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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.

This book explores the development of the Chinese cleft construction through the lens of Diachronic Construction Grammar. Focusing on shi as an invariant copula it examines the VP de cleft the V de O cleft and the bare shi cleft showing how each signals contrastive and specificational meaning. Tracing their origins from the copular construction in Middle Chinese the study reveals distinct developmental paths and semantic-pragmatic uses for each cleft type. Offering the first diachronic constructional analysis of Chinese cleft sentences it sheds light on the evolution of focus structures the expansion of constructional networks and the typology of focus devices across languages making a key contribution to historical linguistics and Chinese grammar research.

This monograph investigates for the first time words like ‘thing’ of maximal semantic generality across languages. Not all languages have exact equivalents of English ‘thing’ – in some for instance the nearest equivalent is an interrogative stem (‘what?’). Few languages extend their ‘thing’ words into indefinite ‘something’ ‘anything’ ‘nothing’ as in English. As regards Indo-European languages Buck (1988) points out that such words typically derive from a more abstract source than that of simple material objects. In the case of ‘thing’ the earliest source usually given is the Germanic word for a ‘judicial assembly’. How does such a word develop the most general sense of ‘thing’ today? Do all languages follow this kind of pattern? These questions lead into an investigation of the concept of ‘thing’ in a wide range of contexts and in a wide variety of languages involving both typological and cognitive aspects. The results have sometimes been unexpected. Buck C. D. 1988. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo -European Languages. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

This volume consists of corpus-based analyses of progressive aspect constructions in Germanic and Romance. By adopting a variety of methodologies and theoretical frameworks these studies provide valuable insights into the development grammaticalization and use of various progressive structures across two subgroups of the Indo-European family. The progressive constructions under scrutiny range from widely studied and seemingly well understood constructions to relatively infrequent and obscure ones. Most chapters investigate a specific function of a particular progressive structure or a change affecting it. Some chapters cast new light on the pragmatic non-aspectual functions fulfilled by the progressive. All the chapters present a substantial amount of new empirical work. This collection thus provides a unique opportunity for linguists working on Romance languages to get an instant insight into similar phenomena in Germanic languages and vice versa. At the same time the volume addresses contemporary theoretical and methodological issues in corpus contact and historical linguistics showing that research on the progressive remains today as relevant and inspiring as ever.

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.

The volume is of direct interest to scholars from senior academics to PhD students interested in linguistically relevant phonetic and gestural information and in the relationship between multimodal communication and grammar. It contains important work in a relatively new dynamic and exploratory field that is receiving a lot of attention namely the relation of multimodal communication with grammatical frameworks notably Construction Grammar. Drawing on case studies in different languages (English Modern Greek Czech Hebrew Italian) the chapters provide both the necessary theoretical discussion and solid empirical evidence (corpus-based or experimental) for integrating multimodal interactional features with grammatical description and analysis. This timely collection of studies highlights the recent marriage of cognitive/constructional and interactional approaches and addresses head-on questions and challenges like: which multimodal features are systematic and conventional enough to be integrated into grammar and what are appropriate ways of achieving the integration.

This book investigates the interaction between new English lexis and metaphor/metonymy – figures meticulously defined and contrasted in terms of similarity/contiguity. It advances three main hypotheses: (i) derived lexis is more likely to be figurative in meaning and usage than the bases from which it is derived; (ii) derivation obscures the figurative origins of this lexis to varying degrees depending on differing processing strategies; (iii) lexicalisation is determined by Relevance (in Sperber and Wilson’s sense) to the needs of a culture or its powerful interest groups where culture following Norman Fairclough is characterised as an ensemble of recognised action/discourse genres. This volume is distinctive in exploring the relations between grammar and metonymy and providing numerous examples of metaphorical and metonymic lexis as it reflects society's changing needs and (contested) ideologies.

The volume presents an innovative set of researches featuring theoretical and practical discussions of the proverb in cognition and culture. To date there seems to be a need for state-of-the-art research into this subject matter. This volume aims at responding to this need. The chapters contribute from a Cognitive Linguistics interdisciplinary perspective to the existing body of literature on the proverb. The book begins with a first part containing three chapters concerned with theoretical discussions of proverbs in cognition and culture. The three chapters in the second part ponder proverbs within a cognitive-cross-cultural perspective. The third part of the volume includes three chapters that deal with the proverbs of individual languages and cultures. The three chapters in the fourth part study proverbs and/or related phenomena from a cognitive and cultural perspective: snowclones idioms and proverbial phrases. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book will be of interest to academics interested in proverbs within a cognitive linguistic framework and to scholars in the areas of language studies applied linguistics language teaching and learning and Cognitive Linguistics in general and to those researchers who wish to refine their knowledge about the cognitive activities featuring proverb use and their interaction with sociocultural contextual variables.<br/>

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields including formal semantics historical linguistics linguistic typology and variationist sociolinguistics.

Although major cognitively based studies of SPACE and TIME in language have appeared in terms of “Frames of Reference” these do not extend to a wide selection of the world’s languages nor do they combine SPACE and TIME in the overarching concept of WORLD which has its own corresponding frames of reference. The aim of relating and unifying these concepts and their expression across languages constitutes the unique thrust of the present book which will represent a significant extension of earlier approaches. Among its main conclusions will be that the complete separation of terms for SPACE and TIME is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon rather than just a metaphorical extension of the latter from the former. The book will be of interest to all students and practitioners of Linguistics in particular Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic typology but also to a more general readership interested in the historical evolution of concepts of SPACE and TIME.