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The Finnish Case System
The Finnish language is perhaps best known for its rich case system. Depending on the definition of a case, Finnish has at least fourteen, possibly fifteen or even more cases. This volume is the first comprehensive English-language account of the Finnish case system, focusing primarily on its semantic functions. This collection of articles presents an up-to-date overview of the Finnish case system, analyses central subsystems within it, and offers data-based analyses of the functions of individual cases. The authors approach Finnish cases from different perspectives within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The volume also addresses more general topics, such as the notion of case, questions of polysemy, the traditional division of cases into grammatical and semantic, the relationship between inflection and derivation as well as the role of inflection in the structuring of the categories of adpositions and adverbs. The book will be of interest to linguists and students as well as to those readers who are not familiar with cognitive linguistics. The analyses presented here will be relevant to anyone investigating the essence of case and the emergence of linguistic meaning.
Diachrony of differential argument marking
While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages code the same grammatical roles differentially. The variables which condition the differential argument marking (or DAM) pertain to various properties of the NP (such as animacy or definiteness) or to event semantics or various properties of the clause. While the main line of current research on DAM is mainly synchronic the volume tackles the diachronic perspective. The tenet is that the emergence and the development of differential marking systems provide a different kind of evidence for the understanding of the phenomenon. The present volume consists of 18 chapters and primarily brings together diachronic case studies on particular languages or language groups including e.g. Finno-Ugric, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages. The volume also includes a position paper, which provides an overview of the typology of different subtypes of DAM systems, a chapter on computer simulation of the emergence of DAM and a chapter devoted to the cross-linguistic effects of referential hierarchies on DAM.
Grammar from the Human Perspective
The papers of this volume investigate how grammar codes the subjective viewpoint of human language users, that is, how grammar reflects human conceptualization. Some of the articles deal with spatial relations and locations. They discuss how basic attributes of human conceptualization are encoded in the grammatical expression of spatial relations. Other articles concern embodiment in language, showing how conceptualization is mediated by one's embodied experience of the world and ourselves. Finally, some of the articles discuss coding of person focusing on the subjectivity of conceptualization and how it is reflected in grammar. The articles show that conceptualization reflects the speaker's construal of the situation, and furthermore, that it is intersubjective because it reflects the speaker's understanding of the relations between the speech act participants. The papers deal with Finnish, utilizing the rich resources of Finnish grammar to contribute to issues in contemporary linguistics and in particular to Cognitive Grammar.
Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case
Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to considerable advances in research, the fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive elements across European languages is far from being well-described, let alone well-understood. There are two main obstacles to this: on the one hand, theoretical linguistics and typological linguistics are fragmented in different methodological approaches that hinder the full sharing of cross-theoretic advances; on the other hand, partitive elements have been analyzed in restricted linguistic environments, which would benefit from a broader perspective. The a...
Existential Constructions across Languages
This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction), and investigates (ii) the relationships between locative, existential, and information structure, (iii) the quantification of the pivot and (iv) the issue of negative existentials. It brings together different and complementary approaches (functional, cognitive, pragmatic, typological, comparative, diachronic, philosophical) based on a wide variety of data sources. The contributions illustrate how the so-called existential construction can take a variety of forms – more or less grammaticalized – and functions – ranging from the expression of literal existence to that of localization and discursive focus – in a wide range of languages. The book will be valuable for linguists, researchers or students, interested in the cross-linguistic manifestations of existential constructions at the interface between syntax, semantics and information structure.
World Lexicon of Grammaticalization
Based on analysis of more than 1,000 languages, this volume reconstructs more than 500 processes of grammatical change in the languages of the world.
Polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics
In Cognitive Linguistics, polysemy is regarded as a categorizing phenomenon; i.e., related meanings of words form categories centering around a prototype and bearing family resemblance relations to one another. Under this polysemy = categorization view, the scope of investigation has been gradually broadened from categories in the lexical and lexico-grammatical domain to morphological, syntactic, and phonological categories. The papers in this volume illustrate the importance of polysemy in describing these various categories. A first set of papers analyzes the polysemy of such lexical categories as prepositions and scalar particles, and looks at the import of polysemy in frame-based dictionary definitions. A second set shows that noun classes, case, and locative prefixes constitute meaningful and polysemous categories. Three papers, then, pay attention to polysemy from a psychological perspective, looking for psychological evidence of polysemy in lexical categories.
Analogy and Contrast in Language
Within cognitive and functional approaches to language structure and grammaticality, analogy and contrast represent two fundamental human cognitive capacities, which, up to now, have mostly been examined separately. This volume seeks to bridge that gap and in doing so it brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research in the field. The chapters in this book examine analogy and contrast across a variety of languages (English, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian), for different language phenomena (constructions, lexical semantics, morphology, sentence structure, text organization), and with the use of various methods (corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, experimental methods, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis). This state-of-the-art research presented in the book should be of interest to specialists within Cognitive Linguistics, corpus linguistics, construction grammar, discourse analysis, translation studies, metaphor research, and cross-cultural research.
Syntax in the Making
Research on the interplay between language structure and language use has shown that grammar is shaped, maintained, and modified by language use. In this view, then, grammar is not seen as existing apart from language use, but rather as a set of recurrent, grammaticized patterns of discourse. This book focuses on syntactic structuring in Finnish from the viewpoint of language use. The author sets out to study syntactic structures in their local contexts in order to discover the more global patterns and constraints on the use of these structures. The coding strategies point to the clause core as the locus of syntactic structuring: this is where syntactic relations emerge most clearly. It is shown that the key to understanding the coding of the core syntactic relations is the category of person. The clause core also shows strong intonational unity as it is most often presented in one intonation unit. Furthermore, analysis of spoken discourse shows the robustness of the category of noun phrase, both as a clausal constituent and as a free syntactic unit, the free NP.
Mental States: Language and cognitive structure
The contributions to this volume focus on what language and language use reveals about cognitive structure and underlying cognitive categories. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking essays from linguists and psychologists within this volume investigate the insights conceptual categorization can give into the organization and structure of the mind and specific mental states. Topics and linguistic phenomena discussed include narratives and story telling, language development, figurative language, linguistic categorization, linguistic relativity, and the linguistic coding of mental states such as perceptions and beliefs. With contributions at the forefront of current debate, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in language and the cognitive structures that support it.
