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Ergative Verb
In general linguistics, a labile verb (or ergative verb) is a verb that undergoes causative alternation; it can be used both transitively and intransitively, with the requirement that the direct object of its transitive use corresponds to the subject of its intransitive use, as in "I ring the bell" and "The bell rings." Labile verbs are a prominent feature of English, but they also occur in many other languages. Terminology The terminology in general linguistics is not stable yet. Labile verbs can also be called "S=O- ambitransitive" (following R.M.W. Dixon's usage), or "ergative", following Lyons's influential textbook from 1968. However, the term "ergative verb" has also been used for unaccusative verbs,Keyser, Samuel Jay & Thomas Roeper. 1984. On the middle and ergative constructions in English. Linguistic Inquiry 15(3). 381–416. and in most other contexts, it is used for ergative constructions. In English Most English verbs can be used intransitively, but ordinarily thi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
General Linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the nature of language and seeks to answer fundamental questions as to what language is, or what the common ground of all languages is. The goal of theoretical linguistics can also be the construction of a general theoretical framework for the description of language. Another use of the term depends on the organisation of linguistics into different sub-fields. The term theoretical linguistics is commonly juxtaposed with applied linguistics. This perspective implies that the aspiring language professional, e.g. a teacher student, must first learn the ''theory'' i.e. properties of the linguistic system, or what Ferdinand de Saussure called ''internal linguistics''. This is followed by ''practice,'' or studies in the applied field. The dichotomy i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Voice
In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to formulate rules that define well-formed, grammatical, sentences. These rules of grammaticality also provide explanations of ill-formed, ungrammatical sentences. In theoretical linguistics, a speaker's judgement on the well-formedness of a linguistic 'string'—called a grammaticality judgement—is based on whether the sentence is interpreted in accordance with the rules and constraints of the relevant grammar. If the rules and constraints of the particular lect are followed, then the sentence is judged to be grammatical. In contrast, an ungrammatical sentence is one that violates the rules of the given language variety. Linguists use grammaticality judgements to investigate the syntactic structure of sentences. Generative linguists are la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unergative Verb
An unergative verb is an intransitive verb that is characterized semantically by having a subject argument which is an ''agent'' that actively initiates the action expressed by the verb. For example, in English, ''talk'' and ''resign'' in the sentence "You talk and you resign" are unergative verbs, since they are intransitive (one does not say "you talk someone") and "you" are the initiator or responsible for talking and resigning. But ''fall'' and ''die'' in the sentence "They fall and die" are unaccusative verbs, since usually they are not responsible for falling or dying but still the verb is intransitive, meaning it is comprehensively used without a direct object. (They cannot "fall something" or "die someone").Note: Dąbrowska (2016)pointed out that the phrase "''to die''" in English does not comply with the strict definition of an unaccusative verb, since it fails some of the distinctions from unergative verbs such as causative alternation, where an unaccusative like "bre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unaccusative Verb
In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb's subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice. Examples in English are "the tree ''fell''"; "the window ''broke''". In those sentences, the action (falling, breaking) can be considered as something that happened to the subject, rather than being initiated by it. Semantically, the word "tree" in the sentence "the tree fell" plays a similar role as it does in a transitive sentence, such as "they cut down the tree", or its passive transformation "the tree was cut down". Unaccusative verbs thus contrast with unergative verbs, such as ''run'' or ''resign'', which describe actions voluntarily initiated by the subject. They are called ''unaccusative'' because ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ambitransitive Verb
An ambitransitive verb is a verb that is both intransitive and transitive.Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, Alexendra Y. Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity. Cambridge University Press. This verb may or may not require a direct object. English has many ambitransitive verbs. Examples include ''read'', ''break'', and ''understand'' (e.g., "I read the book", saying what was read, or just "I read all afternoon"). Ambitransitive verbs are common in some languages, and much less so in other languages, where valency tends to be fixed, and there are explicit valency-changing operations (such as passive voice, antipassive voice, applicatives, causatives, etc.). Agentive and patientive Generally speaking, there are two types of ambitransitive verbs, distinguished by the alignment of the semantic roles of their arguments with their syntactic roles. Agentive Agentive (S = A) ambitransitives are those where the single argument of the intransitive (S) is agentive and it corresponds to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mediopassive Voice
The mediopassive voice is a grammatical voice that subsumes the meanings of both the middle voice and the passive voice. Description Languages of the Indo-European family (and many others) typically have two or three of the following voices: active, middle, and passive. "Mediopassive" may be used to describe a category that covers both the middle (or "medium") and the passive voice. In synchronic grammars, the mediopassive voice is often simply termed either "middle" (typical for grammars of e.g. Ancient and Modern Greek) or "passive" (typical for grammars of e.g. modern Danish). In the oldest Indo-European languages, the distinction active/middle was the most important, whereas the development in later languages has generally been to replace the old distinction with (or to reinterpret it as) an active/passive distinction (e.g. modern English: to tease / to be teased). The Proto-Indo-European language itself is typically reconstructed as having two voices, active and mediopassive, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" was calqued in dozens of other languages. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as ''interpretatio germanica'': the Latin "Day of Mercury", ''Mercurii dies'' (later "mercredi" in modern French), was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (*''Wodanesdag''), which became ''Wōdnesdæg'' in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English. The term ''calque'' itself is a loanword from the French noun ("tracing, imitation, close copy"), while the word ''loanword'' is a calque ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hebrew Language
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved throughout history as the main liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. Hebrew is the only Canaanite language still spoken today, and serves as the only truly successful example of a dead language that has been revived. It is also one of only two Northwest Semitic languages still in use, with the other being Aramaic. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as '' Lashon Hakodesh'' (, ) since an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dutch Language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. ''Afrikaans'' is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible daughter languageAfrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , . Afrikaans was historically called Cape Dutch; see , , , , , . Afrikaans is rooted in 17th-century dialects of Dutch; see , , , . Afrikaans is variously described as a creole, a partially creolised language, or a deviant variety of Dutch; see . spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium (including Flemish) and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union. In Europe, most of the population of the Netherlands (where it is the only official language spoken country ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Causative Verb
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O. All languages have ways to express causation but differ in the means. Most, if not all, languages have specific or ''lexical'' causative forms (such as English ''rise'' → ''raise'', ''lie'' → ''lay'', ''sit'' → ''set''). Some languages also have morphological devices (such as inflection) that change verbs into their causative forms or change adjectives into verbs of ''becoming''. Other languages employ periphrasis, with control verbs, idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. There tends to be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anticausative
An anticausative verb (abbreviated ) is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event. The single argument of the anticausative verb (its subject) is a patient, that is, what undergoes an action. One can assume that there is a cause or an agent of causation, but the syntactic structure of the anticausative makes it unnatural or impossible to refer to it directly. Examples of anticausative verbs are ''break'', ''sink'', ''move'', etc. Anticausative verbs are a subset of unaccusative verbs. Although the terms are generally synonymous, some unaccusative verbs are more obviously anticausative, while others (''fall'', ''die'', etc.) are not; it depends on whether causation is defined as having to do with an animate volitional agent (does "falling" mean "being accelerated down by gravity" or "being dropped/pushed down by someone"? Is "old age" a causation agent for "dying"?). A distinction must ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal Register (sociolinguistics), registers of Latin spoken from the Crisis of the Roman Republic, Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its Literary Latin, literary counterpart was a form of either Classical Latin or Late Latin, depending on the time period. Origin of the term During the Classical antiquity, Classical period, Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as ''sermo plebeius'' or ''sermo vulgaris'', meaning "common speech". The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the Renaissance, when Italians, Italian thinkers began to theorize that Italian language, their own language originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from the literary Classical Latin, Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
