The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027232539
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity by : Talmy Givón

Download or read book The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity written by Talmy Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complex hierarchic syntax is a hallmark of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the evolutionary apex of the uniquely - human language faculty - evolutionary yet mysteriously immune to Darwinian adaptive selection. Prof. Givón's book treats syntactic complexity as an integral part of the evolutionary rise of human communication. The book first describes grammar as an adaptive instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform of pre-linguistic object- and-event cognition and mental representation. It then surveys the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning synchronic morpho-syntax and cross-language diversity; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor directly responsible for acquiring the competent use of grammar. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two developmental trends is compared with second language acquisition, pre-grammatical pidgin and pre-human communication. The evolutionary relevance of language diachrony, language ontogeny and pidginization is argued for on general bio-evolutionary grounds: It is the organism's adaptive on-line behavior- invention, learning and skill acquisition - that is the common thread running through all three developmental trends. The neuro-cognitive circuits that underlie language, and their evolutionary underpinnings, are described and assessed. Recursive embedding turns out to be not an adaptive target on its own, but the by-product of two distinct adaptive moves: (i) the recruitment of conjoined clauses as modal operators on, or referential specifiers of, other clauses; and (ii) the subsequent condensation of paratactic into syntactic structures.

Syntactic Complexity

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Author :
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027229996
Total Pages : 561 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Syntactic Complexity by : Talmy Givón

Download or read book Syntactic Complexity written by Talmy Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language faculty – evolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive selection. This volume, coming out of a symposium held at Rice University in March 2008, tackles syntactic complexity from multiple developmental perspectives. We take it for granted that grammar is an adaptive instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform of pre-linguistic cognition. Most of the papers in the volume deal with the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning synchronic morpho-syntax; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor directly responsible for the acquisition of competent grammatical performance. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two developmental trends is considered alongside with the cognition and neurology of grammar and of syntactic complexity, and the evolutionary relevance of diachrony, ontogeny and pidginization is argued on general bio-evolutionary grounds. Lastly, several of the contributions to the volume suggest that recursive embedding is not in itself an adaptive target, but rather the by-product of two distinct adaptive gambits: the recruitment of conjoined clauses as modal operators on other clauses and the subsequent condensation of paratactic into syntactic structures.

Syntactic Complexity from a Language Acquisition Perspective

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443893528
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Syntactic Complexity from a Language Acquisition Perspective by : Elisa Di Domenico

Download or read book Syntactic Complexity from a Language Acquisition Perspective written by Elisa Di Domenico and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume examines syntactic complexity from an acquisitional perspective, which offers a peculiarly grounded starting point when dealing with linguistic complexity, under the assumption that what is simpler is acquired earlier than what must be thought of as complex. Connecting acquisitional data inseparably to formal linguistic analyses, it not only allows a comparison between structures at various levels in terms of complexity, but also a deeper insight into the factors determining complexity in different populations of acquirers. The book is divided into two parts following an introductory chapter. The papers in Part I consider the first language acquisition of some complex structures such as different types of passives, relative clauses, questions and classes of predicates, with a look at children’s early sensitivity to seemingly complex domains, such as the Definiteness Effect and unaccusative predicates. Part II is dedicated to the acquisition of complex structures in different modes of acquisition. The papers here examine, sometimes comparatively, different conditions of language acquisition dealing with clitics, types of relative clauses or referential pronouns. The languages considered range from European Portuguese to Finnish, French, German, Italian and Romanian.

Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501501011
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces by : Andreas Trotzke

Download or read book Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces written by Andreas Trotzke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntactic complexity has always been a matter of intense investigation in formal linguistics. Since complex syntax is clearly evidenced by sentential embedding and since embedding of one clause/phrase in another is taken to signal recursivity of the grammar, the capacity of computing syntactic complexity is of central interest to the recent hypothesis that syntactic recursion is the defining property of natural language. In the light of more recent claims according to which complex syntax is not a universal property of all living languages, the issue of how to detect and define syntactic complexity has been revived with a combination of classical and new arguments. This volume contains contributions about the formal complexity of natural language, about specific issues of clausal embedding, and about syntactic complexity in terms of grammar-external interfaces in the domain of language acquisition.

Diverse Scenarios of Syntactic Complexity

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Author :
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027262306
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Diverse Scenarios of Syntactic Complexity by : Albert Álvarez González

Download or read book Diverse Scenarios of Syntactic Complexity written by Albert Álvarez González and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume surveys the phenomenon of syntactic complexity in a diversity of languages and from a diversity of theoretical perspectives. The topics include clause combining strategies such as relative, complement, and adverbial clauses, serialization, clausal nominalizations, but also the switch reference systems involved in clause chains, the role of insubordination and the influence of language contact in the development of syntactic complexity as well as the acquisition of complex clauses in child language and the grammaticalization processes leading to syntactic complexity. These studies illustrate the varied aspects involved in clause combining and help to understand how syntactic complexity works and evolves in the world’s languages, how it varies across languages, how it is influenced by language contact, how it is acquired. As such, this book gives the opportunity for readers to expand both their typological and their theoretical knowledge about syntactic complexity in a variety of languages.

Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1614517908
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (145 download)

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Book Synopsis Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces by : Andreas Trotzke

Download or read book Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces written by Andreas Trotzke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntactic complexity has always been a matter of intense investigation in formal linguistics. Since complex syntax is clearly evidenced by sentential embedding and since embedding of one clause/phrase in another is taken to signal recursivity of the grammar, the capacity of computing syntactic complexity is of central interest to the recent hypothesis that syntactic recursion is the defining property of natural language. In the light of more recent claims according to which complex syntax is not a universal property of all living languages, the issue of how to detect and define syntactic complexity has been revived with a combination of classical and new arguments. This volume contains contributions about the formal complexity of natural language, about specific issues of clausal embedding, and about syntactic complexity in terms of grammar-external interfaces in the domain of language acquisition.

Complexity in Language

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107054370
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Complexity in Language by : Salikoko S. Mufwene

Download or read book Complexity in Language written by Salikoko S. Mufwene and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about dynamical, social-interactional aspects of the emergence of complexity in language, explained by linguists, cognitivists, and modelers.

Diachronic Slavonic Syntax

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110531437
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Diachronic Slavonic Syntax by : Björn Hansen

Download or read book Diachronic Slavonic Syntax written by Björn Hansen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is dedicated to the study of the causes and mechanisms of syntactic change in Slavonic languages, including internally motivated syntactic change, syntactic change under contact conditions (structural convergence, pattern replication, shift-induced transfer etc.): It also explores metalinguistic factors such as ideologically driven selection and propagation of syntactic structures.

Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199545219
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

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Book Synopsis Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable by : Geoffrey Sampson

Download or read book Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable written by Geoffrey Sampson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book challenges the idea that languages are equally complex. Eighteen scholars look at evidence from a wide range of times and places. They consider the links between linguistic structure and change and social complexity. Their conclusions challenge conventional ideas about the nature of language and contemporary theory.

The Diachrony of Grammar

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027268886
Total Pages : 928 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis The Diachrony of Grammar by : T. Givón

Download or read book The Diachrony of Grammar written by T. Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The case-studies assembled in these two volumes span a lifetime of research into the diachrony of grammar. That is, into the rise and fall of syntactic constructions and their attendant grammatical morphology. While focused squarely on the data, the studies are nonetheless cast in an explicit theoretical perspective – adaptive, developmental, variationist. Taken as a whole, this work constitutes a frontal assault on Ferdinand de Saussure's corrosive legacy in linguistics. Over the years, reviewers slapped the author's wrist periodically for having dared to commit that most heinous of sins against de Saussure's hallowed legacy – panchronic grammar. In this work he pleads guilty, having never seen a piece of synchronic data that didn't reek, to high heaven, of the diachrony that gave it rise. Reek in two distinct ways: first with the frozen relics of the past that prompt us to reconstruct prior diachronic states; and second with the synchronic variation that hints at ongoing change. Conversely, the author confesses to having never seen a diachronic explanation that did not hinge on the synchronic principles – Carnap's general propositions – that govern language behavior. The synchrony and diachrony of grammar are twin faces of the same coin. To study one without the other is to gut both. By understanding how synchronic grammars come into being we also understand the cognitive, communicative, neurological and developmental universals that constrain diachronic change – and through it synchronic typology.

Language, Corpora, and Technology in Applied Linguistics

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Publisher : Frontiers Media SA
ISBN 13 : 2832539696
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (325 download)

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Book Synopsis Language, Corpora, and Technology in Applied Linguistics by : Muhammad Afzaal

Download or read book Language, Corpora, and Technology in Applied Linguistics written by Muhammad Afzaal and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-11-27 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As culture and society has become more digitalized, especially when computer science and digital technologies have entered a new era in the twenty-first century, translation studies began to utilize a wide range of tools to enhance its reading of texts and contexts, without which translation both as a practice and as a theorization could barely persist. It has become more apparent that two extreme poles between macro and micro visions have formed the diversified terrains of translation studies. On the one hand, technologies like NLP, topic modeling, network analysis and data visualization make distant reading become possible, thus allowing us to have a paradigmatic view of how human’s ideas, beliefs, values, knowledge and even emotions have spread in some patterns across cultural, geographical and language divides in world history. On the other hand, corpus methods, such as the use of keywords, collocates and concordance lines changed the way by which texts were closely read from linear to vertical. With microscope like corpus tools, we could go deeper into the texture for perception of nuanced meaning. While considering a fact that translation is seldom mono modal in conveying meaning, we have to reconceptualize context as a multimodal environment where audio, visual and other resources interact to convey and make meaning. With regard to the fast development of digital technology, translation studies take an active role in gaining an enhanced capability in promoting transformation. Complexity has been favored in terms of theoretical framework and methodology. New questions are asked; old ones revisited with novel tools; but more areas wait to be cultivated and more questions to be approached by combining quantitative and qualitative methods. We could ask if digital technologies would bring new innovation to study of translation history, a heavily-walled land for traditional humanists who tend to repeat “so-what” to question the less significance of data-driven studies. The idea of high-quality machine translation has become so realistic in today’s market that translation educators have to face the shock wave it brought to translation learners and practitioners and rethink the relation between human translators and algorithms. Machine-translation-assisted communication could help remove boundaries for better communication; but at the same time, it also creates conflicts and leads to confrontation. Thus understood, it is imperative to give a concerned attention to digital translation studies, that is, to study translation by resorting to and drawing on the digital technologies. This Research Topic is intended to promote current directions and new developments in cross-disciplinary critical discourse research. We welcome papers which, from a critical-analytical perspective, deal with contemporary social, scientific, political, economic, or professional discourses and genres. Papers addressing the highlighted topics are especially welcome. In giving weight to these topics, we wish to call to attention some of the most pressing problems currently facing the world.

The Register-Functional Approach to Grammatical Complexity

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000481921
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis The Register-Functional Approach to Grammatical Complexity by : Douglas Biber

Download or read book The Register-Functional Approach to Grammatical Complexity written by Douglas Biber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together the authors' previous research with new work on the Register-Functional (RF) approach to grammatical complexity, offering a unified theoretical account for its further study. The book traces the development of the RF approach from its foundations in two major research strands of linguistics: the study of sociolinguistic variation and the text-linguistic study of register variation. Building on this foundation, the authors demonstrate the RF framework at work across a series of corpus-based research studies focused specifically on grammatical complexity in English. The volume highlights early work exploring patterns of grammatical complexity in present-day spoken and written registers as well as subsequent studies which extend this research to historical patterns of register variation and the application of RF research to the study of writing development for L1 and L2 English university students. Taken together, along with the addition of introductory chapters connecting the different studies, the volume offers readers with a comprehensive resource to better understand the RF approach to grammatical complexity and its implications for future research. The volume will appeal to students and scholars with research interests in either descriptive linguistics or applied linguistics, especially those interested in grammatical complexity and empirical, corpus-based approaches.

Challenges of Anglophone Language(s), Literatures and Cultures

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443861472
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Challenges of Anglophone Language(s), Literatures and Cultures by : Alena Kačmárová

Download or read book Challenges of Anglophone Language(s), Literatures and Cultures written by Alena Kačmárová and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores scholarly challenges within the fields of Anglophone language, literature, and culture. The section focusing on language details issues falling within two areas: namely, language contact and the language-culture relationship, and stylistic and syntactic perspectives on the English language. The literature part investigates twentieth-century American, English, and Australian literature, dealing with both poetry and prose and discussing topics of identity, gender, metafiction, postmodern conditions, and other relevant theoretical issues in contemporary literature. The culture part treats theoretical approaches in cultural studies that are vital in today’s cultural context, especially in Central European universities, the Irish language and culture, and contemporary cultural phenomena inspired by the growing ubiquity of technological intrusions into various fields of cultural production.

International Journal of Language Studies (IJLS) – volume 7(4)

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Author :
Publisher : Lulu.com
ISBN 13 : 130445973X
Total Pages : 130 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (44 download)

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Book Synopsis International Journal of Language Studies (IJLS) – volume 7(4) by : Mohammad Ali Salmani Nodoushan

Download or read book International Journal of Language Studies (IJLS) – volume 7(4) written by Mohammad Ali Salmani Nodoushan and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Noun Phrase Complexity in English

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139952250
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (399 download)

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Book Synopsis Noun Phrase Complexity in English by : Eva Berlage

Download or read book Noun Phrase Complexity in English written by Eva Berlage and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores noun phrase (NP) complexity in English, showing that it is best accounted for both by a linear and a hierarchical parameter: its length and its type of postmodifier(s). The study is methodologically unique in that it combines univariate and multivariate analyses in an investigation of four different syntactic variables. Drawing on more than three billion words of British and American data, Eva Berlage shows that the length and the structure of the NPs, along with language-external factors such as the regional variety of English, work as powerful determinants of the variation. On a theoretical level, the book reveals that the structural complexity of NPs cannot be sufficiently captured by (phrasal) node counts but that we need to incorporate the degree to which NPs are sentential. The book is designed for researchers and students interested in syntax, language variation, sociolinguistics, structural complexity and the history of English.

Motivations for Research on Linguistic Complexity: Methodology, Theory and Ideology

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Author :
Publisher : Frontiers Media SA
ISBN 13 : 2889762912
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (897 download)

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Book Synopsis Motivations for Research on Linguistic Complexity: Methodology, Theory and Ideology by : Kilu Von Prince

Download or read book Motivations for Research on Linguistic Complexity: Methodology, Theory and Ideology written by Kilu Von Prince and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Patterns and Development in the English Clause System

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 9811028818
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Patterns and Development in the English Clause System by : Clarence Green

Download or read book Patterns and Development in the English Clause System written by Clarence Green and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines in detail the forms and functions of clause combination in English. Using a corpus linguistics methodology, it describes how the English clause system currently behaves, how it has developed over the history of the language, and how the features and properties of English clause combination have important theoretical and empirical significance. Adopting the cognitive-functional Adaptive Approach to grammar, it offers a series of interconnected studies that investigate how English clause combination interacts with the properties of coherence and cohesion in discourse across historical time, as well in contemporary language use. This work contributes to the ever-increasing common ground between corpus linguistics and cognitive-functional linguistics, producing new paths for interdisciplinary research.