hardcover. Good. Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book. ISBN 0198237820 9780198237822 [US]

ISBN10: 0198237820, ISBN13: 9780198237822, [publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford] Hardcover Hardcover. This book investigates noun phrases in a representative sample of the world's 6,000 or so languages and proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure in any natural language. It examines the semantic and morpho-syntactic properties of the constituents of noun phrases. In doing so it shows that the noun phrase word order patterns of any human language can be derived from three universal ordering principles and, furthermore, that these are allelaborations of one general iconic principle according to which elements that belong together semantically tend to occur together syntactically. Professor Rijkhoff analyses the nounphrase as a semantic hierarchy which accommodates four noun modifiers relating to quality, quantity, location, and discourse. Noun phrases and sentences can be similarly analysed, he argues, because they have the same underlying semantic structure that accommodates the same kind of modifier categories. He introduces the notion of Seinsart or 'mode of being' as the nominal counterpart of Aktionsart 'mode of action' in verb semantics. He proposes a new grammatical category ofnominal aspect and an implicational universal concerning the occurrence of adjectives as a major word class in the part-of-speech system of a language. The book is clearly organized, easilyaccessible, and assumes no knowledge of a ...