Sentence Adverbials In A Functional Description

The author presents empirical arguments in favor of a joint syntactico-semantic treatment, within the framework of a functional generative description, of a range of adverbial expressions which should be viewed as belonging to a single, lexically heterogeneous but functionally homogeneous, class exhibiting scoping properties and functioning as 'complementation of attitude' (CA). These CA-expressions do not only share their underlying functional properties but also certain surface-syntax properties.

Annotation "The handbook provides an overview of the current status of this research. In its first volume, the handbook begins by presenting the historical background of the theories in which the conceptions are rooted and then goes on to deal with the individual ele."

Inspired by the ideas of the Prague School, the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements, from intonation (for speech) to context. A central feature of FSP is communicative dynamism. Jan Firbas discusses the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism over sentence elements, which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence. He examines also the relation of theme and rheme to, and implementation by, syntactic components. Special attention is paid to the relation between FSP and word order. The second part of the book deals with spoken communication and considers the place of intonation in the interplay of FSP factors, establishing the concept of prosodic prominence. It tackles the relationship between the distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism as determined by the interplay of the non-prosodic FSP factors and the distribution of degrees of prosodic prominence as brought about by intonation.

This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.

A Communicative Grammar of English has long been established as a grammar innovative in approach, reliable in coverage, and clear in its explanations. This fully revised and redesigned third edition provides up-to-date and accessible help to teachers, advanced learners and undergraduate students of English. Part One looks at the way English grammar varies in different types of English, such as ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, ‘spoken’ and ‘written’; Part Two focuses on the uses of grammar rather than on grammatical structure and Part Three provides a handy alphabetically arranged guide to English grammar. A new workbook, The Communicative Grammar of English Workbook also accompanies this edition.

The volume presents the author’s articles written in the last fifteen years, dealing with the interaction between syntax, functional sentence perspective (information structure) and text in present-day English. It is divided into five parts, I Syntactic Constancy, II Syntax FSP Interface, III FSP and Semantics, IV Syntax, FSP, Text and V Style, which reveal the two facets of functional sentence perspective: syntactic structures as realization forms of the carriers of FSP functions, and the connection of FSP with the level of text. The first and the last two parts frame the content of the volume in treating the role of functional sentence perspective at the syntactic and the textual levels. At the former, FSP is investigated as a potential factor of syntactic divergence between English and Czech, at the latter the role of FSP is examined with respect to theme development, text build-up and style. The points discussed in the other parts concern, among others, the hierarchical relationship between syntax and FSP, the question of potentiality in FSP structure, different realization forms of FSP structure and FSP functions, general and specific questions of word order, with major attention paid to the role of semantics.

Text readability is at the core of successful reading instruction and language learning. To counteract the challenges of complex reading content, text leveling is a vital necessity for readers with limited language access. A transdisciplinary analysis of reading development and linguistic interrelations builds the theoretical foundation of the base-1 method. This method focuses solely on structural and functional text elements on the word, sentence and cohesion level. But this book also discusses the significance of other prevalent readability factors, such as the reader ́s language knowledge or socio-cultural background. The base-1 method is designed to level early reading texts in German and other alphabetic languages. Experimental tests with a German immersion population has led to a preliminary calibration to demonstrate the validity of this approach. Bernd Nuss ist erfahrener Immersionslehrer in verschiedenen Programmen, die sich über Nord-, Zentral- und Südamerika erstrecken. An der E. E. Waddell Language Academy wirkt er schulintern als Immersion Facilitator, kooperiert mit Bildungsorganisationen und betreut die Praktika von Gaststudierenden an der Schule. Bernd Nuss has worked as an educator and facilitator in English and German language immersion programs all over the Americas and in Europe. In this capacity, he has also been collaborating as a researcher with universities and other educational institutions in Europe, Asia, and the USA.

Although the Germanic and Romance languages are two branches of the same language family and although both have developed the adjective as a separate syntactic and morphological category, the syntax, morphology, and interpretation of adjectives is by no means the same in these two language groups, and there is even variation within each of the language groups. One of the main aims of this volume is to map the differences and similarities in syntactic behavior, morphology, and meaning of the Germanic and Romance adjective and to find an answer to the following question: Are the (dis)similarities the result of autonomous developments in each of the two branches of the Indo-European language family, or are they caused by language contact?