Internal Structure Of Verb Meaning

Internal Structure of Verb meaning: A Study of verbs in Tamazight (Berber) makes years of academic research in linguistics available to a wide audience. It is written in such a way that it serves as an introduction to the domains of lexical semantics and the organization of grammar for students. The book investigates the internal structure and the predicate-argument structure of verbs of (change of) state, including unaccusatives, verbs of spatial configuration, causatives, and those traditionally referred to as verbs of quality in the linguistic literature on Tamazight. The Tamazight data investigated is so peculiar that it reveals a lot about the construction and derivation of verb meaning from both the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic views. The analysis provided in this book also shows in a parsimonious and most lucid way how lexical semantics interacts with other syntactic approaches including Government and Binding and the Minimalist program. As most of the literature available on Tamazight is written in French, the author also made a pledge to inform the English-speaking world about the reality of Tamazight not only as a living language, but also as a culture and an identity that is still cherished and defended by its owners across North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt and in some Sub-Saharan countries including Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso in a variety known as Tuareg. Although the language is still spoken by some 40 million people in these two regions, political regimes in these various countries have had enough of a nerve to even deny its existence (see quotes, p. iv). You will be surprised to find out that Sheshonq, the founder of the 22nd dynasty of Pharaohs in Egypt, was an Amazigh (Berber) from Libya; and you will learn about how this millennia-old language has resisted some of the most oppressive tyrants and regimes of our era.

Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics is a comprehensive new reference work aiming to systematically describe all aspects of the study of meaning in language. It synthesizes in one volume the latest scholarly positions on the construction, interpretation, clarification, obscurity, illustration, amplification, simplification, negotiation, contradiction, contraction and paraphrasing of meaning, and the various concepts, analyses, methodologies and technologies that underpin their study. It examines not only semantics but the impact of semantic study on related fields such as morphology, syntax, and typologically oriented studies such as ‘grammatical semantics’, where semantics has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of verbal categories like tense or aspect, nominal categories like case or possession, clausal categories like causatives, comparatives, or conditionals, and discourse phenomena like reference and anaphora. COSE also examines lexical semantics and its relation to syntax, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics; and the study of how ‘logical semantics’ develops and thrives, often in interaction with computational linguistics. As a derivative volume from Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition, it comprises contributions from 150 of the foremost scholars of semantics in their various specializations and draws on 20+ years of development in the parent work in a compact and affordable format. Principally intended for tertiary level inquiry and research, this will be invaluable as a reference work for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics inquiring into the study of meaning and meaning relations within languages. As semantics is a centrally important and inherently cross-cutting area within linguistics it will therefore be relevant not just for semantics specialists, but for most linguistic audiences. The first encyclopedia ever published in this fascinating and diverse field Combines the talents of the world’s leading semantics specialists The latest trends in the field authoritatively reviewed and interpreted in context of related disciplines Drawn from the richest, most authoritative, comprehensive and internationally acclaimed reference resource in the linguistics area Compact and affordable single volume reference format

Second edition of this popular Handbook bringing together stimulating discussions of core English linguistics topics in a single, authoritative volume—includes numerous new and thoroughly updated chapters The second edition of the popular Handbook of English Linguistics brings together stimulating discussions of the core topics in English linguistics in a single, authoritative volume. Written by an international team of experts, the chapters cover syntax, methodology, phonetics and phonology, lexis and morphology, variation, stylistics, and discourse, and also provide discussions of theoretical and descriptive research in the field. The revised edition includes new and updated chapters on English Corpus Linguistics, experimental approaches, complements and adjuncts, English phonology and morphology, lexicography, and more. In-depth yet accessible chapters introduce key areas of English linguistics, discuss relevant research, and suggest future research directions. An important academic contribution to the field, this book: Presents thirty-two in-depth, yet accessible, chapters that discuss new research findings across the field, written by both established and emerging scholars from around the world Builds upon the very successful first edition, published in 2006 Incorporates new trends in English linguistics, including digital research methods and theoretical advances in all subfields Suggests future research directions The Handbook of English Linguistics, 2nd Edition is an essential reference work for researchers and students working in the field of English language and linguistics.

Spanish Verbalisations and the Internal Structure of Lexical Predicates provides the first comprehensive and empirically detailed theoretical analysis of the different ways in which Spanish builds verbs from nouns and adjectives. This book poses questions about the nature of theme vowels, parasynthesis and the structural relation between the three major lexical word classes from within a Neo-Constructionist framework that highlights the correlations between the syntactic and semantic behaviour of verbs and their morphological make up. Provided within are detailed empirical descriptions of each of the nine major ways of building lexical verbs in Spanish, as well as an integral analysis of those patterns that shows the significance of the contrast between them and their uses to address some foundational questions in morphological theory. Spanish Verbalisations will be of particular interest to researchers in formal linguistics and Spanish. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

This handbook deals with research into the nature of events, and how we use language to describe events. The study of event structure over the past 60 years has been one of the most successful areas of lexical semantics, uniting insights from morphology and syntax, lexical and compositional semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence to develop insightful theories of events and event descriptions. This volume provides accessible introductions to major topics and ongoing debates in event structure research, exploring what events are, how we perceive them, how we reason with them, and the role they play in the organization of grammar and discourse. The chapters are divided into four parts: the first covers metaphysical issues related to events; the second is concerned with the relationship between event structure and grammar; the third is a series of crosslinguistic case studies; and the fourth deals with links to cognitive science and artificial intelligence more broadly. The book is strongly interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science, and will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

Causative change-of-state verbs like 'to open', 'to fill', and 'to wake' are central to both recent theories of grammatical development and theories of lexical structure. This book focuses on how German-speaking children learn the meaning of change-of-state verbs. It offers a thorough characterization of the acquisition of German, embedded in a crosslinguistic perspective. The author provides a comprehensive review of the acquisition literature on that topic and introduces a new account as to how the meaning of these verbs can be learned. The empirical backbone of the investigation are a set of carefully designed experimental studies.

This is really two books in one: a valuable reference resource, and a groundbreaking case study that represents a new approach to constructional semantics. It presents a detailed descriptive survey, using extensive examples collected from the Internet, of German verb constructions in which the expressions durch (‘through’), über (‘over’), unter (‘under’), and um (‘around’) occur either as inseparable verb prefixes or as separable verb particles. Based on that evidence, the author argues that the prefixed verb constructions and particle verb constructions themselves have meaning, and that this meaning involves subjective construal processes rather than objective information. The constructions prompt us to distribute focal attention according to patterns that can be articulated in terms of Talmy’s notion of “perspectival modes”. Among the other topics that play an important role in the analysis are incremental themes, reflexive trajectors, fictive motion, “multi-directional paths”, and “accusative landmarks”.

Words are the building blocks of language. An understanding of how words are learned is central to any theory of language acquisition. This volume looks at early verb learning, focusing on the foundations for verb learning, and how these foundations intersect with the burgeoning language system.