Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (3)
- Article (1)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (3)
- German (1)
- Portuguese (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (5)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (5)
Keywords
- Syntax (5) (remove)
The syntactic structure of predicatives : clues from the omission of the copula in child english
(2001)
This paper explores the syntax of main clause predicatives from the perspective of trying to account for an asymmetry in copular constructions in certain languages. One of the languages in which we find such an asymmetry is child English (around age 2). Specifically, new results show that children acquiring English tend to use an overt (and inflected) copula in individual-level predicatives, but they tend to omit the copula in stage-level predicatives. The analysis adopted to account for this pattern draws on evidence from adult English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese that stage-level predicates are Aspectual (they contain AspP) while individual-level predicates are not (they involve only a lexical Small Clause predicate). Children's omission of the copula in structures with AspP is linked to the fact that at this stage of development, children fail to require finiteness in main clauses. In particular, Asp0 is temporally anchored in child English, thereby obviating the need for a finite (temporally anchored) Infl, i.e. an inflected copula.
As part of a major project on the syntactic organisation of written discourse in the recent history of the English language, this paper tackles the distribution of sentences comprising left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined, this investigation will concentrate on the analysis of the corpus in the following directions: (i) statistical evolution of left dislocation in the recent history of the English language; (ii) the influence of orality and genre on left dislocation; (iii) information conveyed by the left-dislocated material, that is, the discourse-based referentiality potential of the left-dislocated constituents in terms of recoverability, and its association with end-focus; and (iv) grammatical complexity of the left-dislocated material and its association with end-weight.
In this paper, I argue that this informally given list of characteristics covers only a certain subclass of specific indefinites. […] In particular, I dispute the definition of specific indefinites as "the speaker has the referent in mind" as rather confusing if one is working with a semantic theory. Furthermore, I discuss "relative specificity", it. cases in which the specific indefinite does not exhibit wide, but intermediate or narrow scope behavior. Based on such data, I argue that specificity expresses a referential dependency between introduced discourse items. Informally speaking, the specificity of the indefinite expression something [...] expresses that the reference of the expression depends on the reference of another expression, here, on the expression a monk, not the speaker.
This paper presents results of research into syntactic negation in both German and Brazilian Portuguese dialogues. After some considerations on the nature of negation, its occurrence in a corpus is investigated based on semantic negation categories established from works by Polenz and Engel. Based on Ilari's works, possible syntactic negation forms are presented as formulae that express the relationships between their components. Use frequency of syntactic negation in the semantic categories in each language is presented, as well as possible sources of interference in the use of such elements by foreign speakers, along with considerations about negation, culture and language.
Die vorliegende Arbeit sieht sich im Rahmen der Diskursanalyse. Ihr Ziel ist es, einen Beitrag zu Fragestellungen zu leisten, die um die Strukturierung von gesprochener Sprache und Möglichkeiten ihrer Erfassung kreisen. Die in ihr untersuchte Sprache ist das Samoanische, eine der Sprachen, die aufgrund vielfacher linguistischer Forschung eher als 'bekannt' zu bezeichnen ist.