Syntax Grammar Meaning
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Grammar, Meaning and Pragmatics
Author: Frank Brisard
language: en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date: 2009-08-11
The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, cognitive, cultural, social, variational, interactional, or discursive points of view, this fifth volume looks at the field of linguistic pragmatics from a primarily grammatical angle. That is, it asks in which particular sense a variety of older and more recent functional (rather than generative) models of grammar relate to the study of language in use: how this affects their general outlook on language structure, whether issues of language use inform the very makeup of these models or are merely included as possible research themes, and how far the actual integration of pragmatics ultimately goes (is it a module/layer or is the model truly “usage-based”?). Each of the authors presenting these models has taken systematic care to highlight the relevant problems and focus on the implications of considering pragmatic phenomena from the point of view of grammar. Furthermore, a limited number of chapters deal with traditional topics in the grammatical literature, and specifically those which are called pragmatic because they either are not strictly concerned with truth (semantics), or receive their (truth) value only from an interaction with context. In the introduction, these theories and topics are set up against the historical background of a gradually changing attitude, on the part of grammarians, towards questions of linguistic knowledge and behavior, and the role of learning in their relationship.
The Meaning of Syntax
This book adopts a distinctively new approach to a major area of syntax - the way in which adjectives are bound together with other words in phrases or sentences. Connor Ferris argues first, that syntactic constructions do not exist simply as formal abstract grammatical structure, but directly reflect the speaker's cognitive system; second, that apart from the meanings attached to words, any phrase or sentence contains a quite different kind of meaning, virtually unexplored hitherto, which is directly tied to syntactic patterns in which words occur. The author proposes a set of basic pattern meanings, and states clearly how they are expressed in the various adjectival constructions of English. The book gives a comprehensive account of the semantic grammar of English adjectives and explains why these precisely form the set of adjective constructions that are found in English. Using numerous examples from contemporary language, it is shown how interaction between the relational meaning of a construction and the word meaning of an adjective which it contains can enable us to predict in some detail when a sentence will be grammatical and when not, and what sort of meaning it will bear. Written in a lively and readable style, this book will be essential reading for all students of English Language and Linguistics, both those with English as their first language, and those who are learning it as a foreign language.
The Semantics of Grammar
Author: Anna Wierzbicka
language: en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date: 1988-01-01
“The semantics of grammar” presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither “autonomous” nor “arbitrary”, but that it follows from “semantics”. It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be compared in a precise and illuminating way, within one language and across language boundaries. The author develops a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals or near-universals (and, ultimately, on a system of universal semantic primitives), and shows that the same semantic metalanguage can be used for explicating lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language and thus offers a method for an integrated linguistic description based on semantic foundations. Analyzing data from a number of different languages (including English, Russian and Japanese) the author explores the notion of ethnosyntax and, via semantics, links syntax and morphology with culture. She attemps to demonstrate that the use of a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals makes it possible to rephrase the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in such a way that it can be tested and treated as a program for empirical research.