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Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for how do constructions fall into disuse and how do constructions change in general formally and/or semantically and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.

This book is about the functional categories of three Caribbean creoles: Saramaccan Haitian Creole and Papiamentu with two specific goals. The first one is to evaluate the respective contribution of the source languages to the functional categories of these three creoles. The second is to evaluate the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the functional categories across these creoles. This study is cast within the relabeling-based account of creole genesis. Several lexical items discussed in this book may fulfill more than one grammatical function thus raising the issue of multifuctionality. No such in-depth comparative work of these three creoles with their source languages and of the three creoles among themselves is available elsewhere in the literature. This book is addressed to linguists (including Master and PhD students) interested in syntactic categories and more specifically in functional categories to creolists and to researchers interested in language contact.

In this stimulating collection of papers leading researchers from Europe and North America demonstrate the theoretical and methodological importance of corpus studies of phraseology and show how data-intensive case studies provide new perspectives on language use. One of the main theoretical findings of recent linguistics is that phraseology is central to language organization. The authors show how software and statistical techniques can reveal phraseological patterns in different text types – literary academic and commercial – and also typical paths of language change across the last 200 years. These patterns are revealed only when computational methods are applied to corpora consisting of hundreds of millions of running words collected from thousands of authentic texts. A major feature of the book is its critical comparison and evaluation of different quantitative and statistical tools which readers can use for their own empirical work. Originally published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics Vol. 18:1 (2013).

The noun is an apparent cross-linguistic universal; nouns are central targets of language acquisition; they are frequently prototypical exemplars of Saussurian arbitrariness. This volume considers nouns in sign languages and in the evanescent performances of homesigners (and gesturers) which exhibit considerable iconic motivation. Do such systems mark nouns formally? Do they share strategies for forming nominal expressions? Individual chapters consider formal criteria for a noun/verb distinction in sign languages with different socio-linguistic profiles strategies of “patterned iconicity” in a subcategory of nouns in both well-established and emerging sign languages grammatical markers for a nominal class in a first generation family homesign system from Mexico and the changing role of handshapes in signs referring to action and objects over the gradual development of a single deaf child’s homesign. The volume is of special interest to scholars of gesture sign languages linguistic typology and the evolution socialization and ethnography of language. Originally published in Gesture Vol. 13:3 (2013).

Language Structure and Environment is a broad introduction to how languages are shaped by their environment. It makes the argument that the social cultural and natural environment of speakers influences the structures and development of the languages they speak. After a general overview the contributors explain in a number of detailed case studies how specific cultural societal geographical evolutionary and meta-linguistic pressures determine the development of specific grammatical features and the global structure of a varied selection of languages. This is a work of meticulous scholarship at the forefront of a burgeoning field of linguistics.

Second-language varieties of English in the South Pacific have received scant attention until now. This monograph offers the first book-length analysis of the sociolinguistics and morphosyntax of three representatives of South Pacific L2 English in comparison – two of which have never been described linguistically. The book describes the spread of English its current status and use in the three island states and compares the most frequent and salient morphosyntactic features to corresponding structures in Asian and African Englishes and the Oceanic substrate languages. As part of a larger theoretical discussion on the multiple factors that determine the evolution and dynamics of L2 varieties in general Mufwene’s feature pool model is extended to a new model that integrates cognitive aspects of language acquisition and use typological aspects of the languages/varieties involved and socio-cultural motivations of language use. The book also examines the role of New Zealand English as a potential epicentre in the South Pacific and considers ethical and methodological issues of linguistic field research.

Winner of the ESSE Book Award 2016 in the category language and linguistics

Winner of the Habilitationspreis of the Deutsche Anglistenverband 2016

This volume dedicated to language transfer starts out with state-of-the-art psycholinguistic approaches to language transfer involving studies on psycho-typological transfer lexical interference and foreign accent. The next chapter on Transfer in Language Learning Contact and Change presents new empirical data from several languages (English German Russian French Italian) on various transfer phenomena ranging from second language acquisition and contact-induced change in word order to cross-linguistic influences in word formation and the lexicon. Transfer in Applied Linguistics scrutinizes on the one hand the external sources of language transfer by investigating bilingual resources and the school context but also by pointing out the differences in academic language in multilingual adolescents. On the other hand internal sources of language transfer in multilingual classrooms are illuminated. A final chapter directs its focus on methodological issues that arise when more than one language is studied systematically and it offers a solution on causal effects for the investigation of heritage language proficiencies. The chapter also includes studies that exploit more innovative methodologies on L1 identification and clitic acquisition.

The argument structure of verbs defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used. On the basis of several case studies combining quantitative corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments it is shown how a usage-based approach sheds new light on a number of issues in argument realization and offers frequency-based explanations for its organizing principles at three levels of generality: verbs constructions and argument structure alternations.

The articles in this volume examine a number of critical issues in grammaticalization studies including the relationship between grammaticalization and pragmaticalization subjectification and intersubjectification and grammaticalization and language contact. The contributions consider data from a broad range of spoken and signed languages including Greek Japanese Nigerian Pidgin Swedish and Turkish Sign Language. The authors work in a variety of theoretical frameworks and draw on a number of research traditions. The volume will be of primary interest to historical linguists though the diversity of approaches and sources of data mean that the volume is also likely have considerable general appeal.

This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish French Italian Portuguese Romanian Catalan Occitan Sardinian and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics cognitive linguistics and lexical change.

Complementizers offer a window into the architecture of the left-periphery and further our understanding of the demarcation of the boundaries between the C(omplementizer) and T(ense) domains. Using the articulated left-periphery as a laboratory and Spanish constructions featuring more than one complementizer as a point of departure the author delivers new insights into the syntactic positions and behavior of Spanish complementizer que along the left edge. These observations have far-reaching consequences to such fundamental linguistic concepts as the derivation of left dislocations ellipsis and locality of movement. Of great interest to syntax graduate students and researchers in general this volume provides a stepping stone to cracking the code on several current syntactic questions including the widely-contested position of preverbal subjects in null-subject languages like Spanish. In addition it offers the linguist a bountiful toolbox for the cross-linguistic investigation of a number of left-peripheral and clausal phenomena.

By examining the acquisition of Spanish in combination with languages other than English (Arabic Basque Catalan Chinese Dutch Farsi French German Nahuatl Quechua Portuguese Swedish Turkish) this volume advances novel data pertinent to the field’s understanding of acquisition of Spanish in the XXI century. Its crosslinguistic nature invites us to reconsider major theoretical questions such as the role of L1 transfer linguistic typology and onset of acquisition from a fresh perspective and to question the validity of the traditional parameter (re)setting perspective taken in SLA. Additionally this volume underscores the necessity of providing accurate descriptions of the language pairings investigated emphasizing the interconnection between linguistic and SLA theory and pushing us to a more atomic view of the system in which features and feature bundles mapped onto lexical items comprise the skeleton of language. This volume is of great relevance for researchers and students of SLA alike.

This collection is a pioneer study of linguistic phenomena in St Vincent and the Grenadines written by scholars who are both respected in their field of research and connected to the linguistic realities in the geographic area under investigation. This book covers the subfields of sociolinguistics discourse analysis ethnography historical linguistics and syntax. It concentrates on mainland St Vincent and the Grenadine island of Bequia. The volume will appeal to a broad audience including not just specialists in linguistics but also teacher trainers and educators.

The volume is the first comprehensive typological study of the conceptualisation of temperature in languages as reflected in their systems of central temperature terms (hot cold to freeze etc.). The key issues addressed here include questions such as how languages categorize the temperature domain and what other uses the temperature expressions may have e.g. when metaphorically referring to emotions (‘warm words’). The volume contains studies of more than 50 genetically areally and typologically diverse languages and is unique in considering cross-linguistic patterns defined both by lexical and grammatical information. The detailed descriptions of the linguistic and extra-linguistic facts will serve as an important step in teasing apart the role of the different factors in how we speak about temperature – neurophysiology cognition environment social-cultural practices genetic relations among languages and linguistic contact. The book is a significant contribution to semantic typology and will be of interest for linguists psychologists anthropologists and philosophers.

This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of the argument realisation of the concepts of causative purpose permit let/allow and transfer in a broad cross-linguistic typologically diverse mix of languages with GIVE GET TAKE PUT and LET verbs. This volume stands as the first systematic exploration of these verbs and concepts as they occur in complex events and clauses. This book brings together scholars and researchers from a variety of functionally inspired theoretical backgrounds that have worked on these verbs within one language or from a cross-linguistic perspective. The objective is to understand the linguistic behaviour of the verbs and their inter-relationships within a contemporary cognitive-functional linguistic perspective. The languages represented include Irish German Slavic (West Slavic: Polish Czech Slovak and Sorbian and Western South Slavic: Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) Germanic Romance Gan Chinese Yichun dialect Māori Bohairic Coptic Shaowu Chinese Hebrew English Lithuanian Estonian the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Italian and Persian. Topics discussed include argument structure and the encoding of arguments under causation permission and transferverbs their lexical semantics and event structure.

This volume analyzes constructions with non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically drawing on insights from cognitive and discourse-functional linguistics. Prototypical subjects have often been characterized in terms of their semantic syntactic and discourse features such as animacy agentivity topicality referentiality definiteness and autonomy of existence of the subject referent. A non-canonical subject is one that lacks some of these features. This may be reflected in its meaning grammatical coding and/or discourse function. In discussing non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically the chapters in the volume address the following more general topics: What kinds of grammatical semantic and discourse criteria can be used to distinguish subjects from non-subjects? To what extent are subject criteria construction-specific? What kinds of constructions have non-canonical subjects? What are the semantic and discourse functions of constructions with non-canonical subjects? Are subjects which are grammatically non-canonical also atypical in terms of their discourse features?

This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics starting from the idea that language can be described as a mechanism for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics the present volume closes the publication of the three volume series. It discusses in detail several linguistic notions crucial to the development of Meaning-Text models of natural languages: semantic and syntactic actants government pattern lexical functions linguistic connotations phrasemes the meaning of grammatical cases and linguistic dependencies. The notions under analysis are illustrated from a variety of languages. Reflecting the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists anthropologists semioticians and computational linguists.

This volume is a selection of twenty peer-reviewed articles first presented at the 41st annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of Ottawa in 2011. They are thematically linked by a broad notion of variation across languages dialects speakers time linguistic contexts and communicative situations. Furthermore the articles address common theoretical and empirical issues from different formal experimental or corpus-based perspectives. The languages analyzed belong to the main members of the Romance family Spanish Portuguese Catalan French Ladin Italian Sardinian and Romanian and a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields from phonetics to semantics as well as historical linguistics bilingualism and second-language learning is covered. By illustrating the richness and complementarity of subjects methods and theoretical frameworks explored within Romance linguistics significant contributions are made to both the documentation of Romance languages and to linguistic theory.

In contrast with the central arguments of the event structure which have been extensively studied much less attention has been given to non-arguments. To bridge this gap the present volume focuses on prepositional and adverbial phrases expressing instrumental causal spatial temporal roles and the like i.e. semantic roles which have been typically associated with oblique case. The various contributions show that case in general and oblique case in particular is at the intersection between form and meaning: at issue are the nuclear versus non-nuclear status of these phrases and the semantic roles they express. The import of these phrases on the event structure is described in a functional-cognitive perspective for Cora Nyulnyul German Dutch French and Spanish.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The specific analyses of empirical phenomena presented in this volume as well as their implications for linguistic theory in general will be of interest for scholars interested in syntax semantics and pragmatics.<br/>This is the sixth and final volume of the Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages project.<br/>

Above and Beyond the Segments presents a unique collection of experimental linguistic and phonetic research. Mainly it deals with the experimental approach to prosodic and more specifically melodic aspects of speech. But it also treats segmental phonetics and phonology second language learning semantics and related topics.

Apart from European languages and dialects (including Dutch English Greek Danish and dialects from Italy and The Netherlands) there also are chapters on regions as widespread as China Russia South Africa South Sudan and Surinam. These all testify the enormous diversity of language and speech in the world.

This book is of special interest to linguists working on prosodic aspects of speech in general and to those studying non-Western languages in particular.

Endocentric Structuring of Projection-free Syntax puts forward a novel theory of syntax that rigidly adheres to the principle of Minimal Computation in which a number of traditional but extraneous stipulations such as referential indices and representational labels/projections are eliminated. It specifically articulates the overarching hypothesis that every syntactic object is composed by recursive phase-by-phase embedding of the endocentric structure {H α} where H is a head lexical item and α is another syntactic object (order irrelevant). The proposed mechanism achieves both theory-internal simplicity and broad empirical coverage at the same time advancing a radically reduced conception of endocentricty/headedness while deriving a number of empirically grounded constraints on human language.

Convergence i.e. the increase of inter-systemic similarities is usually considered the default development in language contact situations. This volume focuses on the other logical possibilities of diachronic development namely stability and divergence – two well-attested but under-researched phenomena. The contributions investigate the sociolinguistic and structural factors and mechanisms that lead to or at least reinforce both types of non-convergence despite of language contact. The contributions cover a wide range of language contact situations including standard and non-standard varieties.

This volume focuses on word formation processes in smaller and so far underrepresented indigenous languages of South America. The data for the analyses have been mainly collected in the field by the authors. The several language families described here among them Arawakan Takanan and Guaycuruan as well as language isolates such as Yurakaré Kalapalo and Cholón reflect the linguistic diversity of South America. Equally diverse are the topics addressed relating to word formation processes like reduplication nominal and verbal compounding clitic compounding and incorporation. The traditional notions of the processes are discussed critically with respect to their implementation in minor indigenous languages. The book is therefore not only of interest to readers with an Amerindian background but also to typologists and historical linguists and it is a supplement to more theory-driven approaches to language and linguistics.

The authors of this book share a common interest in the following topics: the importance of corpora compilation for the empirical study of human language; the importance of pragmatic categories such as emotion attitude illocution and information structure in linguistic theory; and a passionate belief in the central role of prosody for the analysis of speech. Four distinct sections (spoken corpora compilation; spoken corpora annotation; prosody; and syntax and information structure) give the book the structure in which the authors present innovative methodologies that focus on the compilation of third generation spoken corpora; multilevel spoken corpora annotation and its functions; and additionally a debate is initiated about the reference unit in the study of spoken language via information structure. The book is accompanied by a web site with a rich array of audio/video files. The web site can be found at the following address: DOI: 10.1075/scl.61.media

This volume gathers together for the first time contributions from the most relevant approaches in discourse segmentation developed in the last fifteen years in Romance languages. All these approaches share the assumption that discourses (either oral or written) can be fully divided into units and subunits: just like sentences are fully analyzed with the help of Syntax discourse can be fully analyzed with the help of Pragmatics. In this sense the approaches in this volume represent a step forward with respect to the issues in segmentation addressed by Conversational Analysis or by Discourse Analysis. The research questions addressed in this volume range from the distribution of foci to the coupling of gestures and discourse units the treatment of discourse markers or the interplay between intonation and discourse organization; all of great interest for General Linguistics as well as for Romance Languages.

This volume provides a unique collection of studies representing diversity and innovation in Arabic linguistics. The volume includes several groundbreaking papers authored by leaders in the field organized around key aspects of Arabic morphosyntax semantics phonology and sociolinguistics as well as language acquisition and neurolinguistics. Balancing depth and width of coverage the volume integrates a variety of papers associated with inherent dialectal and diglossic variation innovative questions data and approaches as well as innovative reexaminations of existing theoretical frameworks making a meaningful contribution to the understanding of Arabic linguistic structure and human language representation/processing throughout all papers. The volume is intended to highlight the potential contribution of Arabic linguistics and to endorse further contributions to the sparse knowledge of language representation and processing in Arabic to further develop our understanding of innate linguistic knowledge. It draws special attention to the potential contribution of studies of diversity in Arabic dialects and between the two language varieties of Arabic for the broader study of human language.

This is an innovative and distinctive comparative monograph about new word creation in the different varieties of Catalan. In eight chapters it provides a panoramic analysis of the neologisms documented by the NEOXOC network. Each chapter is dedicated to the qualitative and quantitative analysis as well as the comparative territorial analysis of neologisms differentiated by formation sources: suffixation prefixation neoclassical compounding vernacular compounding and syntagmatic compounding Spanish loanwords English loanwords truncation and semantic change. Two annexes contain the neologisms cited as well as a sample of the data collected by NEOXOC from a corpus during 2008-2010 thus establishing a link with previous studies carried out by the Observatori de Neologia. This book is of interest to scholars of the Catalan language and to anyone involved in lexical neology or in more specific fields such as morphology or lexical semantics. Moreover the innovative approach (based on the analysis of diatopic variation in Catalan lexical neology) makes it relevant for those who are interested in the evolution of languages linguistic variation and language planning. The chapters are written in Catalan with extensive English summaries.

This book is a description of Luwo a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan. Luwo is used by multilingual dynamic communities of practice as one language among others that form individual and flexible repertoires. It is a language that serves as a means of expressing the Self as a medium of art and self-actualization and sometimes as a medium of writing. It is spoken in the home and in public spaces by fairly large numbers of people who identify themselves as Luwo and as members of all kinds of other groups. In order to provide insights into these dynamic and diverse realities of Luwo this book contains both a concise description and analysis of the linguistic features and structures of Luwo and an approach to the anthropological linguistics of this language. The latter is presented in the form of separate chapters on possession number experiencer constructions spatial orientation perception and cognition. In all sections of this study sociolinguistic information is provided wherever this is useful and possible detailed information on the semantics of grammatical features and constructions is given and discussions of theory-oriented approaches to various linguistic features of Luwo are presented.

How do words mean? What is the nature of meaning? How can we grasp a word’s meaning? The frame-semantic approach developed in this book offers some well-founded answers to such long-standing but still controversial issues. Following Charles Fillmore’s definition of frames as both organizers of experience and tools for understanding the monograph attempts to examine one of the most important concepts of Cognitive Linguistics in more detail. The point of departure is Fillmore’s conception of “frames of understanding” – an approach to (cognitive) semantics that Fillmore developed from 1975 to 1985. The envisaged Understanding Semantics (“U-Semantics”) is a semantic theory sui generis whose significance for linguistic research cannot be overestimated. In addition to its crucial role in the development of the theoretical foundations of U-semantics corpus-based frame semantics can be applied fruitfully in the investigation of knowledge-building processes in text and discourse.

This volume offers the reader a unique possibility to obtain a concise introduction to dependency linguistics and to learn about the current state of the art in the field. It unites the revised and extended versions of the linguistically-oriented papers to the First International Conference on Dependency Linguistics held in Barcelona. The contributions range from the discussion of definitional challenges of dependency at different levels of the linguistic model its role beyond the classical grammatical description and its annotation in dependency treebanks to concrete analyses of various cross-linguistic phenomena of syntax in its interplay with phonetics morphology and semantics including phenomena for which classical simple phrase-structure based models have proven to be unsatisfactory. The volume will be thus of interest to both experts and newcomers to the field of dependency linguistics and its computational applications.

Since the 1980s theories and studies of grammaticalization have provided a major source of inspiration for the description and explanation of language change giving rise to many publications and conferences. This collection presents original empirical studies that explore various facets of grammaticalization research of both formal and functional orientation. The papers of this selection deal with general issues and specific empirical domains such as personal pronouns; indefinite pronouns; final particles; tense and aspect markers; comitative markers and coordinating conjunctions. The languages covered include English German dialects of Italian Japanese Polish and Walman (Papuan). The book will be of great interest to linguists working on language change in a wide variety of languages.

The universal and typological status of the notion of word class — closely related to part-of-speech systems morphology syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface — continues to be of major linguistic theoretical interest. The papers included in this volume offer a fresh look at the variety of current theoretical and descriptive approaches to word class issues and present original analyses and new data from a number of languages. The primary focus is on methods (including computational ones) and criteria for identifying and representing major word classes and subclasses in specific languages with considerable attention also directed towards the characterization of the nature and role of minor — or neglected — word classes including trans-categorization processes. The range of topics and perspectives covered makes this volume of considerable interest to both theoretical linguists and typologists.

The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change (socio)linguistic research on variation and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations demonstrate how variation occurs and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change focusing on the boundary between word and grammar discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.

Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive interactional and typological perspectives and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use as an interactional resource available to language users in both written and spoken language. In addition the authors produce typologically relevant information about subordination in the different varieties and genres of the studied languages (English Estonian Finnish and French). These qualities make the book unique in the field of subordination studies.

Greenberg’s (1954) concept of a ‘Khoisan’ language family while heartily embraced by non-specialists has been harshly criticized by linguists working on these languages. Evidence for Greenberg's hypothesis has proved to be seriously insufficient and little progress has been made in the intervening years in substantiating his claim by means of the standard comparative method. This volume goes beyond “Khoisan” in the linguistic sense by exploring a more complex history that includes multiple and widespread events of language contact in southern Africa epitomized in the areal concept ‘Kalahari Basin’. The papers contained herein present new data on languages from all three relevant lineages Tuu Kx’a and Khoe-Kwadi complemented by non-linguistic research from molecular and cultural anthropology. A recurrent theme is to disentangle genealogical and areal historical relations — a major challenge for historical linguistics in general. The multi-disciplinary approach reflected in this volume strengthens the hypothesis that Greenberg’s “Southern African Khoisan” is better explained in terms of complex linguistic cultural and genetic convergence.

The chapters in this book show how the different flavors of Construction Grammar provide illuminating insights into the syntax semantics pragmatics and discourse-functional properties of specific phenomena in Romance languages such as (Castilian) Spanish French Romanian and Latin from a synchronic as well as a diachronic viewpoint. The phenomena surveyed include the role of constructional meanings in novel verb-noun compounds in Spanish the relevance of lexicalization for a constructionist analysis of complex prepositions in French the complementariness of fragments patterns and constructions as theoretical and explanatory constructs in verb complementation in French Latin and Spanish non-constituent coordination phenomena (e.g. Right Node Raising Argument Cluster Coordination and Gapping) in Romanian and variable type framing in Spanish constructions of directed motion in the light of Leonard Talmy’s (2000) typological differences of lexicalization between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages.

Semantic roles have continued to intrigue linguists for more than four decades now starting with determining their kind and number with their morphological expression and with their interaction with argument structure and syntax. The focus in this volume is on typological and historical issues. The papers focus on the cross-linguistic identification of semantic-role equivalents on the regularity of and exceptions concerning change and grammaticalization in semantic roles the variation of encoding the roles of direction and experiencer in specific languages presenting evidence for identifying a new semantic role of speech addressee in Caucasian languages on semantic roles in word formation and finally a cross-linguistic comparison of the functions and the grammaticalization of the ethical dative in some Indo-European languages. The book will be of interest to anyone involved with case and semantic roles with the syntax-semantics interface and with semantic change and grammaticalization.

Approximately a quarter of a century ago the Multi-Dimensional (MD) approach—one of the most powerful (and controversial) methods in Corpus Linguistics—saw its first book-length treatment. In its eleven chapters this volume presents all new contributions covering a wide range of written and spoken registers such as movies music magazine texts student writing social media letters to the editor and reports in different languages (English Spanish Portuguese) and contexts (engineering journalism the classroom the entertainment industry the Internet etc.). The book also includes a personal account of the development of the method by its creator Doug Biber an introduction to MD statistics as well as an application of MD analysis to corpus design. The book should be essential reading to anyone with an interest in how texts genres and registers are used in society what their lexis and grammar look like and how they are interrelated.

The differences among functionalist cognitivist and/or constructionist models are generally taken to be not absolute but rather a matter of emphasis and degree with an increasing permeability between paradigms arising from cross-fertilizing influences. This book further explores this burgeoning area of research through the notion of functional-cognitive space namely the topography of the space occupied by functional cognitivist and/or constructionist models against the background of formalist approaches in general and of Chomsky’s Minimalism in particular. Specifically the twelve contributions in the present volume update the reader on recent developments in functionalism (Systemic Functional Grammar Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar) and cognitivism (Word Grammar (Cognitive) Construction Grammar and the Lexical Contructional Model). Plotting cognitive-space proves particularly adequate for situating the six models represented in this volume not only in relation to each other but also potentially with respect to a wide spectrum of functionalist cognitivist and/or constructionist models.

This book is a research monograph that explores the implications of the strongest minimalist thesis from an antisymmetric perspective. Three empirical domains are investigated: nominal root compounds in German and English nominal gerunds in English and their German counterparts and small clauses in Russian and English. A point of symmetry that has the potential of stalling the derivation emerges in the derivation of all of these constructions. Building on certain assumptions on how Merge works this book shows that the points of symmetry can all be resolved in the same way; despite the fact that the three empirical domains under investigation are standardly derived from distinct structural configurations such as head-head merger in the case of root compounds head-phrase merger as it arises from standard complementation/predication structures for nominal gerunds and phrase-phrase merger in small clauses. This book is of interest to all researchers working on syntax and its interfaces.

Pragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the topic a flourishing literature has reported on the broad set of skills that can be called pragmatic. This volume aims to bring that literature together in a digestible format. It provides a series of succinct review chapters on 19 key topics ranging from preverbal skills right up to irony and argumentative discourse. Each chapter equips the reader with an overview of current theories key empirical findings and questions for new research. This valuable resource will be of interest to scholars of psychology linguistics speech therapy and cognitive science.

In recent decades linguists have significantly advanced our understanding of the grammatical properties of evidentials but their social and interactional properties and uses have received less attention. This volume originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics and Society (issue 3:2 2012) draws together complementary perspectives on the social and interactional life of evidentiality drawing on data from diverse languages including Albanian English Garrwa (Pama-Nyungan Australia) Huamalíes Quechua (Quechuan Peru) Nanti (Arawak Peru) and Pastaza Quichua (Quechuan Ecuador). The language-specific studies in this volume are all based on the close analysis of discourse or communicative interaction and examine both evidential systems of varying degrees of grammaticalization and 'evidential strategies' present in languages without grammaticalized evidentials. The analyses presented draw on conversational analysis ethnography of communication ethnopoetics pragmatics and theories of deixis and indexicality and will be of interest to students of evidentiality in a variety of analytical traditions.

Sociophonetics is a privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change. By combining theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis – both phonetic and statistical – it is possible to extrapolate the role of individual factors (socio-cultural physiological communicative-interactional etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book investigates the fundamental relationship between speech variation and the social background of speakers from articulatory acoustic dialectological and conversational perspectives thus breaking new ground with respect to classical variationist and dialectological studies. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines – including phonetics phonology sociolinguistics psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics – will find innovative suggestions for multiple approaches to language variation. Although presuming some basic knowledge of experimental phonetics and sociolinguistics the book is addressed to all readers with an interest in speech and language variation mechanisms in social interaction.

This volume brings together papers that take usage-based approaches to study the nature of human language with a focus on the grammar of Japanese. The 12 chapters provide a rich array of data and methodologies with topics ranging from phonology modality and grammatical morphemes to sentential construction and discourse-level phenomena such as turn-taking speech register and language change. As a whole they demonstrate that usage-based linguistics illuminates various phenomena in the language that could not have been well accounted for by resorting solely to a formal theory such as the Universal-Grammar-based approach. Reflecting theoretical methodological and technological advancements made in and outside the field of cognitive-functional linguistics in recent years the papers contained in this volume both individually and collectively have significant implications towards linguistics in general and Japanese linguistics in particular as we as Japanese language teaching.

The Spatial Language of Time presents a crosslinguistically valid state-of-the-art analysis of space-to-time metaphors using data mostly from English and Wolof (Africa) but additionally from Japanese and other languages. Metaphors are analyzed in terms of their most direct motivation by basic human experiences (Grady 1997a; Lakoff & Johnson 1980). This motivation explains the crosslinguistic appearance of certain metaphors but does not say anything about temporal metaphor systems that deviate from the types documented here. Indeed we observe interesting culture- and language-specific metaphor phenomena. Refining earlier treatments of temporal metaphor and adapting to temporal experience Levinson’s (2003) idea of frames of reference the author proposes a contrast between perspective-neutral and perspective-specific frames of reference in temporal metaphor that has important crosslinguistic ramifications for the temporal semantics of FRONT/BEHIND expressions. This book refines the cognitive-linguistic approach to temporal metaphor by analyzing the extensive temporal structure in what has been considered the source domain of space and showing how temporal metaphors can be better understood by downplaying the space-time dichotomy and analyzing metaphor structure in terms of conceptual frames. This book is of interest to linguists psychologists anthropologists philosophers and others who may have wondered about relationships between space and time.

For many years studies of the development of pragmatic and discourse skills in young children have predominantly focused on English and other European languages as with the field of child language development in general. This volume originally published in Chinese Language and Discourse 3:1 (2012) brings together a team of researchers from China the UK USA Hong Kong Macao and Taiwan. It explores the development of pragmatic and discourse skills among Chinese-speaking children by investigating the development of pragmatic features specific to the Chinese language and culture (i.e. the use of null forms and overt forms in self/other reference and time expressions) socio-cultural factors in child-directed speech and comprehension of semiotic resources in children’s early childhood. The studies reported in the volume draw upon data of different kinds including recorded spontaneous speech corpus questionnaires and experimental data. The findings not only highlight a number of developmental patterns which may be attributed to the Chinese language(s) and culture but also contribute to the understanding of some key issues in the development of pragmatic and discourse skills irrespective of linguistic backgrounds.

The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages focusing on English German Norwegian French Spanish and Portuguese and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

Any theory of phonology must be able to account for the acquisition and development of a phonological system and studying acquisition often leads to reciprocal advances in the theory. This volume explores the link between phonological theory and linguistic development from a variety of angles including phonological representation individual differences and cross-linguistic approaches. Chapters touch on the full spectrum of phonological development from childhood to adult second-language learning and from developing dialects to language death. Contributors are leading researchers in the fields of linguistics speech pathology and cognitive psychology. A tribute to Daniel A. Dinnsen the papers in this volume complement his research career by highlighting significant contributions of acquisition research to the development of phonological theory.

This volume should be of great interest to phoneticians phonologists and both historical and cognitive linguists. Using data from the Romance languages for the most part the book explores the phonetic motivation of several sound changes e.g. glide insertions and elisions vowel and consonant insertions elisions assimilations and dissimilations. Within the framework of the DAC (degree of articulatory constraint) model of coarticulation it clearly demonstrates that the typology and direction of these sound changes may very largely be accounted for by the coarticulatory effects occurring between adjacent or neighbouring phonetic segments and by the degrees of articulatory constraint imposed by speakers on the production of vowels and consonants. The phonetically-based explanations presented here are formulated on the basis of coarticulation data from speech production and perception research carried out during the last fifty years and are complemented with data on the co-occurrence of phonetic segments in lexical forms of the languages being considered. Attention is also paid to the role that positional and prosodic factors play in sound change implementation as well as to the cognitive and peripheral strategies involved in segmental replacements elisions and insertions.

The aim of this book is to investigate and attain new insights on how and to what extent the wider sociolinguistic context of language use and contact impinges on formal grammatical structures. The papers contained in the book approach this important problem from various points of view by focusing on language evolution and change on multilingualism language mixing and dialect variation on spoken language and on creole languages. Given the theoretical perspectives methodological focus and analyses the book will be of interest to theoretical linguists as well as sociolinguists from undergraduate students to researchers.