Books

This volume provides a detailed investigation of perfects from all the branches of the Indo-European language family, in some cases representing the first ever comprehensive description. Thorough philological examinations result in empirically well-founded analyses illustrated with over 940 examples. The unique temporal depth and diatopic breadth of attested Indo-European languages permits the investigation of both TAME (Tense-Aspect-Mood-Evidentiality) systems over time and recurring cycles of change, as well as synchronic patterns of areal distribution and contact phenomena. These possibilities are fully exploited in the volume. Furthermore, the cross-linguistic perspective adopted by many authors, as well as the inclusion of contributions which go beyond the boundaries of the Indo-European family per se, facilitates typological comparison. As such, the volume is intended to serve as a springboard for future research both into the semantics of the perfect in Indo-European itself, and verb systems across the world’s languages.

This research monograph is an investigation of wh-movement and wh-expletive constructions in the Indic languages Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu. It advances a novel theory of the periphery, or the clausal positions that mediate A-bar movement. In particular, a detailed study of wh-expletives and wh-expletive constructions reveals an underlying similarity of design between the A and A-bar systems, and indicates that the two can be understood as driven by the same basic set of mechanisms. The monograph offers an account of wh-movement and the clausal periphery in the two languages, informed by the latest strands of research on the syntax and semantics of A-bar movement. This micro-comparative analytical method yields an important result: we can understand a set of systematic contrasts between the two languages in terms of the properties of specifically the phase-defining heads C and v. Empirically, this work explores the lesser-studied language Kashmiri, bringing to the fore linguistic data not yet discussed in formal syntactic literature. The significance of these data for the development of the wider theoretical framework is stressed throughout, making the book of substantial interest for general linguistic research.

It seems to be a truism that today’s news media present the news in a more personal and direct way than print newspapers some twenty-five years ago. However, it is far from obvious, how this can be described linguistically. This study develops a model that integrates and differentiates between the various facets of personalisation from a linguistic point of view. It includes 1) contexts that involve the audience by inviting direct interaction and through the use of visual elements; 2) the focus on private individuals who are personally affected by news events; and 3) the use of communicative immediacy, for instance in the form of direct speech and first and second person pronouns. This model is applied to data from five British online news sites, demonstrating how individual features contribute to personalisation, how different features interact, and what personalisation strategies are used by news sites of different market orientations.

Over the past few years interest and research in experimental linguistics has shifted more toward centre stage, perhaps because of the growing recognition that purely theoretical formulations and speculations about language must necessarily be tested against the empirical facts of language knowledge, use, and acquisition. To highlight some aspects of empirical linguistics, a conference was organized in 1978 at University of Alberta, at which six prominent scholars were invited to present substantial contributions. These papers are included in this volume, together with an epilogue summing up and discussing the recurrent themes of the conference, and a general bibliography.

Human language is the most powerful communication system that evolution has produced. Within this system, we can talk about things we can physically see, such as cats and tables, but also about more abstract entities, such as theories and feelings. But how are these abstract concepts grounded in human cognition and represented in the mind? How are they constructed in language? And how are they used in natural communication settings?

This book addresses these questions through a collection of studies that relate to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from Conceptual Metaphor Theory to Words as Social Tools. Contributors investigate how abstract concepts are grounded in the mind, represented in language, and used in verbal discourse. This richness is matched by a range of methods used throughout the volume, from neuroimaging to computational modeling, and from behavioral experiments to corpus analyses.

The papers in this volume address core areas in contemporary Arabic linguistics: syntax, phonology, and variation studies. The papers in the syntax sections address different topics from the perspective of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) and subsequent work. The topics in this section are adverbs and adjectives, resumptive pronouns, gapping and VP deletion, and the morphosyntax of reciprocals. The phonology section consists of a contribution on coarticulation effects of uvular(ized) segments, and of a paper on pharyngealization and uvularization within the framework of Optimality Theory. The sociolinguistics papers in the third section of the volume represent three important lines of inquiry: discourse level variation, stylistic variation, and diachronic variation.

This volume includes twelve papers selected from the Ninth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, held at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., 1995. Three of the papers deal with codeswitching with Arabic, two with the acquisition of Arabic, and four with different aspects of Arabic grammatical structure. The volume also includes three papers presenting data on negation in some Arabic dialects (including those of Yemen, Morocco, Egypt).

The topics are diverse and include Arabic and constraints on codeswitching, verb embeddings and collocations in codeswitching, ellipsis in child language acquisition, clitic left dislocation, parameter resetting in second language acquisition, accessing pharyngeal place, and the derivation of imperatives.

This volume includes ten papers selected from the Seventh Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. For the first time in this series, three of the papers represent experimental studies dealing with Arabic syllable and morphological structure. Four are focused on aspects of agreement in Arabic. The remaining three deal with certain problems in Arabic phonology and discourse.

The papers in the first section of this volume, 'Variation in Arabic', deal with a wide range of topics: the function of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) vs. dialect variation in political speeches, patterns of variation in concord in Cairene dialect, the extent to which Cairenes 'know' MSA, and the scope of emphaticization in different dialects.

In the section on 'Phonological Perspectives' there are papers dealing with emphasis spread and with gemination/degemination/antigemination in Iraqi Arabic.

The papers in the section on syntax, all focused on MSA and within a GB framework, discuss aspects of Arabic that are problematic for current hypotheses in linguistics, and also more traditional issues such as word order and verbal vs. nominal sentences.

The last two papers represent a historical, comparative Semitic perspective: on the function of energic suffixes, and on the reconstruction of the early Arabic sounds represented by siin and šiin.