This comprehensive and detailed analysis of second language writers' text identifies explicitly and quantifiably where their text differs from that of native speakers of English. The book is based on the results of a large-scale study of university-level native-speaker and non-native-speaker essays written in response to six prompts. Specifically, the research investigates the frequencies of uses of 68 linguistic (syntactic and lexical) and rhetorical features in essays written by advanced non-native speakers compared with those in the essays of native speakers enrolled in first-year composition courses.
The main idea of this study can be expressed in a few words: the syntactic component of the faculty of language is responsible for ordering categories and for ordering categories only. This would be a completely uninteresting thought, a truism, if one did not attempt to account for how and why the attested patterns emerge from the external requirements that the syntactic component has to satisfy.
Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb is a corpus-based study that unveils the morpho-syntax and the semantics of the Arabic verb.
Approaches to verbal grammatical categories - the constituents of verbal systems - often rely on either semantic-pragmatic or syntactic analyses. This research bridges the gap between these two distinct approaches through a detailed analysis of Taxis, Aspect, Tense and Modality in Standard Arabic. This is accomplished by showing, firstly, ...
This book shows how the generative approach to linguistics may be used to understand how languages change. Generative diachronic syntax has developed since the inception of the principles and parameters approach to comparative syntax in the early 1980s: it has become increasingly important in historical linguistics and generative theory, acting as a bridge between them and providing insights to both. Ian Roberts relates work in historical linguistics to contemporary work on universal grammar and historical syntactic variation. He explains how standard questions in historical linguistics - including word-order change, grammaticalization, and reanalysis - can be explored in terms of current generative theory. He examines the nature of the links between syntactic change and first-language acquisition and considers the short and long-term effects of language contact. Professor Roberts provides numerous examples from a range of different languages, guides to further reading, and a comprehensive glossary. This is the ideal textbook introduction for students of syntactic change.
Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction is unlike any other
introductory textbook on the market. Targeting students with strong
formal/mathematical skills, but assuming no particular previous
background, this book focuses on the development of precisely
formulated grammars whose empirical predictions can be directly tested.
The book begins with the inadequacy of context-free phrase structure
grammars, motivating the introduction of feature structures, types and
type constraints as ways of expressing linguistic generalizations. Step
by step, students are led to discover a grammar that covers the core
areas of English syntax that have been central to syntactic theory in
the last quarter century, including: complementation, control, 'raising
constructions', passives, the auxiliary system, and the analysis of
long distance dependency constructions. Special attention is given to
the treatment of dialect variation, especially with respect to African
American Vernacular English, which has been of considerable interest
with regard to the educational practice of American school systems.
