Grammaticalization Paths of English and High German Existential Constructions

Grammaticalization Paths of English and High German Existential Constructions
Author: Simone E. Pfenninger
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2009
Genre: English language
ISBN: 9783034300216

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Existential constructions are a fundamental feature of many Indo-European languages, and constructions with non-referential subjects have developed in all of the latter, albeit at different stages in their histories. High German does not feature a prototypical existential construction that is equivalent in syntactic and pragmatic function and semantic meaning to the English existential there-construction. How did a prototypical existential structure originate in English? Why is it that High German has never developed such a construction? Has it ever shown a tendency towards developing one? How did two closely related languages such as English and High German come to differ so much with respect to these constructions? By means of investigating a variety of historical and contemporary data this study shows that not only semantic, pragmatic and syntactic factors are involved, which decide the choice of a certain construction, but also very much the more general different linguistic development that the two languages underwent in the course of time.

Comparative Studies in Early Germanic Languages

Comparative Studies in Early Germanic Languages
Author: Gabriele Diewald
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013-10-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027271453

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This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they descended from a common ancestor language, the contributions present in-depth, empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments, thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change, grammaticalisation, and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.

Crossing Linguistic Boundaries

Crossing Linguistic Boundaries
Author: Paloma Núñez-Pertejo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-12-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1350053872

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Breaking away from previously rigid descriptions of the linguistic system of the English language, Crossing Linguistic Boundaries explores fascinating case studies which refuse to fall neatly within the traditional definitions of linguistic domains and boundaries. Bringing together leading international scholars in English linguistics, this volume focusses on these controversies in relation to seeking to overcome the temporal and geographical limits of the English language. Approaching tensions in the areas of English phonology and phonetics, pragmatics, semantics, morphology and syntax, chapters discuss not only British and American English but also a wide variety of geographical variants. Containing synchronic and diachronic studies covering different periods in the history of English, Crossing Linguistic Boundaries will appeal to anyone interested in linguistic variation in English.

Linguistic Perspectives on a Variable English Morpheme

Linguistic Perspectives on a Variable English Morpheme
Author: Laura Rupp
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1349728039

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This book investigates –s marking in English verbs, specifically its manifestations in main verbs, in the past tense of BE, and in existential constructions. It embraces the many ways in which –s marking varies across the English speaking world, and considers both how it arose in these places historically and the ways in which it has since developed. The authors propose a story which holistically accounts for these different manifestations of –s, drawing upon evidence from a wide range of subdisciplines in linguistics, including sociolinguistics, generative syntax, historical linguistics, dialectology, and discourse-pragmatics. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in these and related fields.

Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics

Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics
Author: Ole Schützler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2022-05-26
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1108499643

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By contrasting different approaches and datasets, this book highlights critical developments in latest corpus-linguistic research.

Long Story Short: An Interactive Journey through the History of English

Long Story Short: An Interactive Journey through the History of English
Author: Paula Rodríguez Abruñeiras
Publisher: Universitat de València
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 8491348417

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This textbook intends to do a clear, informal review of the history of the English language. Although the main focus is not to provide a thorough social description of the different periods in which the history of English is divided, we want to make it clear that language has changed because it is used by society, and therefore one cannot be understood without the other.

Impersonal Constructions

Impersonal Constructions
Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 653
Release: 2011
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027205914

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Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

Germanic Future Constructions

Germanic Future Constructions
Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2008-08-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027291039

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This study offers a Construction Grammar approach to the historical development and modern usage of future constructions in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. On the basis of corpus data, constructions such as English be going to or German werden are analyzed as symbolic units that convey a range of temporal and modal meanings. A special focus lies on the main verbs that occur with these constructions. Statistical co-occurrence patterns between constructions and lexical items guide the semantic analyses in this study: It is argued that a construction that conventionally occurs with main verbs such as write or speak differs functionally from a construction that typically occurs with verbs such as rain or increase. The same approach is also applied historically: If a construction co-occurs with different main verbs at subsequent stages in time, this is seen as a sign of semantic change.

Walking on the Grammaticalization Path of the Definite Article

Walking on the Grammaticalization Path of the Definite Article
Author: Renata Szczepaniak
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261563

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This volume focuses on the grammaticalization of the definite article in German. It contains eight empirically-based papers which examine individual stages of the grammaticalization path from its beginnings as a demonstrative to the definite article and beyond. Focusing on cognitive, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic factors, the contributions not only address the development from pragmatic to semantic definiteness, but also deal with functional and formal changes starting as soon as the linguistic unit has acquired the function of marking semantic definiteness. Based on corpora spanning the entire history of the German language, from Old High German (750-1050) to present-day German, the analyses challenge the traditional linear model of grammaticalization and provide alternative pathways. What all the contributions have in common is the idea that the main grammaticalization path is accompanied or crossed by several side roads which lead to different destinations such as preposition-article-clitics, generic usages or onymic articles.

Historical Linguistics 2017

Historical Linguistics 2017
Author: Bridget Drinka
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261679

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The collected articles in this volume address an array of cutting-edge issues in the field of historical linguistics, including new theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies for studying language through a diachronic lens. The articles focus on the following themes: I. Case & Argument Structure, II. Alignment & Diathesis, III. Patterns, Paradigms, & Restructuring, IV. Grammaticalization & Construction Grammar, V. Corpus Linguistics & Morphosyntax, VI. Languages in Contact. Papers reflect a wide range of perspectives, and focus on issues and data from an array of languages and language families, from new analyses of case and argument structure in Ancient Greek to phonological evidence for language contact in Vietnamese, from patterns of convergence in Neo-Aramaic to the development of the ergative in Basque. The volume contributes substantially to the debate surrounding core issues of language change: the role of the individual speaker, the nature of paths of grammaticalization, the role of contact, the interface of diachrony and synchrony, and many other issues. It should be useful to any reader hoping to gain insight into the nature of language change.