This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of argument realisation in complex predicates and complex events at the syntax-semantic interface across a wide variety of the world’s languages, ranging over languages such as German, Irish, Sicilian and Italian, Lithuanian, Estonian and other… read more
Edited by Brian Nolan, Gudrun Rawoens and Elke Diedrichsen
This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of the argument realisation of the concepts of causative purpose, permit, let/allow and transfer in a broad cross-linguistic typologically diverse mix of languages with GIVE, GET, TAKE, PUT, and LET verbs. This volume stands as the first… read more
There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world’s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will… read more
Internet memes are meaningful objects of diverse shapes that spread across networks of mediated participation (term from Milner 2012: 10). The distribution and reception of memes bears aspects of communicative interaction, because memes establish usage conventions. This paper will be concerned… read more
Internet memes are meaningful objects of diverse shapes that spread across networks of mediated participation (term from Milner 2012: 10). The distribution and reception of memes bears aspects of communicative interaction, because memes establish usage conventions. This paper will be concerned… read more
The paper argues in favor of including cultural aspects in the description of communicative interaction. According to Eco (1976), a linguistic sign is a cultural unit. In order to use it properly, a speaker relies on communicative experience with this unit within a culture (Wittgenstein 1960;… read more
Verbs with separable prefixes are one of many existing realisations of discontinuous complex predicates in German. Their syntactic structure follows the widely described sentence bracket structure, in that the finite verb base opens the bracket at the second position in the sentence, while the… read more
In many languages, there is a morphological marker or a lexical expression for a situation in which an agent brings about a state of affairs or makes somebody else do something. In German, both variants of formal marking for causativity are found only very rarely. The main expression of causativity… read more
This paper describes the development of a sentence parser for German based on Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). German has a number of characteristics which are very challenging to a computational approach to syntactic processing that is semantically motivated. These include the German sentence… read more
The phenomenon of variance in auxiliary selection with haben and sein for perfect formation is very well known from a number of languages, and it is widely discussed. Recent models assume that sets of ranked criteria act as the semantic basis for auxiliary selection. Sorace’s hierarchical model… read more
The paper will explore the theoretical scope of the concept “construction”, as envisaged in Constructional approaches to grammar. Starting from the Role and Reference Grammar notion of Constructions, as represented in “Constructional Schemas”, it will be argued that Constructional Schemas as… read more
The paper will account for the regularities of word order with German main declarative clauses by using the RRG framework. The question whether the so-called “Vorfeld” (“prefield”)-position can be equated with the RRG-notion of precore slot (PrCS) will be explored. It will be shown that operator… read more
