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Author: Andre? L?vovich Mal?chukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 653
ISBN-13: 9027205914
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Ayumi Miura
Publisher: Oxford Studies in the History
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 0199947155
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Impersonal constructions in the history of English form a puzzling category, in that there has been uncertainty as to why some verbs are attested in such constructions while others are not, even though they look almost synonymous. This book tackles this under-discussed question in one of the most popular topics of English historical syntax, with special reference to verbs of emotion in Middle English.
Author: Andrej Malchukov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2011-07-20
Total Pages: 653
ISBN-13: 9027287163
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages, but also includes considerations of several African, American, South-East Asian, Australian, and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive, or from active to passive, or participant-to event-centered construction.
Author: Ruth Möhlig-Falke
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2012-07-05
Total Pages: 565
ISBN-13: 0199777721
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries-their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English-have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. Möhlig-Falke offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. She focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. Her research comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses. It is thus the most comprehensive investigation of the impersonal construction in early English available to date.
Author: Roberta D'Alessandro
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2008-09-25
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 3110207516
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.
Author: Mutsumi Yamamoto
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2006-01-01
Total Pages: 167
ISBN-13: 9027230889
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.
Author: Osamu Imahayashi
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 9783631609668
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"The first international conference was held at Chiba University in 1-3 September 2005, the second one at Nagoya University in 7-9 September 2007, and the third one at Hiroshima University in 28-30 August 2009"--P. [v].
Author: Jacek Fisiak
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 520
ISBN-13: 9783110161519
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Comprising a selection of papers presented at the Ninth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held in Poznan in August 1996, this volume contains 28 contributions addressing a range of topics, but with an emphasis on morphological and syntactical studies on word-formation, modality and negation, and clause structure in the history of the English language. A more theoretically-oriented strain is represented by contributions treating grammaticalization or lexical diffusion in language change. There are also contributions addressing the historiography of historical linguistics including discussion of past grammarians such as Buchanan or Huish, as well as phonological studies and discussion of the development of Early Modern English. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Sabine Mohr
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2005-01-01
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9789027233523
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book offers a comparative study of the Germanic languages. It promotes a new approach to the OV vs. VO classification, according to which all clauses have a universal base where the internal argument is always merged in SpecVP. Word order differences and their correlates result from an interaction of checking conditions, the EPP and different types of verb movement, and from parametric variation concerning the location of the subject of predication in the I- or in the C-system. In the discussion of a range of impersonal constructions in German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Icelandic, the Mainland Scandinavian languages and English, it is shown that crosslinguistic variation as regards, e.g., the distribution of the expletive in impersonal passives and the occurrence of a Definiteness Effect in Transitive Expletive Constructions is mainly due to the choice of different kinds of 'expletive' elements (each associated with different featural make-ups which force them to show up in different positions), namely true expletives, event arguments and quasi-arguments, whereas expletive pro is shown not to exist.
