Big Events, Small Clauses: The Grammar of Elaboration (Language, Context and Cognition, 12) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3110285800 ISBN 13: 9783110285802

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter, 2012

Synopsis

This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaboration
across seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian,
French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative small
clauses (“absolutes”), participle constructions and related clause-like but
non-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect to
constitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowest
sense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connected
with but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in two
parts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventive
interpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax of
participial and converb constructions? How do these constructions
function at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structures
that are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empirical
cross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters that
are based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specific
construction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how a
specific construction is rendered in other languages.

About this title

About the Author

Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen and Dag Haug, University of Oslo, Norway.

Edition details

• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3110285800
• ISBN 13: 9783110285802
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 466
• Editor: Fabricius-Hansen Cathrine, Haug Dag