The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the ...verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.
Gradation is usually considered to be a property of adjectives. Examples like 'The boy loves his mother very much' and 'The boy has grown a lot' reveal that gradation is not limited to adjectives but ...verbs are gradable too. Verb gradation has received considerably less attention in the literature than gradation of adjectives. The aim of the current volume is to explore the notion of verb gradation in more detail. The book presents a semantic as well as a syntactic analysis of verb gradation and combines three case studies with a general perspective on the phenomenon. Issues addressed in the volume cover, among others, the notion of scalarity in the verbal domain, the interaction of verb gradation with grammatical as well as lexical aspect and verb gradation as a subcompositional phenomenon. These topics are investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. The languages of investigation include, among others, German, Russian and French.
This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar.
This investigation of V2-movement addresses the question which role the lexical content of the moved element plays during sentence processing. It draws on original theoretical arguments, empirical ...data and results from psycholinguistic experiments. The main finding is that the lexical content of the V2-verb is interpreted only at the end of the clause, i.e. at the base position of the finite verb.
In Anatolian Verbal Stem Formation, David Sasseville provides a full analysis of the Luwian, Lycian and Lydian verbal stem classes and their pre-history in relation to Hittite.
This book revives and reinterprets a persistent intuition running through much of the classical work: that the unitary appearance of Obligatory Control into complements conceals an underlying duality ...of structure and mechanism. Idan Landau argues that control complements divide into two types: In attitude contexts, control is established by logophoric anchoring, while non-attitude contexts it boils down to predication. The distinction is also syntactically represented: Logophoric complements are constructed as a second tier above predicative complements.The theory derives the obligatoryde sereading of PRO as a special kind ofde reattitude without ascribing any inherent feature to PRO. At the same time, it provides a principled explanation, based on feature transmission, for the agreement properties of PRO, which are stipulated on competing semantic accounts. Finally, it derives a striking universal asymmetry: the fact that agreement on the embedded verb blocks control in attitude contexts but not in non-attitude contexts. This book is unique in being firmly grounded in both the formal semantic and the syntactic studies of control, offering an integrated view that will appeal to scholars in both areas. By bringing to bear current sophisticated grammatical analyses, it offers new insights into the classical problems of control theory.
The relationship between verbs and their arguments is a widely debated topic in linguistics. This comprehensive 2005 survey provides an overview of this important area of research, exploring theories ...of how a verb's semantics can determine the morphosyntactic realization of its arguments. Assuming a close connection between verb meaning and syntactic structure, it provides a bridge between lexical-semantic and syntactic research, synthesizing the results of work from a range of linguistic subdisciplines and in a variety of theoretical frameworks. The first four chapters survey leading theories about event structure and conceptualization. The fifth and sixth chapters focus on the mapping from lexical semantics to morphosyntax and include a detailed discussion of the thematic hierarchy. The final chapter reviews treatments of multiple argument realization. With useful bibliographic references and clear definitions of relevant terms, this book will be invaluable to students and researchers in syntax and semantics, as well as those in related fields.
Situated at the crossroads of comparative philology, classics and general historical linguistics, this study is the first ever attempt to outline in full the developments which led from the remotest ...recoverable stages of the Indo-European proto-language to the complex verbal system encountered in Homer and other early Greek texts. By combining the methods of comparative and internal reconstruction with a careful examination of large collections of primary data and insights gained from the study of language change and linguistic typology, Andreas Willi uncovers the deeper reasons behind many surface irregularities and offers a new understanding of how categories such as aspect, tense and voice interact. Drawing upon evidence from all major branches of Indo-European, and providing exhaustive critical coverage of scholarly debate on the most controversial issues, this book will be an essential reference tool for anyone seeking orientation in this burgeoning but increasingly fragmented area of linguistic research.
