Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Syntax

First published in 1997, this book addresses the question: What is the interpretation of English there-existential construction? One of the principal goals is to develop an interpretation for the construction that will specifically address other properties of the postcopular DP. After outlining the problem, the author goes on to present a syntactic motivation for the claim that the postcopular DP is the sole complement to the existential predicate, as well as for the claim that the optional final phrase is a predictive adjunct. In chapter 3 the interpretation for the basic...

In the mid 20th century the people known as the Logbara were a diverse collection of groups fleeing from different parts and having different socail and political affiliations - essentially refugees in search of a new home. At the time that this book was originally published in 1960, existing conditions, resulting from the past history of Logbara, made it difficult to decide which dialect fo the language to choose for this analysis. The grammar as a whole in its features, details and rules is common to all parts of the country but the author chose the dialect spoken around Arua, the...

First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists’ failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine’s arguments by proposing universal ‘semantic primitives’ or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word...

First published in 2000, this book is about sentences containing the word or, dealing primarily with sentences in which or conjoins clauses, but also some cases in which it conjoins expressions of other categories. The author aims to give an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction, and to use this account in explaining the behaviour of presupposition projection and of anaphora in disjunctive sentences. The author begins by giving an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction before turning to the...

Structure and Meaning in English is designed to help teachers of English develop an understanding of those aspects of English which are especially relevant for learners who speak other languages.

Using corpus research, Graeme Kennedy cuts to the heart of what is important in the teaching of English. The book provides pedagogically- relevant information about English at the levels of sounds, words, sentences and texts. It draws attention to those linguistic items and processes which research has shown are typically hard for learners and which lead to errors.

Each...

First published in 1994, this book is concerned with certain kinds of wh-clauses, whose interpretations are easily and, the author argues, plausibly rendered by a logicosemantic analysis on which wh-phrases translate as open sentences, that is, as expressions of the semantically interpreted representation which contain free variables. After a review of influential contemporary analyses of the semantics of questions, concentrating on issues related to the truthconditional interpretation of these constructions, the author goes on to analyse logicosemantic similarities between...

First published in 1987, this book is an attempt to re-establish semiotic on the basis of principles consistent with its past history, rather than the ‘cultural semiotics’ of the European tradition, and especially with the guiding ideas of Peirce and Morris. The book is divided into two parts, with the first two chapters providing the background for the more systematic discussions of signs at different levels taken up in the last three. In the final chapter issues that have become the focus of recent philosophy of language regarding the reference, meaning, and truth of sentences are...

First published in 2000, this book is about sentences containing the word or, dealing primarily with sentences in which or conjoins clauses, but also some cases in which it conjoins expressions of other categories. The author aims to give an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction, and to use this account in explaining the behaviour of presupposition projection and of anaphora in disjunctive sentences. The author begins by giving an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction before turning to the...

First published in 1983, this book represents an effort to lay the groundwork for a general approach to lexical semantics that pays heed to the needs of a theory of discourse interpretation, a theory of compositional semantics, and a theory of lexical rules. The first chapter proposes a basic framework in which to undertake lexical description and a lexical semantic analogue to the classical syntactic distinction between subcategorized for complement and adjunct. This apparatus for lexical description is expanded in the second chapter. A theory of the semantics of nuclear terms along with...

First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists’ failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine’s arguments by proposing universal ‘semantic primitives’ or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word...