Beyond aspect: the expression of discourse functions in African languages

Certain grammatical elements help hearers know how propositions are conceptually related: Does a given proposition advance the foregrounded event line, or not? Initiate versus continue an event chain? Indicate that one proposition belongs to a different "mental space" from the previous one...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Körperschaft: Societas Linguistica Europaea Split (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Payne, Doris L. 1952- (HerausgeberIn), Shirtz, Shahar 19XX- (HerausgeberIn)
Format: Elektronisch Tagungsbericht E-Book
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: Amsterdam ; Philadelphia John Benjamins Publishing Company [2015]
Schriftenreihe:Typological studies in language 109
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:UBW01
URL des Erstveröffentlichers
Zusammenfassung:Certain grammatical elements help hearers know how propositions are conceptually related: Does a given proposition advance the foregrounded event line, or not? Initiate versus continue an event chain? Indicate that one proposition belongs to a different "mental space" from the previous one? Provide background information? Studies in this volume show that African languages sometimes support, but often refute the idea that perfective aspect or past tense marks the narrative event line. Rather, languages may employ clause level constructions, conjunctions or connectives, tonal melodies on verbs or subjects, specialized auxiliaries, special verb forms and even dependent clause and imperfective aspect forms. Often, correlation of such grammatical elements with the event line is a subcase of a more general function. Analyses in this volume contribute to developing a typology of the expression of discourse functions, a field of research which has so far been minimally addressed from a typological perspective.
Beschreibung:"Earlier versions of some of the papers in this volume were presented in a workshop held as part of the 46th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Split, Croatia" - aus dem Vorwort
Includes bibliographical references and index
Beschreibung:1 Online-Ressource (VI, 319 Seiten)
ISBN:9789027267870
DOI:10.1075/tsl.109