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This volume places topicality at the very heart of grammatical explanation drawing on richly annotated discourse corpora from lesser-studied languages across the Americas and beyond. Through nine original studies it demonstrates how aspects of discourse relevance (rather than just abstract syntactic relations) shape word order argument encoding case marking and voice systems in natural speech. Several chapters revisit and critically reassess Givón's seminal work on topic continuity and discourse motivation and re-examine classic frameworks such as “Preferred Argument Structure” through contemporary corpus-based work. The volume spans a remarkable typological range of linguistic systems combining methodological innovation with fine-grained empirical analysis. Essential reading for linguists working on information structure typology and language documentation this book demonstrates why topicality remains a powerful engine of grammatical design diversity and change.

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.

Root syntax with roots as primitive lexical units is an influential theme in building the lexicon in linguistic theory typically in Distributed Morphology and the generative model of minimal computation. Implementing important fragments of the Arabic lexicon the book presents a comprehensive view of word formation and argument structure providing robust evidence that favors root-based rather than stem-based derivations of words. Tested on Arabic a language wearing DM ‘on its sleeve’ the DM model gains substantial support and refinement. Significant templatic affixes turn out to be roots. Valency changing causatives anti-causatives reflexives or nominalizations implicate root complexity not category change. Psych perception and cognition eventuality classes are born as root subtypes not ‘verb’ classes. Category changing deverbalizations deadjectivations or denominalizations are supplemented by complex root derivations. Melodic templates operate ‘templatization’ (e.g. with adjectives) or act as functional templates for Voice and Aspect (e.g. with passives) or gradation (with synthetic comparatives) after category typing. The book is of interest to generative and comparative linguists cognitivists typologists lexicographers and students teachers and researchers of Arabic or Semitic

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 book brings together some of the most prominent linguists working in the field of East and Southeast Asian syntax to create a special collection of papers which highlight new developments in the analysis of the syntax of Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian languages. Generative syntactic theory has regularly been influenced by discoveries made in Asian languages and the present volume connects a broad range of striking patterns found in Asian languages with Minimalist syntactic theory and provides arguments for fresh approaches to a variety of fundamental problems and puzzles within formal syntax. The volume has also been created as a tribute to Professor C.-T. James Huang one of the most influential of generative linguists active in the study of Chinese and other Asian languages.

Harmonic Serialism is a derivational version of Optimality Theory that has widely been pursued for phonology and syntax but so far much less for morphology. The harmonic serialist approach to inflectional morphology underlying the contributions to the present volume is virtually unique in that it combines from the perspective of the minimalist program a cyclic approach to morphological structure-building with an optimality-theoretic approach to optimization; in a general taxonomy of morphological theories it qualifies as lexical realizational Merge-based and pre-syntactic.<br/>Following a comprehensive introduction to the new theory the book brings together eight case studies from typologically different languages (like Potawatomi Itelmen Acoma Modern Greek Lithuanian Urarina Irarutu and Hill Mari) that address a number of morphological phenomena which can all be shown to empirically support a cyclic optimality-theoretic approach (among them extended exponence disjunctive blocking impoverishment deponency portmanteau marking and morphological movement). The book will be of use to all scholars and students interested in morphological theory.

Word classes of a language are usually not homogeneous groups of lexemes that share the same morphological and syntactic properties completely. Rather lexemes are usually grouped together that have some basic commonalities but may differ in detail e.g. regarding their inflectional behaviour. In many cases one can identify within a word class a large number of lexemes that conform to a certain morphological or syntactic pattern (often referred to as “core members”) whilst there is only a comparatively small number of deviants (“peripheral members”). Examples abound: borrowings (in several word classes) may differ grammatically from native words some complex verbs evade certain syntactic slots (such as verb-second position in German) mass and proper nouns differ grammatically from (other) nouns and so on. In this volume we focus on the diachrony of such phenomena. We consider that the study of change and stability can be particularly helpful in furthering our understanding of the diversity within word classes concerning for example the motivation for divergent grammatical properties.

This ebook is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

The Making of Multi-Unit Turns is the first book-length treatment to comprehensively describe extended turns produced by a single speaker. It draws on multiparty everyday conversations in English using the methods of Conversation Analysis. It brings together the currently scattered literature on MUTs and goes on to expand our understanding of the ‘natural history’ of MUTs by showing how speakers and recipients deploy linguistic and embodied behaviours in intricate ways from the launch of an extended turn of talk to beyond the end of the MUT. The chapters report on the diverse ways in which speakers secure a second turn-constructional unit and show how grammatical prosodic gestural and postural resources as well as gaze direction are deployed to extend the speaker’s floor in a long MUT. Further investigating how speakers and their recipients transition out of the MUT and return to turn-by-turn talk and how recipients sometimes disrupt an extended MUT this book aims to provide a fresh understanding of the orderliness which underlies our everyday interactions.

Over the last decade Construction Grammar has become increasingly popular in the study of language contact and multilingualism. Indeed constructional approaches including Diasystematic Construction Grammar not only offer a useful theoretical framework for empirical studies but also provide a fresh look at fundamental questions in contact linguistics. This volume continues the series of works on Constructions in Contact (the first two volumes were published in 2018 and 2021). It presents new research on the constructionist modelling of language contact phenomena the impact of multilingualism on argument structure constructions and the role of phonological units in language contact. The volume thus combines classical areas of constructional research with innovative ones demonstrating the broad applicability of Construction Grammar for contact linguistics.

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.