Information Structure And Reference Tracking In Complex Sentences

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.

This volume brings together recent scholarship addressing a number of significant issues in linguistic theory and description, including verb classification, case marking, comparative constructions, noun phrase structure, clause linkage and reference-tracking in discourse. These topics are discussed with respect to a wide range of languages, including Bamunka (Bantu), Biblical Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, Pitjantjatjara (Australia), Russian and Taiwan Sign Language. The theoretical perspective employed in these analyses is that of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a theory which strives to describe language structure and grammatical phenomena in terms of the interaction of syntax, semantics and discourse-pragmatics. RRG differs from other parallel-architecture, constructionally-oriented theories in important ways, particularly with respect to the ability to formulate cross-linguistic generalizations. The ability of RRG to facilitate the formulation of cross-linguistic generalizations is exemplified well in the contributions to this volume. As such, this text makes important theoretical and descriptive contributions to contemporary linguistic discussions.

Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a theory of language in which linguistic structures are accounted for in terms of the interplay of discourse, semantics and syntax. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this Handbook provides a field-defining overview of RRG. Assuming no prior knowledge, it introduces the framework step-by-step, and includes a pedagogical guide for instructors. It features in-depth discussions of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, including treatments of lexical and grammatical categories, the syntax of simple clauses and complex sentences, and how the linking of syntax with semantics and discourse works in each of these domains. It illustrates RRG's contribution to the study of language acquisition, language change and processing, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, and also contains five grammatical sketches which show how RRG analyses work in practice. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how grammar interfaces with meaning.

The volume is a collection of papers which apply Role & Reference Grammar (RRG) to African languages. RRG is a functional theory of syntax which has been developed on the basis of two leading questions: First, how would a syntactic theory look like which starts from 'exotic' languages rather than English? Second, how can the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics in different grammatical systems best modelled and explained? Although RRG took linguistic diversity serious from its very beginning, African languages have been underrepresented in the development of the theory. Given the sheer number African languages deserve a wider coverage in a syntactic theory which takes linguistic diversity seriously. The volume is intended to fill this gap and comprises a selection of papers which investigate different aspects related to the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface of different African languages. This includes: argument doubling and dislocation in iziZulu, complex referential phrases in Gĩkũyũ, serial verb constructions in Igbo, locative complements in Hausa and Zarma Chiine and focus constructions in Emai. The papers will extent the current RRG approach to new languages and phenomena.

This book is a grammatical description of Koromu (or Kesawai), an endangered and previously undescribed language in Papua New Guinea's Ramu Valley. Koromu belongs to the Madang subgroup of the putative Trans New Guinea family. The grammar covers the structures of the language, with an emphasis on information structure. Geographic, linguistic, social and historical setting are described as well as phonology and morphophonology. The book examines the morphosyntactic structures of the language, covering basic clause structure, word classes, phrase structures and structures of spatial reference, verbal morphology, serial verb constructions, experiencer object constructions and the various constructions of clause combining (clause chaining, complement clauses, adverbial and relative clauses). Chapters also deal with noun phrase (non)realisation and morphological signaling of prominence and show how links and tails are encoded grammatically. Appendices contain texts and a wordlist.

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.

This collection presents current work on discourse structuring from a theoretical as well as a processing perspective. The main objectives are the investigation of appropriate levels of analysis for discourse segmentation and criteria for the identification of basic discourse units.

This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties. In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts, the strength of the study lies in the critical approach it develops to the common definition of clefts. Several commonly used criteria for clefts are applied to the corpus data, revealing that these criteria often lead to ambiguous results. The reasons for this ambiguity are explored, thus leading to a better understanding of what constitutes a cleft. In this sense, the analysis will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.