This study investigates the functions, meanings, and varieties of forms of address in Shakespeare’s dramatic work. New categories of Shakespearean vocatives are developed and the grammar of vocatives is investigated in, above, and below the clause, following morpho-syntactic, semantic, lexicographical, pragmatic, social and contextual criteria.
Fifteen specially written papers examine the ways in which the content of what we say is dependent on the context in which we say it. At the centre of the current debate on this subject is Cappelen and Lepore's claim that context-sensitivity in language is best captured by a combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism.
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages ...
With this study of Maori and Chamorro, Sandra Chung and William Ladusaw make a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the formal semantic analysis of non-Indo-European languages. Their ultimate focus is on how the study of these Austronesian languages can illuminate the alternatives for semantic interpretation and their interaction with syntactic structure. Revisiting the analysis of indefiniteness in terms of restricted free variables, they claim that some varieties of indefinites are better analyzed by taking restriction and saturation to be fundamental semantic operations.
In spite of the vast literature on modality in English, very little research has been done on modal adverbs as a group. While there are studies of individual adverbs, the semantic and pragmatic relations between them have been left largely unexplored. This book takes a close look at the whole field of modal certainty as expressed by adverbs in English. On the basis of corpus data the most frequent adverbs of certainty, including certainly, indeed, and no doubt, are examined from the point of view of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics.
