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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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Query Details


Query Subject:   Adpositions and Case
Author:   Sander Lestrade
Submitter Email:  click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):  Syntax
Typology

Query:   Dear all,

We are constructing a typological database on languages that both have a
case and an adpositional system. We are interested in the interaction
between these two systems, and want to answer questions like: which cases
combine with (which) adpositions?, which adpositions show case
alternation?, and what are the meaning differences in case alternations? We
now have information on 32 languages. Unfortunately, the semantic
information in reference grammars is often not very detailed. We are
looking for specialist in the languages listed below who are willing to
control and correct the data we collected.

For example, we know from the reference grammar that the P ''bi'' in
Alamblak can combine with an allative itself and having a complement with
absolutive case to mean 'in front'. If the same adpositional form combines
with the referent case it is said to have the same meaning, but more
probably it has a slightly different meaning. This is of course precisely
what we're after.

The languages in our database are: Alamblak, Basque, Brahui, Burushaski,
Cahuilla, Evenki, Finnish, Gamo, Georgian, Harar Oromo, Ika, Jaqaru,
Kabardian, Ket, Kolyma Yukaghir, Korana, Lezgian, Macushi, Malayalam,
Mapudungun, Marathi, Meitei, Mochica, Newar, Paumari, Polish, Puelche, SE
Pomo, Tlingit, Trumai, Turkish, Warao.

Looking forward to your responses,
Sander Lestrade, Kees de Schepper, Joost Zwarts (Universities of Nijmegen
and Utrecht)
LL Issue: 19.3930
Date posted: 21-Dec-2008



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