Passive Prototypes, Topicality and Conceptual Space (original) (raw)
Related papers
Topicality, Predicate Prototypes, and Conceptual Space
Journal of Universal Language, 2005
This paper has the goal of investigating the nature of membership within the category 'passive' and cross-linguistic comparison of constructions, 'passive' and otherwise. Topicality measures were collected from the Uppsala Corpus of Russian for passive and active uses of the Russian verbs pisat'/napisat' 'to write,' davat'/dat' 'to give,' and zabyvat'/zabyt' 'to forget.' Croft's (2001) notion of plotting constructions in 'conceptual space' is exploited as a means of cross-linguistic comparison using these topicality measures. Examining the conceptual space of various voice constructions with these Russian verbs, Croft's generalizations are upheld, their position being consistent whether Referential Distance or Topic Persistence is used as a measure. Finally, data from other typological discourse studies is plotted, noting where various voice constructions pattern, and how this data fits into Croft's model.
Linguistic Typology: a Short History and Some Current Issues (2007)
Tidsskrift for Sprogforskning 5, 1-18 (now called: Skandinaviske Sprogstudier). Online: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/tfs/issue/view/38, 2008
This issue of Tidsskrift for Sprogforskning contains written versions of the four invited presentations for the 7th Research Colloquium ‘Sprog på Statsbiblioteket’ (30 November 2006), which was devoted to Linguistic Typology. Typology is concerned with cross-linguistic variation; more specifically, it investigates the range of possible grammatical phenomena that are attested in human language and informs us about the way these phenomena hang together (tendencies, correlations). Typology also attempts to account for the attested frequency and distribution of grammatical phenomena, and to explain where the variation stops, i.e. why certain logically possible grammatical phenomena do not occur (for example, why there are no languages with basic order Numeral – Adjective – Demonstrative – Noun in the noun phrase, as in ‘three big these dogs’). By way of an introduction to this issue, I will give a brief outline of the history of linguistic typology in the last 50 years (mainly concentrating on SYNTACTIC TYPOLOGY) and mention some recent developments and current issues in the field, such as the problem of cross-linguistic identification.
CONSTRUCTIONS AND LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY
Anton Zimmerling, Ekaterina Lyutikova. Constructions and Linguistic Typology // Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2023. Vol. 6, Iss. 2, 13-30., 2023
This paper reconsiders the notion of construction and its applications in linguistic typology. Constructions are language-specific parts of morphosyntax. Claims about mental lexicon and mental grammar are orthogonal to the typology of constructions. The claims that all constructions are language-specific and all constructions are idiomatic are potentially conflicting. If one accepts the hypothesis that there is no variation in logical structure, the meaning of most constructions can be decomposed into the universal component directly or indirectly based on logical categories, for example, the meaning of yes-no question, the meaning of verification, the meaning of goal, the meaning of concession, and the non-universal component resulting from language-specific partition of semantic structure. Typology provides the diagnostics for classes of comparable constructions, while cross-linguistic comparison of isolated constructions explores the idea that they can belong to the same class if they are derived the same way.
The syntactic role of discourse-related features (2009)
2009
This paper focuses on the syntactic role of the features related to discourse and information structure. I argue that discourse-related features are encoded in syntax, projecting their own phrase structure, and are fundamental in accounting for cross-linguistic variation. Languages differ in the morphological realisation of the discourse-related features (i.e. whether they have topic and focus markers), in the extent to which they exhibit word order alternations and whether they employ syntactic operations which are strictly dependent on the discourse/informational properties of the sentence, as well as in the distinction between different information-structure categories characterised by different grammatical properties. All these differences can be reduced to the syntactic role of discourse-related functional projections, in particular to the overt realisation of their heads and to the kind of movement they trigger, obeying the rigid hierarchical constraints of a uniform functional clause structure, and univocally specifying interpretive instructions to the interfaces. Under this view, this paper offers an analysis of dislocation and fronting phenomena in Romance, which entails that variation in these processes is correlated with the activation and the attraction properties of the functional projections encoding information-structure distinctions.
Linguistic Research, 2020
Recent research on discourse markers (DMs) has been increasingly paying attention to their hypothesized functional asymmetry depending on their position at left- and right-periphery (LP and RP) and the role of prosody, among others. Drawing upon contemporary corpus data in Korean, this paper argues that the LP/RP position does influence the function, yet it is not uniquely correlated with subjectification/ intersubjectification. It further argues that prosodic features indeed play a crucial role in determining DM functions, yet such prosodic features are not unique in DMs only but are in consonance with the patterns in general language use. In addition to these two determinants, there are other factors such as the semantics of source constructions, which serves as the bases of pragmatic inferences in the discursive and interactional contexts. Since pragmatic inferences are largely based on conceptual metonymy, DM functions form a conceptual network by virtue of their relatedness.
Grammaticalization or pragmaticalization of discourse markers?: More than a terminological issue
Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2015
Discourse markers are a crucial component of natural language, which is why a description and account of their diachronic evolution must be part of our linguistic models. However, researchers have different views on whether this evolution should be accounted for in terms of grammaticalization and/or pragmaticalization. In this paper, we provide a structured overview of the accounts given for the diachronic evolution of DMs. It is shown that the different positions encountered in the literature can be brought back to diverging views on the conceptualization of grammar, the categorization of discourse markers, and the weight that is put on specific processes involved in the diachronic change. We provide case studies for each of the positions that we present and discuss.