Non-Finiteness

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-009-07369-1
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 250 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 371 g

'Non-finiteness' is a phenomenon that occurs in most natural languages, whereby a verb is not inflected by grammatical tense, and does not possess the grammatical features of aspect, mood or voice. Various theories have been developed to explain their distribution and their role in clause structure, but many instances of non-finiteness remain unaccounted for. Taking a functional approach, this study proposes a 'process relation framework' to explain the more complex, previously unaccounted for, instances of non-finiteness in clause structure. It applies the framework comparatively to non-finiteness in English and Chinese, showing how it can be applied across typologically distinct languages. Drawing on corpus-based instances and observations, it introduces numerous thought-provoking cases, in which constructional (or combining) types and the predictability of non-finiteness co-occur. In terms of application, non-finiteness is decisive in categorising language types, and it is critical in processing natural languages, text segmentation and annotation in particular.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Yang, Bingjun

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Zeichensprachen, Künstliche Sprachen
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction; 2. Non-finiteness in the literature; 3. Theoretical foundation; 4. Basic process relations as one solution to the controversy; 5. Non-finiteness as the bridge for process compression; 6. Revisiting the controversial English constructions with non-finiteness; 7. Revisiting the controversial Chinese constructions with non-finiteness; 8. Conclusion; References; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Yang, Bingjun
Bingjun Yang is Professor in Systemic Functional Linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His publications include Corpus-based Investigations into Grammar, Media and Health Discourse (Springer Nature, 2020), Language Policy (Routledge, 2017) and Absolute Clauses in English from the Systemic Functional Perspective (Springer, 2015).