Sinhala focus concord constructions from a discourse-syntactic perspective

Focus and Syntactic Subordination in Discourse

Information Packaging in Sinhala: a Preliminary Study of Adverbial Clauses in Focus Constructions

Each of these sentences can be compared with one or more of the others to demonstrate the presence of either the syntactic, semantic or pragmatic component. Sentences 1a and 1b both provide the same statement about the world and are thus semantically equivalent, but they differ in terms of their syntax (seen with the change in word order) and pragmatics (seen with the fronting, hence focus, of ...

Learning Syntactic Constructions from Raw Corpora

Construction-based approaches to syntax (Croft, 2001; Goldberg, 2003) posit a lexicon populated by units of various sizes, as envisaged by (Langacker, 1987). Constructions may be specified completely, as in the case of simple morphemes or idioms such as take it to the bank, or partially, as in the expression what’s X doing Y?, where X and Y are slots that admit fillers of particular types (Kay ...

Money and Discourse: From a Realist Perspective

This paper uses the concept of discourse i.e. semiotic elements of social practices to define money. It explores a way in which money requires discourse in order to be money. Before proceeding to investigate money, however, the following methodological points need to be considered: 1. Why discourse? 2. What is and what is not discourse? 3. How does discourse work with money? This paper focuses ...

Discourse Prominence and Movement Constructions

One of the key requirements in understanding a text is deciding how successive utterances relate to one another. Anaphors help in this respect by picking out entities already existing in the discourse and indicating the referent to which the new information encoded in the utterance should be attached. Sometimes, the interpretation of an anaphor is determined entirely by the morphosyntactic feat...