Language Arts & Disciplines : Grammar

Language is in large part about the description of events occurring in the world around us. Relationships of different sorts may be perceived between those events. And some of these relationships can be expressed by specific verb forms--or by syntactic constructions involving specific verb forms. The present study examines this facet of the Egyptian and Coptic verbal systems in isolation, singling out three types of relationships between events and the linguistic means by which they are expressed. The first essay studies the verb form called "conjunctive," arguing that the function of the conjunctive is to "con-join" a chain of two or more events into a single--though compound--notion. The second essay shows how a certain syntactic construction can be used to refer to events that are contiguous, that is, events that succeed one another rapidly in time. The third essay examines verb forms that refer to events whose occurrence is contingent on the occurrence of other events implied or explicitly mentioned in the context. The respective grammatical phenomena are labeled conjunction, contiguity, and contingency. This study constitutes a significant advancement in our understanding of the ancient language of Egypt, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Egyptology, Coptology, and the Ancient Near East, as well as linguists, Byzantinists and Classicists.  more...

Price: $90.00

This book provides a detailed study and a novel Minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences. On the assumption that Merge is defined in the simplest way possible, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are a(nti)symmetrical. One of the copular sentence types is analyzed as a poster child for symmetrical structures, while the other type is treated as asymmetrical. The originality of this study lies in treating the copula in the two types of copular sentences neither as completely identical nor as two distinct lexical items; instead, the two types of copula are derived through the process of semantic bleaching. Furthermore, it is argued that the two types of the copula need to combine with post-copular phrases of different categories. It is concluded that Russian draws a distinction between saturated DPs and unsaturated NPs, in spite of its renowned lack of overt articles. more...

Price: $69.95

Deals with the issue of how corpus data relate to the questions that cognitive linguists have typically investigated with respect to conceptual mappings. This volume investigates a range of issues - the coherence and function of particular metaphorical models, the interaction of form and meaning, the priming of metaphors, and more. more...

Price: $118.80

A range of electronic corpora is increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improved standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. This book looks at developing similar standards for enriching and preserving unconventional data: dialects, child language and bilingual databases. more...

Price: $80.00

This is an accessible book which makes an important contribution to the study of Pidgin and Creole language varieties, as well as to the development of contemporary European languages outside Europe. more...

Price: $53.95