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This book offers the first systematic investigation of the instrumental role across syntax semantics and language acquisition. Focusing primarily on Italian within a comparative perspective the book addresses a long-standing puzzle: why Instruments can be syntactically omitted even when they remain semantically present.Combining theoretical analysis with experimental evidence corpus data and innovative methodologies the study redefines the status of Instruments with respect to the argument-adjunct distinction and introduces a new principled account of their syntactic omission based on semantic recoverability. It proposes a refined typology of Instruments grounded in verb meaning and contextual factors and tests its predictions through behavioral experiments and large-scale corpus analyses.The book also breaks new ground in acquisition research presenting the first experimental investigation of how Italian-speaking children acquire Instruments. The results reveal a striking dissociation between early syntactic mastery and the slower development of Instrument semantic recoverability shedding new light on the acquisition of syntactically optional elements.By integrating syntax semantics and acquisition Silent Instruments provides a robust and empirically grounded framework that is readily applicable to cross-linguistic research and to other phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface. It will be of interest to linguists working on argument structure optionality language acquisition and experimental and corpus-based approaches to grammar.

Storytelling is a means of fostering a sense of identity belonging and continuity. Through stories Indigenous peoples understand and interpret the world and learn how to survive in spite of external forces such as colonialism. Storytelling has been studied by many scholars across myriad disciplines; however its importance in dealing with trauma and in shaping identity demand further study. This volume contributes to an understanding of the importance of storytelling in shaping identity and healing trauma and as a method of resistance among Indigenous peoples in North America. The book will attract readers interested in Native North American studies Canadian studies and cultural studies. In particular the audience will include scholars investigating the importance of storytelling and its impact on healing and resistance among Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of media: fiction and non-fiction works documentaries poetry activist work movies and TV series.

This is the first comprehensive volume to explore the tendency from ‘intersubjective’ to ‘textual’ functions in semantic-pragmatic change. It challenges the influential hypothesis based on the pioneering works by Traugott i.e. the unidirectionality of change from objective to subjective and then to intersubjective meanings. In this framework textual meanings precede (inter)subjective ones. Questioning this established trajectory the contributions in this volume offer fresh perspectives on the development of intersubjective and textual functions. The chapters provide new empirical data about different constructions (modals conditionals discourse markers non-lexical items etc.) across a variety of largely unrelated languages (Ainu Mandarin Chinese English German Japanese Italian Sicilian Spanish).<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book collects a multifaceted reflection for researchers interested in language change especially at the interface of semantics and pragmatics providing readers with an opportunity to better understand the crucial processes of textualization and intersubjectification.

After a comprehensive description of the French and English tense aspect mood/modality (TAM) systems in Chapter 1 an overview of key theoretical perspective and applied perspectives from the morpheme-order studies to examples of internal and external interfaces in monolingual child acquisition is presented in Chapter 2. The literature review of L2 studies illustrates the subtleties of TAM properties in Chapter 3. It is followed by the rigorous methodology of a cross-sectional empirical study designed to test the L2 acquisition of the English TAM system along with pretest results in Chapter 4. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of data obtained from written production tasks cloze tests and completion tasks completed by French EFL and ESL learners and a NS comparison group appear in Chapters 5 6 and 7. The results discussed in Chapter 8 address the explanatory power of the Interface and Feature Reassembly hypotheses while directions for future research are offered in Chapter 9. Scholars will appreciate how new data carefully analyzed in its nuances and complexities bring us closer to better understanding the challenges L2 learners face.

This volume of stylistic scholarship is dedicated to the memory of one of the most inspirational and kindest stylistics scholars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries Peter Verdonk (1934-2021). Verdonk was Professor of Stylistics at the University of Amsterdam and one of the founding members of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). Many of his colleagues from PALA have contributed chapters to this volume. Each author has chosen as their starting point one of Verdonk’s ideas on literary and linguistic style. Through his many nuanced and illuminating stylistic analyses Verdonk’s works explore questions pertaining to: How can we recognise styles and stylistic features? How is style used in literary and non-literary contexts? What is the relationship between text and discourse and between production and reception? And centrally how can we consider ‘style’ as ‘motivated choice’. The chapters in this volume are erudite and inspirational. Reflecting Verdonk's own influence on the discipline of stylistics and his career-long support of younger scholars they will motivate new stylistics researchers and students for decades to come.

The chapters in this volume study the construction representation and negotiation of a variety of social roles through self- and other-reference markers or the discussion of reference as a tool for identification. The chapters uncover new insights both from a historical and present-day perspective and show how positioning the self and other varies what kind of reference choices language users make and what follows from these choices. The data come from a variety of public texts private encounters and questionnaires and the methodologies range from macro to micro perspectives including combinations of qualitative close-reading and quantitative corpus methods and synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The findings enhance our understanding and use of reference practices in the context of global institutional political and multicultural as well as media texts.

This book brings together research in cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology to construct a psychologically plausible account of grammar as a mental network. To explore the organisation of this network the author examines evidence from structural priming which occurs when speakers’ processing of a grammatical construction is affected by prior exposure to the same or a similar construction. Previous experimental findings are innovatively reinterpreted to shed light on various aspects of the grammatical network including the strength of the similarities between constructions the level of abstraction at which they are represented and the ways in which similar constructions can either boost or inhibit each other. Moreover new experiments are reported that extend structural priming to phenomena like the resultative the depictive and the caused-motion construction. The book is directed at theoretical linguists psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists alike showcasing how recent work in these areas can be integrated and extended.

In this volume the emergence of English in Saipan is examined in the complex context of its colonial past. The focus lies on the influence of the American era on the linguistic outcomes in Saipan. Sociolinguistic interviews with indigenous Chamorros and Saipan Carolinians were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. A general overview of the English spoken in Saipan and detailed analyses of selected morphosyntactic features are presented. The English spoken by the local people presents an interesting transitional phase of English becoming a first language with unique local ‘island’ features. Results shed light on linguistic constraints globally and on social constraints in Saipan that motivate language variation and change locally. This volume contributes to the literature of language variation and change lesser-known varieties of English and the description and categorization of emerging English varieties within the canon of World Englishes.

This volume offers a comprehensive snapshot of the breadth of empirical research currently being conducted on the second language acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in Spanish during study abroad. Research on this topic spans diverse methodological approaches types of programs linguistic structures and learner characteristics which is reflected in the contributions in this volume. This diversity of approaches illustrates how the second language development of sociolinguistic variation during study abroad depends crucially on a number of linguistic and extralinguistic factors and can be measured in distinct ways. Thus this collection will be an indispensable resource to researchers and students of second language acquisition sociolinguistics applied linguistics education and other fields interested in language development during study abroad.

Clitics those “funny little words” like English contracted future tense and pluperfect tense/conditional mood markers (’ll and ’d) or French pronominal objects (le ‘him’ la ‘her’ lui ‘to him/her’ etc.) have long been a source of fascination for linguists. Lacking an inherent stress that characterizes “well-behaved” words clitics prosodically depend on a stressed sentence element called their host which makes them look and in some contexts behave like affixes (parts of words). Some clitics Serbian second-position clitics being the case in point also obey stringent linear ordering rules different from those holding for fully-fledged sentence elements. This monograph offers a comprehensive formalized description of second-position clitics in standard Serbian from the viewpoint of the Meaning-Text theory an approach relying on syntactic dependencies and oriented towards speech production which sets it apart from most contemporary frameworks. It will be of interest for general linguists Slavists and advanced learners of Serbian.