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This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic diachronic and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological syntactic and semantic literature namely that so-called reciprocal constructions encode symmetric relations. Instead they are analyzed as constructions encoding unspecified relations. In effect it provides a new proposal for the truth-conditional semantics of these constructions. More broadly this book introduces new ways of bringing together historical linguistics and formal semantics demonstrating how on the one hand the inclusion of historical data concerning the sources of reciprocal constructions enriches their synchronic analysis; and how on the other hand an analysis of the syntax and the semantics of these constructions serves as a key for understanding their historical origins.

Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas yet they have not been approached as foundational grammatical structures for constructions such as relative clauses and complement clauses. This is due to an imbalance in past scholarship which has tended to focus on these constructions at the expense of the nominalization structures underlying them. The papers in this collection treat grammatical nominalizations in their own right and as a starting point for the investigation of their uses in complex grammatical structures. A representative sample of Amerindian languages with focus on South America examines properties of grammatical nominalizations such as their multiple functions their internal and external syntax and their diachronic development. Among the far-reaching theoretical conclusions reached by the studies in this volume is that the various types of relative clauses recognized in the typological literature are actually no more than epiphenomena arising from the different uses of grammatical nominalizations.

This groundbreaking work offers a comprehensive account of brain-based research on translation and interpreting. First the volume introduces the methodological and conceptual pillars of psychobiological approaches vis-à-vis those of other cognitive frameworks. Next it systematizes neuropsychological neuroscientific and behavioral evidence on key topics including the lateralization of networks subserving cross-linguistic processes; their relation with other linguistic mechanisms; the functional organization and temporal dynamics of the circuits engaged by different translation directions processing levels and source-language units; the system’s susceptibility to training-induced plasticity; and the outward correlates of its main operations. Lastly the book discusses the field’s accomplishments strengths weaknesses and requirements. Its authoritative yet picturesque didactic style renders it accessible to researchers in cognitive translatology bilingualism and neurolinguistics as well as teachers and practitioners in related areas. Succinctly this piece establishes a much-needed platform for translation and interpreting studies to fruitfully interact with cognitive neuroscience.

Negation and speculation detection is an emerging topic that has attracted the attention of many researchers and there is clearly a lack of relevant textbooks and survey texts. This book aims to define negation and speculation from a natural language processing perspective to explain the need for processing these phenomena to summarise existing research on processing negation and speculation to provide a list of resources and tools and to speculate about future developments in this research area. An advantage of this book is that it will not only provide an overview of the state of the art in negation and speculation detection but will also introduce newly developed data sets and scripts. It will be useful for students of natural language processing subjects who are interested in understanding this task in more depth and for researchers with an interest in these phenomena in order to improve performance in other natural language processing tasks.

While universally present in languages negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages however negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language generally exhibit negative concord a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’ where several expressions each negative on its own come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

Interest in non-canonically case-marked subjects has been unceasing since the groundbreaking work of Andrews and Masica in the late 70’s who were the first to document the existence of syntactic subjects in another morphological case than the nominative. Their research was focused on Icelandic and South-Asian languages respectively and since then oblique subjects have been reported for language after language throughout the world. This newfangled recognition of the concept of oblique subjects at the time was followed by discussions of the role and validity of subject tests discussions of the verbal semantics involved as well as discussions of the theoretical implications of this case marking strategy of syntactic subjects. This volume contributes to all these debates making available research articles on different languages and language families additionally highlighting issues like language contact differential subject marking and the origin of oblique subjects.

Building on a substantial earlier literature the chapters in this volume further advance knowledge and understanding of properties of the noun phrase in English. The empirical material for the papers includes both historical and present-day data with the two often shedding light on each other in a process of mutual illumination. The topics addressed are: the structure of nounless NPs like the poor and the obvious; the article/zero alternation in expressions like go to (the) church; developments in the early history of adjective stacking; the semantics of N + clause units in present-day English; the history of N + BE + clause constructions; and the decline of two anaphoric NPs in Early Modern English. The volume will appeal to scholars working in this area and will also help those interested in the general field of English grammar to keep abreast of recent methods and results in NP-related work.

This book develops a grammar model which accounts for discourse ellipses in spoken Norwegian. This is a previously unexplored area which has also been sparsely investigated internationally. The model takes an exoskeletal view where lexical items are inserted late and where syntactic structure is generated independently of lexical items. Two major questions are addressed. Firstly is there active syntactic structure in the ellipsis site? Secondly how are discourse ellipses licensed? It is argued that both structural and semantic restrictions are required to account for the empirical patterns. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Discourse ellipses can be seen as a contextual adaptation. Ellipsis is only possible in certain contexts. The existence of ellipsis may lead to the impression that syntax is partly destroyed. However the analysis shows that narrow syntax is not affected. The underlying structure stays intact as the licensing restrictions concern only phonological realization. Hence the grammar of discourse ellipses is best characterized as an interface phenomenon.

This book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified ranging from languages rich in compounds such as German Saami Estonian and Finnish to languages poor in compounds such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech like Russian Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.

Narrative Absorption brings together research from the social sciences and Humanities to solve a number of mysteries: Most of us will have had those moments of being totally absorbed in a book a movie or computer game. Typically we do not have any idea about how we ended up in such a state. Nor do we fully realize how we might have changed as we return for the fictional worlds we have visited. The feeling of being absorbed is one of the most illusive and transient feelings but also one that motivates audiences to spend considerable amounts of time in narrative worlds and one that is central to our understanding of the effects of narratives on beliefs and behavior. Key specialists inform the reader of this book about the nature of the peculiar state of consciousness during episodes of absorption the perception of absorption in history the role of absorption in meaningful experiences with narratives the relation with related phenomena such as suspense and identification issues of measurement and the practical implications for instance in education-entertainment.

Various fields have worked separately on topics of absorption albeit using different terminology and methods but having reached a high level of development and complexity in understanding absorption. Now is the time to bring them together. This volume will be a point of reference for years to come.