The ‘Noun Phrase’ across Languages
An emergent unit in interaction
Editors
| University of Alberta
| University of California, Santa Barbara
The ‘NP’ is one of the least controversial grammatical units that linguists work with. The NP is often assumed to be universal, and appears to be robust cross-linguistically (compared to ‘VP’ or even ‘clause’) in that it can be manipulated in argument positions in constructed examples. Furthermore, for any given language, its internal structure (order and type of modifiers) tends to be relatively fixed. Surprisingly, however, the empirical basis for ‘NP’ has never been established. The chapters in this volume examine the NP in everyday interactions from diverse languages, including little-studied languages as well as better-researched ones, in a variety of interactional settings. Together, these chapters show that cross-linguistically, the category NP is not as robust as has been assumed: in the context of temporally unfolding human interaction, its structural status is constantly negotiated in terms of participants’ evolving social agendas.
[Typological Studies in Language, 128] 2020. vi, 366 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
2–8
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Part I. Languages from Europe
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12–207
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12–41
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44–70
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72–92
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94–118
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120–152
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154–177
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180–207
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Part II. Languages from other parts of the world
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212–362
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212–235
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238–269
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272–314
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316–327
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330–362
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Index
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“We knew how noun phrases are structured. This volume for the first time shows how noun phrases are actually used in spoken discourse across a range of languages – and it turns out we also still have a lot to learn about the structure of noun phrases! A rich and thought-provoking collection.”
Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara
“The compelling data and analyses in these chapters advance our understanding of the multifaceted nature of grammatical constituents such as the noun phrase. Going beyond the clause-level grammatical properties of NPs, which are by no means uniform across languages, these studies treat some of the language-specific discourse-level conventions of usage found in the languages of the world. At the same time, they demonstrate that talk-in-interaction provides an important source of information about grammatical processing in language use, because online processing exploits and modifies existing and continually emerging constructions.”
Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Laury, Ritva & Tsuyoshi Ono
Mushin, Ilana & Simona Pekarek Doehler
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 09 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
BIC Subject: CFK – Grammar, syntax
BISAC Subject: LAN009050 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Sociolinguistics