A Typological Study Of The Existential Clause

This book investigates the existential clause (EC) from a cross-linguistic perspective and within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The prototypical EC in the less familiar languages is identified through its functional equivalents in the more familiar ones, which share the common semantic basis of ‘there exists something in some location’. Topics addressed include the morpho-syntactic features of the EC, the subject of the EC, the definiteness effect and its manifestations in the EC, the EC as impersonals, the distinction between entity- vs. event-existentials, and the EC and its related constructions. Drawing on both cross-linguistic observations based on the language sample and in-depth investigations in particular languages (e.g., in Chinese and English), the study aims to unravel how the lexico-grammar of EC is related to its meanings and functions, that is, how meaning is realised in form. The title will appeal to scholars and students in the field of linguistics, especially functional linguistics, and syntax.

This collection of articles offers descriptions of the negation system in 16 languages. As not much is known about negation systems in non-European languages, the first aim of the volume is to provide data on various aspects on negation; for all articles these data were collected on the basis of the same questionnaire.Most work on this subject deals with syntactic aspects of negation; this volume attempts to include pragmatic and semantic issues as well, such as the expression of negative indefinites, interaction of negation and quantifiers, the scope of negation, and the choice of a particular form of negation in cases where there are several ways to express this.For a number of less-known languages descriptions offering a wealth of data are presented here, and in the articles about well-studied languages, new data and analyses of more complicated issues are provided.

The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the book of Ben Sira can be properly understood only in the light of all contemporary Second Temple period sources. With this in mind, 20 experts from Israel, Europe, and the United States convened in Jerusalem in December 2008. These proceedings of the Twelfth Orion Symposium and Fifth International Symposium on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira examine the Hebrew of the Second Temple period as reflected primarily in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the book of Ben Sira, Late Biblical Hebrew, and Mishnaic Hebrew. Additional contemporaneous sources—inscriptions, Greek and Latin transcriptions, and the Samaritan oral and reading traditions of the Pentateuch—are also noted.

In this book, Cinque takes a generative perspective on typological questions relating to word order and to the syntax of relative clauses. In particular, Cinque looks at: the position of the Head vis à vis the relative clause in relation to the position of the verb vis à vis his object; a general cross-linguistic analysis of correlatives; the need to distinguish a sentence-grammar, from a discourse-grammar, type of non-restrictives (with languages differing as to whether they possess both, one, the other, or neither); a selective type of extraction from relative clauses; and a tentative sketch of a more ample work in progress on a unified analysis of externally headed, internally headed, and headless relative clauses.

Existential sentences in the world's languages tend to develop specific morphological, syntactic, and lexical properties. The present work offers a contrastive functional analysis of these constructions in two typologically unrelated languages, English and Lithuanian. The study focuses on the relationship between the syntactic structure of different existential sentence types and their meaning; it also explores the semantic and pragmatic parameters relevant to the structural differences within a single language and across the two compared languages. Most importantly, a new definition of the existential sentence, which takes into account both semantic and syntactic criteria, is proposed for Lithuanian. The findings are drawn on the basis of the corpus and highlight conspicuous differences in the linguistic representations of the construction in the two languages. With respect to Lithuanian, communicative word order variations, language-specific structures (the BKI and the impersonal passive), and a wider use of lexical verbs present an area of special interest.

A typological study of the rare marked-S language type which overtly marks the single argument of intransitive verbs (S) while one of the arguments of transitive verbs (either A or P) is left zero-coded. The formal (overt versus zero-coding) as well as functional aspects (range of uses of individual case forms) of the phenomenon are treated. The book covers languages from the Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages of Africa and of the North America Pacific Northwest and Pacific regions.

The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This volume deals with negation in the Uralic language family in a typological perspective. As in no other major language family before, a comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for the chapters documenting negation in 17 languages. Most of them are endangered. The chapters highlight negative auxiliary verbs—the special Uralic feature—and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses, as well as negative replies, negative indefinites, abessives/caritives/privatives, scope, polarity and emphatic negation. Selected aspects of negation, such as negative indefinites, negation of non-verbal predicates and information structure, are discussed in more detail in five further chapters. The book brings new typologically informed perspectives on negation in the Uralic family, and it provides valuable data and insights for any linguist working on negation.

This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series will aim for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end will strive for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The languages of publication are English, German, and French. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will be imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume will be a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editor of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editor only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume.