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21502 results in English language and linguistics: general interest

Page 446 of 1076

The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics
  • Keith Brown, Jim Miller
  • Published online:
    21 November 2014
    Print publication:
    05 December 2013
  • The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics provides concise and clear definitions of all the terms any undergraduate or graduate student is likely to encounter in the study of linguistics and English language or in other degrees involving linguistics, such as modern languages, media studies and translation. lt covers the key areas of syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, semantics and pragmatics but also contains terms from discourse analysis, stylistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and corpus linguistics. It provides entries for 246 languages, including 'major' languages and languages regularly mentioned in research papers and textbooks. Features include cross-referencing between entries and extended entries on some terms. Where appropriate, entries contain illustrative examples from English and other languages, and many provide etymologies bringing out the metaphors lying behind the technical terms. Also available is an electronic version of the dictionary which includes 'clickable' cross-referencing.

Syntax of Dutch
  • Adpositions and Adpositional Phrases
  • Hans Broekhuis
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013
  • Part of the larger Syntax of Dutch series, this volume focuses on the internal makeup and distribution of adpositional phrases in Dutch. It covers such topics as complementation and modification of adpositional phrases, as well as their predicative, attributive, and adverbial uses.

  • Chapter 1 - Adpositions: Characteristics and Classification

  • Hans Broekhuis
  • Book:
    Syntax of Dutch
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013, pp 3-166

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter provides a more general discussion of adpositions and their projections (adpositional phrases). Section 1.1 starts by providing a general characterization of the category of adpositions. Section 1.2 and 1.3 continue by discussing two possible ways of classifying the adpositions. The first classification is based on the relative position of the adpositions with respect to their complement (if any), which results in distinguishing the following four subclasses: prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions and intransitive adpositions/particles. The second classification, on the other hand, is based on the meaning of the adpositions, which results in distinguishing the following three subclasses: spatial, temporal and nonspatial/ temporal adpositions. Section 1.4 concludes with a discussion of a number of borderline cases, that is, elements that resemble adpositions in various respects, but for which it is nevertheless not entirely clear whether they should really be considered adpositions.

    Characterization of the category adposition

    This section provides a brief characterization of the category of adpositions. Section 1.1.1 discusses some characteristic properties of this category. Section 1.1.2 provides illustrations of the four basic types of adpositions: prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions and intransitive adpositions/particles. Section 1.1.3 concludes with a preliminary discussion of the syntactic uses of adpositional phrases. Since the purpose of the discussion below is to provide the necessary background for the remainder of our discussion on adpositional phrases, it is inevitably sketchy and far from complete; most issues mentioned here will be taken up again and discussed more exhaustively later in this study.

    Properties of adpositions

    There are several features that distinguish the class of adpositions from the other three main categories of words: verbs, nouns and adjectives. These are discussed in Subsection I. It is nevertheless difficult to design syntactic tests that single out the full set of adpositional phrases, although there are several tests that can be used in order to recognize certain syntactic or semantic subtypes. These will be discussed in Subsection II.

    Differences from the other main categories of words

    The subsections below discuss several respects in which adpositions differ from verbs, nouns and adjectives.

  • Introduction

  • Hans Broekhuis
  • Book:
    Syntax of Dutch
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013, pp 1-2

  • Summary

    Verbs (V), adjectives (A), nouns (N) and adpositions (P) constitute the four major word classes. The present volume deals with adpositions and their projections (adpositional phrases or PPs). The general introduction in Chapter 1 provides a survey of the most distinctive syntactic, semantic and morphological characteristics of adpositions. Like the other categories, adpositions can project: in other words, they select complements and can be modified, which will be discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, respectively. After this, we will have a closer look at the syntactic uses of the adpositional phrases in Chapter 4. This study will be concluded in Chapter 5 with a discussion of the formation of pronominal PPs like er op ‘on it’, which consist of a so-called R-word like er and a preposition, and the phenomenon that these pronominal PPs can be split by extraction of the R-word. We will also address the complicated issue of co-occurrence and conflation of different types of R-words, although, strictly speaking, this goes somewhat beyond the main theme of this work.

  • 1 - What is phonology?

  • David Odden, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Introducing Phonology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    PREVIEW

    KEY TERMS

  • sound

  • symbol

  • transcription

  • grammar

  • continuous nature of speech

    • This chapter introduces phonology, the study of the sound systems of language. Its key objective is to:

  • explain the difference between physical sound and “a sound” as a discrete element of language

  • highlight the tradeoff between accuracy and usefulness in representing sound

  • introduce the notion of “sound as cognitive symbol”

  • present the phonetic underpinnings of phonology

  • introduce the notion of phonological rule

    • Phonology is one of the core fields that compose the discipline of linguistics, which is the scientific study of language structure. One way to understand the subject matter of phonology is to contrast it with other fields within linguistics. A very brief explanation is that phonology is the study of sound structure in language, which is different from the study of sentence structure (syntax), word structure (morphology), or how languages change over time (historical linguistics). But this is insufficient. An important feature of the structure of a sentence is how it is pronounced – its sound structure. The pronunciation of a given word is also a fundamental part of the structure of the word. And certainly the principles of pronunciation in a language are subject to change over time. So phonology has a relationship to numerous domains of linguistics.

Introducing Phonology
  • 2nd edition
  • David Odden
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013
  • Designed for students with only a basic knowledge of linguistics, this leading textbook provides a clear and practical introduction to phonology, the study of sound patterns in language. It teaches in a step-by-step fashion the logical techniques of phonological analysis and the fundamental theories that underpin it. This thoroughly revised and updated edition teaches students how to analyze phonological data, how to think critically about data, how to formulate rules and hypotheses, and how to test them.New to this edition:Improved examples, over 60 exercises and 14 new problem sets from a wide variety of languages encourage students to practise their own analysis of phonological processes and patterns A new and updated reference list of phonetic symbols and an updated transcription system, making data more accessible to students Additional online material includes pedagogical suggestions and password-protected answer keys for instructors

  • 4 - Underlying representations

  • David Odden, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Introducing Phonology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013, pp 79-114

  • Summary

    PREVIEW

    KEY TERMS

  • alternation

  • neutralization

  • predictability

  • structure preservation

    • This chapter looks deeper into the nature of underlying forms by

  • introducing contrast-neutralizing rules

  • seeing how unpredictable information must be part of the underlying form

  • learning what factors are most important in establishing an underlying representation

  • understanding how underlying forms are different from actually pronounced words

    • A fundamental characteristic of the rules discussed up to this point is that they have described totally predictable allophonic processes, such as aspiration in English or vowel nasalization in Sundanese. For such rules, the question of the exact underlying form of a word has not been so crucial, and in some cases a clear decision could not be made. We saw that in Sundanese every vowel becomes nasalized after a nasal sound, and every phonetic nasal vowel appears after a nasal. Nasality of vowels can always be predicted by a rule in this language: all nasal vowels appear in one predictable context, and all vowels are predictably nasal in that context. It was therefore not crucial to indicate whether a given vowel is underlyingly nasal or underlyingly oral. If you assume that vowels are underlyingly oral you can write a rule to derive all of the nasal vowels, and if you contrarily assume that vowels are all underlyingly nasal you could write a rule to derive all of the oral vowels. The choice of underlying sound may make a considerable difference in terms of simplicity and elegance of the solution, and this is an important consideration in evaluating a phonological analysis, but it is possible to come up with rules which will grind out the correct forms no matter what one assumes about underlying representations in these cases. This is not always the case.

  • Preface and Acknowledgments

  • Hans Broekhuis
  • Book:
    Syntax of Dutch
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013, pp ix-xxii

  • Summary

    General introduction

    Dutch is an official language in the Netherlands, Belgium-Flanders, Surinam, Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. With about 22 million native speakers it is one of the world's greater languages. It is taught and studied at more than 175 universities around the world (source: taalunieversum.org). Furthermore, Dutch is one of the most well-studied living languages; research on it has had a major, and still continuing, impact on the development of formal linguistic theory, and it plays an important role in various other types of linguistic research. It is therefore unfortunate that there is no recent comprehensive scientifically based description of the grammar of Dutch that is accessible to a wider international audience. As a result, much information remains hidden in scientific publications: some information is embedded in theoretical discussions that are mainly of interest for and accessible to certain groups of formal linguists or that are more or less outdated in the light of more recent findings and theoretical developments, some is buried in publications with only a limited distribution, and some is simply inaccessible to large groups of readers given that it is written in Dutch. The series Syntax of Dutch (SoD) aims at filling this gap for syntax.

    Main objective

    The main objective of SoD is to present a synthesis of currently available syntactic knowledge of Dutch. It gives a comprehensive overview of the relevant research on Dutch that not only presents the findings of earlier approaches to the language, but also includes the results of the formal linguistic research carried out over the last four or five decades that often cannot be found in the existing reference books. It must be emphasized, however, that SoD is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory; the reader will generally look in vain for critical assessments of theoretical proposals made to account for specific phenomena. Although SoD addresses many of the central issues of current linguistic theory, it does not provide an introduction to current linguistic theory. Readers interested in such an introduction are referred to one of the many existing introductory textbooks, or to handbooks like The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, edited by Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk, or The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax, edited by Marcel den Dikken.

  • 8 - Abstractness and psychological reality

  • David Odden, Ohio State University
  • Book:
    Introducing Phonology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013, pp 237-284

  • Summary

    PREVIEW

    KEY TERMS

  • abstractness

  • absolute neutralization

  • psychological reality

  • external evidence

    • This chapter explores the extent to which underlying and surface forms can be different – what constraints if any are tenable within the formal theory, what the issues are in limiting abstractness, and how to address these questions empirically. The central question raised in this chapter is “what counts as evidence for a phonological analysis?”

    A fundamental question in the theory of phonology has been “how abstract is phonology?”, specifically, how different can the underlying and phonetic forms of a word be? The essential question is whether grammars use entities that are not directly observed. Related to this is the question whether a linguistic model requiring elements that cannot be directly observed reflects what the human mind does. The very concept of a mental representation of speech, such as a phonological surface form like [sɔks] socks which is not itself an observable physical event, requires abstracting away from many specifics of speech. Without generalizing beyond the directly observable, it would be impossible to make even the most mundane observations about any language. The question is therefore not whether phonology is abstract at all, but rather what degree of abstractness is required.

  • Chapter 5 - R-pronominalization and R-words

  • Hans Broekhuis
  • Book:
    Syntax of Dutch
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 November 2013, pp 291-362

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This section is devoted to R-PRONOMINALIZATION and R-EXTRACTION. The first notion refers to pronominalization of the nominal complement of a preposition by means of a so-called R-word, which must precede the preposition. In (3) we give two examples with the R-word er, which will be glossed as there for reasons that will become clear when we discuss the examples in (6).

    (1) a. Jan kijkt naar de film. a′. Jan kijkt ernaar.

    Jan looks at the movie the movie there.at

    ‘Jan is watching the movie.’ ‘Jan is watching it.’

    b. Jan wacht op de bus. b′. Jan wacht erop.

    Jan waits for the bus Jan waits there.on

    ‘Jan is waiting for the bus.’ ‘Jan is waiting for it.’

    Pronominal R-words like er will normally be referred to as R-PRONOUNS, although we will also use the notation [+R] pronouns when they are discussed in contrast to [-R] pronouns like hij/hem ‘he/him’. The combination of an R-pronoun and its associate adposition will be referred to as a PRONOMINAL PP.

    Table 1, which is based on the classification of the pronouns developed in Section N5.2, shows that all third person, non-anaphoric [-R] pronouns that can be used independently as arguments have a [+R] counterpart. The fact that these [+R] pronouns all contain an /r/ is responsible for their name.

    Table 1 shows that the [-R] pronouns can be divided into four main groups by means of the features [±NEUTER] and [±HUMAN]. For the referential, demonstrative and relative pronouns (group A), the gender distinction is the most prominent one, although it must be noted that most nouns that refer to [+HUMAN] entities are [-NEUTER] as well; nouns with the feature constellation [+NEUTER] and [+HUMAN] are typically diminutives (exceptions are the noun meisje ‘girl’, which has the formal characteristics of a diminutive, the noun kind ‘child’, and a number of nouns with a negative connotation like wijf ‘bitch of a woman’ and mens ‘person’). For the interrogative and quantificational pronouns (group B), only the distinction between [+HUMAN] and [-HUMAN] is relevant. As illustrated in (2), and to be discussed more extensively in Section 5.1, [+R] pronouns are typically, but not exclusively, used as alternative realizations of [-HUMAN] pronouns; see Table 2 in Section 5.1.7 for an overview.

Page 446 of 1076