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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod


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Title: The Early English Impersonal Construction
Subtitle: An Analysis of Verbal and Constructional Meaning
Written By: Ruth Möhlig-Falke
URL: http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/?view=usa&ci=9780199777723
Description:

"The Early English Impersonal Construction" aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries-their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English-have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. Möhlig-Falke offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. She focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. Her research comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses. It is thus the most comprehensive investigation of the impersonal construction in early English available to date.

Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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BibTex: View BibTex record
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
Semantics
Syntax
Subject Language(s): English

Versions:
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 0199777721
ISBN-13: 9780199777723
Pages: 576
Prices: U.S. $ 99