[PDF] A Theory Of Predicates eBook

Author : Farrell Ackerman
Publisher : Stanford Univ Center for the Study
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 24,87 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781575860862

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When studying linguistics, it is commonplace to find that information packaged into a single word in one language is expressed by several independent words in another language. This observation raises an important question: how can linguistics research represent what is the same among languages while accounting for the obvious differences between them? In this work, two linguists-Farrell Ackerman and Gert Webelhuth-from different theoretical paradigms develop a new general theory of natural language predicates. This theory is capable of addressing a broad range of issues concerning (complex) predicates, many of which remain unresolved in previous theoretical proposals. The book focuses on cross-linguistically recurring patterns of predicate formation. It also provides a detailed implementation of Ackerman and Webelhuth's theory for German tense-aspect, passive, causative, and verb-particle predicates. In addition, a discussion of the extension of these representative analyses to the same predicate construction in other languages is presented. Beyond providing a formalism for the analysis of language-particular predicates, the authors demonstrate how the basic theoretical mechanism they develop can be employed to explain universal tendencies of predicate formation.

Author : Farrell Ackerman
Publisher : Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 50,2 MB
Release : 1998-05-13
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781575860879

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Lexicalism is a theory of information associated with words and what exactly a word is. The authors propose a different idea of what can be contained in words. Lexicalism is first and foremost a hypothesis about functional-semantic information and secondly a hypothesis about the formal expression of this information. Grammar rules cannot change the argument structure of words. Any change to the meaning of words must occur in the lexicon. A new lexical theory of complex predicates is proposed in this volume. The authors argue that previous lexicalist accounts within Lexical Functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar have abandoned certain crucial aspects of lexicalism in their efforts to account for analytically-expressed predicates, in particular permitting predicate-formation operations to occur within phrase structure. Although the theory is presented in detail primarily for German expressions of these predicates, consideration is given to cross-linguistic application of this theory.

Author : Carrie Figdor
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 11,35 MB
Release : 2018-04-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 0192537350

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Psychological terms are widely used to describe the biological world: plants, insects, bacteria colonies, even single cells are described as making decisions, anticipating rewards, and communicating with language. Carrie Figdor presents a comprehensive critical assessment of the interpretation of psychological terms across biological domains. She argues that we interpret these descriptions as literal claims about the capacities of such beings, and she argues against the anthropocentric attitude which takes human cognition as the standard for full-blooded capacities, to which nonhuman capacities are compared and found wanting. She offers an alternative view of what is required for a naturalistic explanation of the mind, and promotes finding a non-anthropocentric framework for determining distinctions in moral status. This is the first book to give a comprehensive theory of the interpretation of mental language throughout biology and to emphasize the role of mathematical modeling in the spread and revision of concepts.

Author : Justin Nuger
Publisher : Springer
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 39,2 MB
Release : 2016-08-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 331928682X

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This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the syntax of Palauan that will appeal to anyone interested in Austronesian languages or formal syntactic and morphological theory. This volume proposes that words in Palauan are not drawn directly from a mental lexicon, but are instead composed at least partially in the syntax. Using original data from syntactic constructions not previously explored in the language, the author entertains several competing theories of word formation and highlights the compatible and incompatible aspects of each, through an exploration into new corners of Palauan syntax and morphology.

Author : Andrea Moro
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 32,87 MB
Release : 1997-01-09
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0521562333

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One of the basic premises of the theory of syntax is that clause structures can be minimally identified as containing a verb phrase, playing the role of predicate, and a noun phrase, playing the role of subject. In this study Andrea Moro identifies a new category of copular sentences, namely inverse copular sentences, where the predicative noun phrase occupies the position which is canonically reserved for subjects. In the process, he sheds new light on such classical issues as the distribution and nature of expletives, locality theory and cliticization phenomena.

Author : Donald Davidson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 34,83 MB
Release : 2009-07
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 9780674030220

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This brief book takes readers to the very heart of what it is that philosophy can do well. Completed shortly before Donald Davidson's death at 85, Truth and Predication brings full circle a journey moving from the insights of Plato and Aristotle to the problems of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Davidson, countering many of his contemporaries, argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous, and that we need an effective theory of truth in order to live well. Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar; in the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life--such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use--how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth. Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.

Author : Susan Rothstein
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 19,84 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9401006903

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Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic constraint. Chapters in the book show how the syntactic predication relation is semantically interpreted, and how the predication relation explains constraints on DP-raising and on the distribution of pleonastics in English. The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew, of the use of `be' in predicative and identity sentences in English, and concludes with a study of the meaning of the verb `be'.

Author : Derek Goldrei
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 47,68 MB
Release : 2005-12-27
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 1846282292

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Designed specifically for guided independent study. Features a wealth of worked examples and exercises, many with full teaching solutions, that encourage active participation in the development of the material. It focuses on core material and provides a solid foundation for further study.

Author : Edsger W. Dijkstra
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 48,37 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Computers
ISBN : 1461232287

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This booklet presents a reasonably self-contained theory of predicate trans former semantics. Predicate transformers were introduced by one of us (EWD) as a means for defining programming language semantics in a way that would directly support the systematic development of programs from their formal specifications. They met their original goal, but as time went on and program derivation became a more and more formal activity, their informal introduction and the fact that many of their properties had never been proved became more and more unsatisfactory. And so did the original exclusion of unbounded nondeterminacy. In 1982 we started to remedy these shortcomings. This little monograph is a result of that work. A possible -and even likely- criticism is that anyone sufficiently versed in lattice theory can easily derive all of our results himself. That criticism would be correct but somewhat beside the point. The first remark is that the average book on lattice theory is several times fatter (and probably less self contained) than this booklet. The second remark is that the predicate transformer semantics provided only one of the reasons for going through the pains of publication.

Author : Léa Nash
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 47,82 MB
Release : 2016-04-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9004307095

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Complex predicates can be loosely defined as a sequence of items that behave as a single predicate, projecting a single argument structure within a clause. Each of the members of the predicate contributes part of the information ordinarily associated with a single head. The present volume presents a collection of theoretical linguistic results on the study of complex predicates in different perspectives and with a variety of approaches. Important empirical and theoretical issues cutting across various subfields of linguistics are being addressed in this book, such as: • Syntactic and semantic modeling of complex predicate formation: compositionality, argument structure, event structure. • Differences between syntactic and morphological processes of lexeme formation. • Typological and diachronic issues in complex predicate formation. • Neo-Davidsonian analyses of abstract predicate decomposition and its morphological correlates. Contributors are: Ane Berro, Denis Creissels, Hannah Gibson, Adele Goldberg, Lutz Marten, Annie Montaut, Léa Nash, Pooja Paul, Pollet Samvelian, Peter Svenonius, and Susanne Wurmbrand.