Search results for "grammatica"
showing 10 items of 182 documents
Classifiers, Quantifiers and Class Nouns in Hmong
1993
Four operations of nominal concretization are crucial for presenting a typology of classifier languages: individualization, classification, relationalization (possession), and referentialization. The first three of these operations are at work in the Hmong classifier system. The development of classifiers is described in connection with the degree of grammaticalization which will be measured by the three parameters of [± exact], [± entity], and cohesion. These parameters will be arranged in a three-dimensional continuum (cf. Fig. II.) which leads to the following evolutional steps of increasing grammaticalization: nouns, class nouns, quantifiers, intrinsic quantifiers (to be defined in the …
Variation and change in English resultative constructions
2010
AbstractThe system of English resultative constructions is in a state of flux characterized by variation between two of its most prominent competitors,way-constructions as inShe worked herwayto the topand reflexive structures as inShe worked herselfto the top.Although this competition has occasionally been addressed in the literature (cf. Jackendoff, 1990:213; Kirchner, 1951:158; Salkoff, 1988:54ff.), the present findings reveal that the long-standing rivalry between these structures has resulted in an increased use of theway-construction at the expense of reflexive structures. In addition, the coexistence ofway-constructions with semantically overlapping reflexive structures eventually cul…
Perdió el libro que se compró / había comprado pocos días antes: Reflexiones iniciales en torno al saber gramatical sobre los tiempos verbales del pa…
2007
Carmen.Rdez-Gonzalo@uv.es La alternancia entre los tiempos verbales del pasado en textos escritos exige tener en cuenta diferencias aspectuales poco presentes en el español hablado. Según López García (2005: 162), el sistema de cinco tiempos simples (vengo, venía, vine, vendría, vendré) cubre las necesidades expresivas de los hispanohablantes, aunque los niños emplean menos y muchos hablantes adultos raramente usan otras formas. Los problemas se plantean cuando en lugar de hablar español necesitamos escribirlo y leerlo. Esta necesidad cambia por completo el inventario de tiempos ya que, para articular un texto es preciso dejar muy claro que unos acontecimientos ocurren antes o después de ot…
Case and Contact Linguistics
2012
Abstract Language contact affects case categories in various ways. This article examines the effects of contacts between linguistic codes (languages, unrelated or related, or language varieties): changes in one code on the model of another. It deals with inflectional case markers, affixes, and adpositions from which they evolve. Though most adpositions express more specific relations, some are relatively desemanticised. Affixes and case-like adpositions may fulfil similar functions; the close correspondences between Dravidian case suffixes and Indic postpositions. Case markers and case functions are acquired through what is called ‘borrowing’, ‘diffusion’, ‘transfer’, ‘interference’, ‘repli…
Passive in motion: the Early Italian auxiliary andare (‘to go’)
2014
The Italian construction andare ‘to go’ + (transitive) past participle expresses a passive meaning when occurring in a perfective past tense (1), whereas it conveys an additional deontic sense of (impersonal) obligation when used in an imperfective tense (2) (Bertinetto 1991; Giacalone Ramat 2000). A further constraint on the passive reading is represented by the semantics of the participle, necessarily expressing a negative value of ‘loss/destruction’; this value is moreover conceived as ‘non-intentional’, as the impossibility to express the agent (*da qualcuno) shows: (1) I documenti andarono distrutti. (*da qualcuno) the documents go. prf.3pl destroy.pst.ptcp.pl (by someone) ‘The documen…
THE EXPRESSION OF EVIDENTIALITY IN SPOKEN AND WRITTEN TEXTS: EMPIRICAL APPROACHES TO ROMANCE LANGUAGES
2020
Evidentiality is a grammatical category that encodes information source as its primary meaning. The information can be: acquired through direct perception, reported by others (hearsay) or inferred by the speaker upon considering the information that is available. Languages with an evidential grammatical category have morphemes with a primary evidential value (Aikhenvald 2004). Nevertheless, Romance languages, like many other languages, have a tense- modal system and lack an evidential grammatical category, instead of which several lexical units or certain constructions convey information source. This special issue is devoted to some of those items, such as modal adverbs, evidential meanings…
Paradigms as triggers of semantic change: Demonstrative adverbs in Catalan and Spanish
2015
This paper sets out to analyse the development of demonstrative adverbs of place in Catalan and Spanish. The main questions dealt with in this study are the following: (i) why two-term and three-term deictic systems often display a certain lack of stability so that diachronically two-term systems sometimes become three-term (as in old Catalan and Spanish) or, the other way round, three-term systems become two-term (like in late Latin and in Catalan during the modern era); (ii) if the most normal and expected development is for deictic systems to take on anaphoric values, why in the case of the adverb aquí ('near the speaker and/or addressee') in Catalan and the adverb ahí ('near the address…
Revisión del sistema pronominal español
2002
This article offers a critical review of the Spanish pronominal system (personal, possessive and demonstrative pronouns) as described in Nebrija's works and in those of the 16th and 17th century grammarians. These texts show that the history of grammatics is frequently a history of errors. In fact, the methodology conveniences they chose to establish regular models, led grammarians to false the reality of the language. Quite frequently also, as they intended to develop the grammatical thinking establishing certain categories or divisions among them, these authors originated errors that have been perpetuated in their texts. From my point of view, that is the case for pronouns. As has been de…
Inflectional speaker-role classifiers in Weining Ahmao
2008
Abstract This paper is the first of two (see references) aiming to bring to the attention of pragmaticians an idiosyncratic classifier system that encodes speaker-roles along the lines of gender and age. Isolating (analytic) languages are known for their scarcity of word forms and for their under-specification of grammatical categories. Analytic languages in East and Southeast Asian involve classifiers – a word category without counterpart in most languages of the inflectional type – to attenuate some of the vagueness in the nominal realm. Similar to other parts of speech, the classifier generally constitutes a one-form word category with occasional sandhi-derivations. Weining Ahmao, a Miao…
The Representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Twenty-first Century Russian Media
2013
The aim of this study is to investigate the representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in contemporary Russian media discourse. Attention is paid to Gorbachev's social roles and activities as well as his personality, as presented in Russian news texts. The empirical data were collected over the period from 2000 to 2009 from seven major Russian newspapers. According to these data, a dual relationship to Gorbachev exists: in the West he is an honoured politician with a high profile, whereas in Russia the attitude towards him is ambivalent. In most texts he is represented as a once important political actor.