Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen - Böcker

The central aim of this study is to elucidate the nature of the semantics / pragmatics distinction in both synchrony and diachrony. The author proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that is orthogonal to the question of truth-conditionality, and discusses the status of various types of meaning with respect to this definition. A corollary aim of the study is to propose an account of how and why erstwhile pragmatically-determined elements of meaning may, in the course of time, become semanticized. The nature, paths, and mechanisms of diachronic sense changes of the relevant type, as well as the motivations for them, are discussed in some detail. The author combines insights from different sources, prominently frame-based semantics, historical pragmatics, and Peircean semiotics, to arrive at a model of linguistic meaning that is both synchronically and diachronically dynamic, hence capable of integrating structure and usage. As a case study, the synchronic uses and diachronic evolution of the exceptionally polyfunctional French phasal adverbs deja ('already'), encore ('still/yet'), toujours ('still'), and enfin ('finally') are analyzed in some detail, with particular attention being paid to the semantic vs pragmatic nature of the various uses of these items. The book will be of interest to lexical semanticists, pragmaticians, historical linguists, functional/cognitive linguists, discourse analysts, and semioticians.

This book is an advanced student's grammar of French that integrates traditional grammar with knowledge and insights from modern linguistics. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen takes a structural approach to French grammar: she provides clear descriptions of grammatical rules based explicitly on syntactic structure, and places descriptive emphasis on instances where the grammatical structures of French differ from those used in corresponding contexts in English. The first part of the book provides an introduction to French sentence structure, before the following parts examine the grammar of verbs, nominals, particles, and clauses and sentences. The Structure of Modern Standard French will be a valuable resource for students of French at undergraduate level and beyond. It assumes some prior knowledge of French grammar but is designed to be accessible to those with no background in linguistics.

This book is an advanced student's grammar of French that integrates traditional grammar with knowledge and insights from modern linguistics. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen takes a structural approach to French grammar: she provides clear descriptions of grammatical rules based explicitly on syntactic structure, and places descriptive emphasis on instances where the grammatical structures of French differ from those used in corresponding contexts in English. The first part of the book provides an introduction to French sentence structure, before the following parts examine the grammar of verbs, nominals, particles, and clauses and sentences. The Structure of Modern Standard French will be a valuable resource for students of French at undergraduate level and beyond. It assumes some prior knowledge of French grammar but is designed to be accessible to those with no background in linguistics.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.This volume explores the long-held assumption in linguistics that language change may proceed in a cyclical fashion. Cyclic change has recently attracted renewed interest, most notably with respect to the evolution of negation across a range of languages, but also in relation to a wide range of other phenomena. The chapters in this book take as their point of departure the hypothesis that cyclic change is pragmatically driven, and analyse forms of this change in morphosyntax, the lexicon, and semantics and pragmatics - as well as the interaction between these levels - across a range of mainly Indo-European languages and language families, but also including Semitic, Sinitic, and Austronesian languages. They also discuss the epistemological status of cycles; explore their relationship with other recognized forms of change; examine the limits of the notion of a cycle in language change; and discuss cyclicity from a cognitive-pragmatic and sociopragmatic perspective.

The focus of this volume is on semantic and pragmatic change, its causes and mechanisms. The papers gathered here offer both theoretical proposals of more general scope and in-depth studies of language-specific cases of meaning change in particular notional domains. The analyses include data from English, several Romance languages, German, Scandinavian languages, and Oceanic languages. Detailed case-studies covering central semantic domains, such as concession, evidentiality, intensification, modality, negation, scalarity, subjectivity, and temporality, allow the authors to test and refine current models of semantic change, by focusing, for instance, on the respective roles of speakers and hearers in the process and on the relationship between semantic and syntactic reanalysis. Key theoretical notions, such as presuppositions, paradigms, word order, and discourse status are revisited in a diachronic perspective to provide innovative accounts of causes and motivations for linguistic changes. A prominent theme is the evolution of procedural meanings of various kinds. Thus, several papers feature different types of pragmatic markers as their object of study, while others are concerned with items and constructions expressing modality, evidentiality, negation, and relational meanings. Closely related themes are: the interface between semantics and pragmatics/discourse, with figurative uses of language, rhetorical-argumentational strategies, discourse traditions, information structure, and the importance of dialogic contexts in change playing a salient role in several papers; the relationship between meaning change and processes such as grammaticalization, subjectification and pragmaticalization; and, the thorny issue of the categorization of linguistic items such as discourse markers or modal particles, evidentials or epistemic modals, to which the diachronic data are shown to contribute substantially. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and historical linguistics.

Virtually unstudied until the 1980s, discourse markers have gone on to become a growth industry. Research on markers is central to comprehensive theories of the synchronic linguistic system as such, of the use of language in communication, and of language change. From the very beginning, linguists working on Romance languages have been at the forefront of research on discourse markers. Including among its contributors many of the foremost experts in the field, this volume not only offers substantial state-of-the-art introductions to the diverse facets of contemporary research on discourse markers, with a focus on Romance, but it achieves added value by including in each chapter original and previously unpublished results. The first part of the book addresses foundational issues: What are discourse markers? What is their relationship to other types of pragmatic markers? The second part considers discourse markers at different levels of linguistic description, in particular: their grammatical status, their semantics and pragmatics, their prosodic features, their positioning within discourse units. The third part outlines different approaches to the study of discourse markers, namely contrastive studies, corpus linguistics, discourse traditions, and historical linguistics. The fourth part explores discourse markers at the interface with central topics in linguistics, such as politeness, social variation, language acquisition and psycholinguistic processing. The final part focuses on discourse markers in each of the major Romance languages, namely French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and Romanian. The volume will be of interest to researchers and students working in the field of Romance studies, general linguists, pragmaticians, discourse analysts, educationalists, and psychologists.