents are sorted by language, word classes are identified, and semantic ambiguities are discovered and resolved without using a dictionary or other explicit human input. The book concludes with an outlook on the possibilities implied by this paradigm and sets the methods in perspective to human computer interaction. The target audience are academics on all levels (undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers and professors) working in the fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics, as well as natural language engineers who are seeking to improve their systems.

Language as a Complex Adaptive System

Language as a Complex Adaptive System
Author: Nick C. Ellis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2009-12-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 144433400X

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Explores a new approach to studying language as a complex adaptive system, illustrating its commonalities across many areas of language research Brings together a team of leading researchers in linguistics, psychology, and complex systems to discuss the groundbreaking significance of this perspective for their work Illustrates its application across a variety of subfields, including languages usage, language evolution, language structure, and first and second language acquisition "What a breath of fresh air! As interesting a collection of papers as you are likely to find on the evolution, learning, and use of language from the point of view of both cognitive underpinnings and communicative functions." Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology