Acquisition Of Clause Chaining

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

A Grammar of Nungon is the comprehensive reference grammar of Nungon, a previously-undescribed Papuan language of northeast Papua New Guinea. Hannah Sarvasy provides a rich description of the language in its cultural context, based on original immersion fieldwork.

Explaining the acquisition and processing of relative clauses has long challenged psycholinguistics researchers. The current volume presents a collection of chapters that consider the acquisition of relative clauses with a particular focus on function, typology, and language processing. A diverse range of theoretical approaches and languages are bought to bear on the acquisition of this construction type, making the volume unique in its coverage. The volume will appeal to students and scholars whose interest lies in the acquisition and processing of syntax with a particular focus on complex sentences in crosslinguistic and functionalist perspective.

In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up, the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates, and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous, yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking, clause chaining, nominalization, and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity, as evidenced in subordination.

This collective volume explores clause-linkage strategies in a cross-linguistic perspective with greater emphasis on subordination. Part I presents some theoretical reassessment of syntactic terminologies and distinctive criteria for subordination, as well as typological methods based on sets of variables and statistics allowing cross-linguistic comparability. Part II deals with strategies relating to clause-chaining, conjunctive conjugations, converbial constructions, masdars. Part III centers on the interaction between the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of clause-linking and subordination, in relation to informa-tional structure, to referential hierarchy, and correlative constructions. Part IV presents insights in the clause-linking and subordinating functions of some T.A.M. markers, verbal inflectional morphology and conjugation systems, which may also interact with informa-tional hierarchy, via the backgrounding effects and lack of illocutionary force of some aspect and mood forms. The volume is of particular interest to linguists and typologists working on clause-linkage systems and on the interface between syntax, pragmatics, and semantics.

This volume is dedicated to exploring the crossroads where complex sentences and information management – more specifically information structure and reference tracking – come together. Complex sentences are a highly relevant but understudied domain for studying notions of IS and RT. On the one hand, a complex sentence can be studied as a mini-unit of discourse consisting of two or more elements describing events, situations, or processes, with its own internal information-structural and referential organization. On the other hand, complex sentences can be studied as parts of larger discourse structures, such as narratives or conversations, in terms of how their information-structural characteristics relate to this wider context. The book offers new perspectives for the study of the interaction between complex sentences and information management, and moreover adds typological breadth by focusing on lesser studied languages from several parts of the world.

Switch reference is a grammatical process that marks a referential relationship between arguments of two (or more) verbs. Typically it has been characterized as an inflection pattern on the verb itself, encoding identity or non-identity between subject arguments separately from traditional person or number marking. In the 50 years since William Jacobsen’s coinage of the term, switch reference has evolved from an exotic phenomenon found in a handful of lesser-known languages to a widespread feature found in geographically and linguistically unconnected parts of the world. The growing body of information on the topic raises new theoretical and empirical questions about the development, functions, and nature of switch reference, as well as the internal variation between different switch-reference systems. The contributions to this volume discuss these and other questions for a wide variety of languages from all over the world, and endevaour to demonstrate the full functional and morphosyntactic range of the phenomenon.

Publisher description