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A quotation is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance that is introduced by a quotative marker, such as a verb of saying. For example: John said: "I saw Mary today". Quotations in oral speech are also signaled by special prosody in addition to quotative markers. In written text, quotations are signaled by quotation marks. Quotations are also used to present well-known statement parts that are explicitly attributed by citation to their original source; such statements are marked with quotation marks.
In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
In linguistics, deixis is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence.
An auxiliary verb is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. An example is the verb have in the sentence I have finished my lunch. Here, the auxiliary have helps to express the perfect aspect along with the participle, finished. Some sentences contain a chain of two or more auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs are also called helping verbs, helper verbs, or (verbal) auxiliaries. Research has been conducted into split inflection in auxiliary verbs.
Robert D. Van Valin Jr. is an American linguist and the principal researcher behind the development of Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics, and discourse pragmatics. His 1997 book Syntax: structure, meaning and function is an attempt to provide a model for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages.
In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, indirect objects, and arguments of adpositions ; the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology or relational nouns . In ergative-absolutive languages, for example most Australian Aboriginal languages, the term "subject" is ambiguous, and thus the term "agent" is often used instead to contrast with "object", such that basic word order is often spoken of in terms such as Agent-Object-Verb (AOV) instead of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). Topic-prominent languages, such as Mandarin, focus their grammars less on the subject-object or agent-object dichotomies but rather on the pragmatic dichotomy of topic and comment.
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.
In English, the word like has a very flexible range of uses, ranging from conventional to non-standard. It can be used as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, hedge, filler, and quotative.
In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases the boundary between them depends on which specific grammatical theory is being used to analyze the sentence.
In linguistics, word order is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are
In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) is a descriptive grammar of the English language. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Huddleston was the only author to work on every chapter. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 and has been cited more than 7,000 times.
In linguistics, inversion is any of several grammatical constructions where two expressions switch their canonical order of appearance, that is, they invert. There are several types of subject-verb inversion in English: locative inversion, directive inversion, copular inversion, and quotative inversion. The most frequent type of inversion in English is subject–auxiliary inversion in which an auxiliary verb changes places with its subject; it often occurs in questions, such as Are you coming?, with the subject you is switched with the auxiliary are. In many other languages, especially those with a freer word order than English, inversion can take place with a variety of verbs and with other syntactic categories as well.
Beth Levin is an American linguist who is currently the William H. Bonsall Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. Her research investigates the lexical semantics of verbs, particularly the representation of events and the kind of morphosyntactic devices that English and other languages use to express events and their participants.
Ellen F. Prince was an American linguist, known for her work in linguistic pragmatics.
Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.
A presentative, or presentational, is a word or a syntactic structure which presents, or introduces, an entity, bringing it to the attention of the addressee. Typically, the entity thus introduced will serve as the topic of the subsequent discourse. For example, the construction with "there" in the following English sentence is a presentative:
Gregory Ward is an American linguist, academic and researcher. He is Professor of Linguistics, Gender & Sexuality Studies and, by courtesy, Philosophy at Northwestern University.
References
- ↑ "Graduate Alumni" . Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- ↑ "Betty Birner - NIU" . Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- ↑ "LSA Bulletin" (PDF). March 2008. Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- ↑ "Bilingualism" (PDF). Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- ↑ "Eric - Is English Changing?" . Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- ↑ "Eric". Does the Language I Speak Affect the Way I Think?. Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- ↑ "Leonard Bloomfield Book Award Previous Holders" . Retrieved April 18, 2015.
