LINGUIST List 8.1448

Wed Oct 8 1997

Books: Asian Lang

Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>

Links to the websites of all LINGUIST's supporting publishers are available at the end of this issue.

Directory

Tony Schiavo, New Books: Asian Language Studies

Message 1: New Books: Asian Language Studies

Date: Mon, 06 Oct 1997 17:00:27 -0400
From: Tony Schiavo <tony

benjamins.com>
Subject: New Books: Asian Language Studies



John Benjamins Publishing would like to call your attention to the
following new titles in the field of Asian Language Studies:


NOUN MODIFYING CONSTRUCTIONS IN JAPANESE
A FRAME-SEMANTIC APPROACH
Yoshiko Matsumoto
1997 viii, 204 pp. Studies in Language Companion Series, 35
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 846 9 Price: US$74.00
Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 3038 2 Price: Hfl. 130,--
John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com
For further information via e-mail: servicebenjamins.com

This study examines the clausal noun-modifying construction (NMC) in
Japanese, a much-discussed construction that embraces what have
usually been called relative clause and noun complement
constructions. Drawing up on a broad range of naturally-occurring
NMCs, including types that fall outside the domains of relative clause
and noun complement constructions, Yoshiko Matsumoto argues for an
analysis of NMCs that gives an important role to semantics and
pragmatics. The framework in which this approach is presented draws
from, and further refines, concepts of frame semantics. By using a
frame semantic definition of semantic integration, the author reveals
the commonality of diverse types of NMCs in Japanese, and posits a
tripartite classification of NMCs which is both more comprehensive and
more revealing than the traditional dichotomy between relative
clause and noun complement constructions. As the first comprehensive
and systematic study in English of Japanese NMCs with diverse
lexical heads, this work is further notable for its detailed
discussion of the dependence of NMCs on both linguistic and
extra-linguistic context.


VIETNAMESE
Dinh-Hoa Nguyen
1997 x, 240 pp. London Oriental and African Language Library, 9
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 733 0 Price: $84.00
Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 3809 X Price: Hfl. 140,--
John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com
For further information via e-mail: servicebenjamins.com

An essential descriptive introduction to a South-East Asian language
with over seventy million speakers, this book provides a conservative
treatment of the phonology, lexicon and syntax of Vietnamese, with
comments on semantics and history, with particular reference to
writing systems, loan words and syntactic structures. All example
texts are transcribed and glossed. Prof. Dinh-Hoa Nguyen has based
this grammar on his vast teaching experience and gives basic insights
into "Vietnamese without veneer".


CLASSIFICATION SYNTAXIQUE DES CONSTRUCTIONS ADJECTIVALES EN COREEN
Jee-Sun Nam
1996 xxvi, 560 pp. Lingvisticae Investigationes Supplementa, 21
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 751 9 Price: $99.00
Rest of the world: Cloth: 90 272 3130 3 Price: Hfl. 175,--
John Benjamins Publishing web site: http://www.benjamins.com
For further information via e-mail: servicebenjamins.com

The purpose of this study is the systematic description of a set of
data called 'adjectives' in Korean, which reduces to a minimum
theoretical preoccupations and abstract formalizations with no
practical applications. The framework of the research is the
'Lexicon-grammar', whose fundamental idea is that the minimal
meaningful unit is the simple sentence and not an isolated word. This
work is constituted as follows: given that the corpus extracted from
current dictionaries is insufficient for the purpose, a complete
corpus will be reconstituted: first, with a formal definition, and
then according to some other principles discussed in the first
section. With this more complete corpus (5300 items), general
syntactic properties of adjectival constructions will be examined in
the second section. The third section is devoted to the description of
15 classes of adjectival structures. These syntactic classes will be
represented in the form of tables in the annex. The results obtained
in this work are indispensable at least for the following activities:
first, the elaboration or verification of a linguistic theory demands
a priori examination and systematic description of empirical data;
furthermore, a syntactic description of lexical data, which is as
exhaustive as possible, has a particular interest in the perspective
of the elaboration of a lexicon suitable for computer processing of
natural language.

For further information please e-mail
Bernadette Keck: servicebenjamins.com

Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue

The following contributing LINGUIST publishers have made their backlists available on the World Wide Web: