Overview

The book introduces the concept of asymmetric events, an important concept in language and cognition, which, for the first time in linguistic literature, is identified in a more systematic way and analyzed in a number of different languages, including typologically or genetically unrelated ones. Asymmetric events are two or more events of unequal status in an utterance and papers in the volume present ways in which a linguistic description of main events in a sentence is different (morphologically, syntactically, discursively) from a description of backgrounded events. The prototypical asymmetries involving perception, cognition, and language are identified in subordination, nominalization and modification of various kinds but they extend to coordinate structures, serial verbs, spatial language and viewing arrangement, as well as part - whole relations. The perspective is broadly cognitive and functional, the authors use different though complementing methodologies, some include corpus data, and the asymmetries are shown to have a variety of stylistic and ideological implications.An in-depth analysis of manifold asymmetries in structure and function of diverse languages makes this volume of interest to linguists of different persuasion, philosophers, cognitive researchers, discourse analysts and students of language and cognition.

Full Product Details

Author:   Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (University of Lodz)
Publisher:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Imprint:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Volume:   11
Weight:   0.695kg
ISBN:  

9789027238993

ISBN 10:   9027238995
Pages:   287
Publication Date:   15 May 2008
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Part I: Event chains and complex events; 3. 1. Asymmetry in English multi-verb sequences: A corpus-based approach (by Newman, John); 4. 2. Asymmetries for locating events with Cora spatial language (by Casad, Eugene H.); 5. 3. Spanish (de)queisimo: Part/whole alternation and viewing arrangement (by Delbecque, Nicole); 6. 4. What does coordination look like in a head-final language? (by Kwon, Nayoung); 7. 5. Verb serialization as a means to express complex events in Thai (by Thepkanjana, Kingkarn); 8. 6. Notional asymmetry in syntactic symmetry: Connective and accessibility marker interactions (by Izutsu, Katsunobu); 9. Part II: Subordination, nominalization, modification; 10. 7. Subordination in Cognitive grammar (by Langacker, Ronald W.); 11. 8. Asymmetric events, subordination, and grammatical categories (by Cristofaro, Sonia); 12. 9. Asymmetry reversal (by Lichtenberk, Frantisek); 13. 10. Transparency vs. Economy: How does Adioukrou resolve the conflict? (by Horie, Kaoru); 14. 11. Relating participants across asymmetric events: Conceptual constraints on obligatory control (by Panther, Klaus-Uwe); 15. 12. The Portugese inflected infinitive and its conceptual basis (by Soares da Silva, Augusto); 16. 13. The periphrastic realization of participants in nominalizations: Semantic and discourse constraints (by Heyvaert, Liesbet); 17. 14. Asymmetries in participial modification (by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara); 18. Author index; 19. Subject index

Reviews

The book is an important contribution in the recent trend of cross-linguistically and typologically-driven syntactic research and presents a cognitive-functional perspective on an abstract structural domain, subordination, that has generally been the target of more formally-driven, language-specific inquiry. The articles in the book, including work by some of the leading scholars in the field, argue convincingly for the cognitive underpinnings of some of the most abstract morphosyntactic phenomena in natural language, and shows how taking this approach provides insights not only into the structure of a wide range of grammatical systems, but also into the way human beings conceptualize events and encode these conceptualizations for the purposes of communication. -- David Beck, University of Alberta, Canada

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