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This volume presents the results of the international symposium Chunks in Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John Sinclair's contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century. The main theme of the book, highlighting important aspects of Sinclair's work, is the idiomatic character of language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated items) as extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's enormous impact on research in this field, the volume contains two contributions which deal explicitly with his work, including material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that,...
Compounding is a highly productive word-formation pattern in the English language. In light of this, it is counterintuitive that English lacks a general word-formation rule for genuine verbal compounds and those appear to be very rare. But for what reason does verbal composition disqualify as a productive word-formation pattern in English? How are verbal pseudo-compounds processed and what does this imply about the way in which newly coined genuine verbal compounds would be processed? What are the factors that determine and influence the processing of English verbal compounds and pseudo-compounds? This book adopts a fresh cognitive linguistic perspective on verbal compounding and investigates the above questions with the help of experimental methods. It offers a novel and cognitive linguistically based model of mental access to verbal compounds and tries to complement the prevailing structural and typological approaches by insights on language processing.
This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual langu...
The book introduces the reader to the central areas of English linguistics. The main sections are: the English language and linguistics - sounds - meaning-carrying units - sentences: models of grammar - meaning - utterances - variation. Notably, the book is written from a foreign student's perspective of the English language, i.e. aspects relevant to foreign language teaching receive particular attention. A great deal of emphasis is put on the insights to be gained from the analysis of corpora, especially with respect to the idiomatic character of language (idiom principle, valency approach). In addition, the text offers basic facts about the history of the language and elaborates on the dif...
An original study of the formation of compounds, and what syntactic, structural and semantic criteria determine their spelling and usage.
Dependency analysis is increasingly used in computational linguistics and cognitive science. Surprisingly, compared with studies based on phrase structures, quantitative methods and dependency structure are rarely integrated in research.This is the first book that collects original contributions which quantitatively analyze dependency structures across different languages and text genres.
This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the Function Theory of Lexicography, which originated at the Aarhus School of Business (Aarhus University). Function Theory considers dictionaries to be tools that are constructed for assisting specific users with punctual needs in specific usage situations, e.g. communicative-oriented situations and cognitive-oriented situations. The book's main focus is on defending the independent academic status of lexicography and its corollary: The process of designing, compiling and updating (specialised) online dictionaries needs a theoretical framework that addresses general and specific aspects. The former are common to all types of information tool...
This book is a collection of eleven research articles which altogether serve as a contribution to the study of verb complementation and other constructions, an area of investigation which bridges observations on the spectrum of lexico-grammar, syntax, and semantics. In terms of methodological approaches and the types of linguistic patterns examined, the chapters cast light on the subject from a variety of perspectives, and the volume is structured in a way that groups the various perspectives under three main themes according to their main focus and/or methodological approaches, namely: the semantic and functional descriptions of constructions; the investigation into the distribution of complementation patterns; and the study of innovative patterns in ESL contexts and languages other than English. All chapters in this volume employ data from large electronic corpora where possible – the BNC, COCA, COHA, GloWbE, NOW, and newly compiled corpora representing regional varieties of English.
This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.
This book provides a comprehensive typological account of voice syncretism, focusing on resemblance in formal verbal marking between two or more of the following seven voices: passives, antipassives, reflexives, reciprocals, anticausatives, causatives, and applicatives. It covers voice syncretism from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and has been structured in a manner that facilitates convenient access to information about specific patterns of voice syncretism, their distribution and development. The book is based on a survey of voice syncretism in 222 geographically and genealogically diverse languages, but also thoroughly revisits previous research on the phenomenon. Voice syn...