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Hispanic Linguistics : Current issues and new directions
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Alfonso Morales-Front,
Michael J. Ferreira,
Ronald P. Leow and
Cristina Sanz
This volume addresses a wide range of phenomena including intonation restructuring clitic climbing aspectual structure subject focus marking code-switching lenition loanwords and heritage learning that are central in Hispanic linguistics today. The authors approach these issues from a variety of recent theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies and make important contributions to our current understanding of language acquisition theoretical and descriptive linguistics and language contact. This collection of articles is a testimony to the breadth and degree of specialization of the scholarly interest in the field. The selection of refereed chapters included in this volume were originally presented at the 20th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS) hosted at Georgetown University 2016. The book should be read with interest by scholars and graduate students hoping to gain insight into the issues currently debated in Hispanic Linguistics.
Silently Structured Silent Argument
May 2020
Book
Author(s):
Yuta Sakamoto
Theoretical linguistics in the generative tradition has payed much attention to issues related to silence ‒ children know the syntax of silence despite the fact that they do not have direct access to it throughout their language acquisition process. One of the issues that have been hotly discussed regarding silence in natural languages is whether it involves syntactic structure or not. This book is concerned with a particular instance of silence in natural languages what is called radical pro-drop showing that it is silently structured on the basis of novel data from Japanese as well as Chinese Korean Mongolian and Turkish. The discussion in this book also has consequences for the dichotomy between PF-deletion vs. LF-copying shedding a new light on the proper analysis of several syntactic phenomena in Japanese including wh-in-situ and control.
Approaches to Hungarian : Volume 16: Papers from the 2017 Budapest Conference
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Veronika Hegedűs and
Irene Vogel
This volume contains selected papers from the 13th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Budapest 2017).The contributions address current issues in Hungarian linguistics including comparisons with other languages (e.g. English German Turkish Arabic Spanish).<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Specifically the phonetics and phonology papers present experimental and corpus studies of /h/ voicing the acoustics of Hungarian word stress and vowel harmony in harmonically mixed stems. The papers on syntax and semantics discuss object agreement and its locality restrictions equative markers in German and Hungarian diachronically and synchronically anaphoric possessor strategies and definite article distribution and the semantics of various aspectual adverbs. Experimental studies of information structure examine the linear placement of textually given topical constituents post-verbally exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German English and Hungarian and contextual factors licensing Hungarian structural focus.<br/>The broad range of topics ensures that this volume will interest scholars of Hungarian and theoretical linguists more generally.
Linguistic Approaches to Portuguese as an Additional Language
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Karina Veronica Molsing,
Cristina Becker Lopes Perna and
Ana Maria Tramunt Ibaños
This book includes a selection of theoretical and practical accounts of the acquisition of Portuguese from a broad range of linguistic perspectives. This collection is particularly appealing in the broad academic sphere of language acquisition due to the fact that there has yet to be one entirely dedicated to Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL). This volume showcases the breadth of research being carried out on topics ranging from the acquisition of aspects from the main language modules (syntax morphology semantics phonology and pragmatics) to applied perspectives involving corpus-based approaches and experimental methodologies. Moreover we present studies addressing a variety of learning contexts and learner types. The target audience includes researching scholars with a background in second language acquisition studies interested in learning more about the acquisition of Portuguese as an Additional Language from linguistic perspectives.
Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Iwona Kraska-Szlenk
The volume focuses on body part terms as the vehicle of embodied cognition and conceptualization. It explores the relationship between universal embodiment language-specific cultural models and linguistic usage practices. The chapters of the volume add to the previous research in a novel way. The presentation of original data from previously undescribed languages spoken by small communities in Africa and South America allows to discover unknown aspects of embodiment and to propose new interpretations. Well-known languages are analyzed from a new perspective relying on the benefits of linguistic corpora. Contrastive and theoretically oriented studies help to pinpoint similarities and differences among languages as well as tendencies in conceptualization patterns and semantic development of the lexis of body part terms. The volume contributes to the field of linguistics but also to cognitive science anthropology and cultural studies.
Usage-Based Studies in Modern Hebrew : Background, Morpho-lexicon, and Syntax
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Ruth A. Berman
The goal of the volume is to shed fresh light on Modern Hebrew from perspectives aimed at readers interested in the domains of general linguistics typology and Semitic studies. Starting with chapters that provide background information on the evolution and sociolinguistic setting of the language the bulk of the book is devoted to usage-based studies of the morphology lexicon and syntax of current Hebrew. Based primarily on original analyses of authentic spoken and online materials these studies reflect varied theoretical frames-of-reference that are largely model-neutral in approach. To this end the book presents a functionally motivated dynamic approach to actual usage rather than providing strictly structuralist or formal characterizations of particular linguistic systems. Such a perspective is particularly important in the case of a language undergoing accelerated processes of change in which the gap between prescriptive dictates of the Hebrew Language Establishment and the actual usage of educated literate but non-expert speaker-writers of current Hebrew is constantly on the rise.
The NP-strategy for Expressing Reciprocity : Typology, history, syntax and semantics
Mar 2020
Book
Author(s):
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic diachronic and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological syntactic and semantic literature namely that so-called reciprocal constructions encode symmetric relations. Instead they are analyzed as constructions encoding unspecified relations. In effect it provides a new proposal for the truth-conditional semantics of these constructions. More broadly this book introduces new ways of bringing together historical linguistics and formal semantics demonstrating how on the one hand the inclusion of historical data concerning the sources of reciprocal constructions enriches their synchronic analysis; and how on the other hand an analysis of the syntax and the semantics of these constructions serves as a key for understanding their historical origins.
English Resultatives : A force-recipient account
Mar 2020
Book
Author(s):
Seizi Iwata
The objective of this book is to develop a force-recipient account of English resultatives. Within this approach the post-verbal NP is a recipient of a verbal force whether it is a subcategorized object or not and the verbal force being exerted onto the post-verbal NP is responsible for bringing about the change as specified by the result phrase. It is shown that many apparent puzzles posed by English resultatives are due to the complex interplay between the verb meaning and the constructional meaning or between the verb meaning and the semantics of the result phrase. Thus the proposed account can provide answers to the question “Which resultatives are possible and which are not?” in a coherent way. Also the proposed account reveals that English resultatives are not a monolithic phenomenon and that some “resultatives” cited in the literature as such are not resultatives at all. This book is of interest not only to practitioners of Construction Grammar but also to everyone interested in English resultatives.
Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Pierre-Yves Modicom and
Olivier Duplâtre
The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic antitopic contrastive topic focus verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles sentence-final particles and other medial sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk including Basque French German Italian Kazakh Spanish and Turkish with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.
Sign Language in Papua New Guinea : A primary sign language from the Upper Lagaip Valley, Enga Province
Feb 2020
Book
Author(s):
Adam Kendon
This book presents in revised form and as a single monograph three papers on a sign language from the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea. Originally published in 1980 for more than twenty years these papers remained the only report of a sign language from that part of the world. The detailed descriptive analyses that the author provided are still fresh today and in some respects they anticipate insights into the nature of sign languages that were not further explored until much more recently. The monograph is accompanied by two essays: Sherman Wilcox comments on value and relevance of the author’s work in the light of much more recent work on the linguistics of sign languages. An essay by Lauren Reed and Alan Rumsey provides an up to date survey of what is now known about sign languages in Papua New Guinea. Information about sign languages in the Solomon Island is also included.
Understanding Deafness, Language and Cognitive Development : Essays in honour of Bencie Woll
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Gary Morgan
The study of childhood deafness offers researchers many interesting insights into the role of experience and sensory inputs for the development of language and cognition. This volume provides a state of the art look at these questions and how they are being applied in the areas of clinical and educational settings. It also marks the career and contributions of one of the greatest scholars in the field of deafness: Bencie Woll. As the field of deafness goes through rapid and profound changes we hope that this volume captures the latest perspectives regarding the impacts of these changes for our understanding of child development. The volume will be of essential interest to language development researchers as well as teachers and clinical researchers.
Emergent Syntax for Conversation : Clausal patterns and the organization of action
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Yael Maschler,
Simona Pekarek Doehler,
Jan Lindström and
Leelo Keevallik
This volume explores how emergent patterns of complex syntax – that is syntactic structures beyond a simple clause – relate to the local contingencies of action formation in social interaction. It examines both the on-line emergence of clause-combining patterns as they are ‘patched together’ on the fly as well as their routinization and sedimentation into new grammatical patterns across a range of languages – English Estonian Finnish French German Hebrew Italian Mandarin and Swedish. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The chapters investigate how the real-time organization of complex syntax relates to the unfolding of turns and actions focusing on: (i) how complex syntactic patterns or routinized fragments of ‘canonical’ patterns serve as resources for projection (ii) how complex syntactic patterns emerge incrementally moment-by-moment out of the real-time trajectories of action (iii) how formal variants of such patterns relate to social action and (iv) how all of these play out within the multimodal ecologies of action formation.<br/>The empirical findings presented in this volume lend support to a conception of syntax as fundamentally temporal emergent dialogic sensitive to local interactional contingencies and interwoven with other semiotic resources.
Right Peripheral Fragments : Right dislocation and related phenomena in Romance
Feb 2020
Book
Author(s):
Javier Fernández-Sánchez
In recent years a number of authors (De Vries 2009 Truckenbrodt 2015 Ott and de Vries 2016 inter alia) have defended that right dislocations (RD) should be treated as bisentential structures where the “dislocated” constituent is actually a remnant of a clausal ellipsis operation licensed under identity with an antecedent clause. Although Romance RD is a fertile area of research the consequences of the biclausal analysis remain unexplored in these languages. This monograph intends to fill this gap. Adopting this approach not only solves some issues that have always been at the core of dislocation structures in general; it also allows us to uncover novel sets of data and to provide straightforward explanations for well-known generalizations. Further it brings RD along with a set of phenomena which are structurally very similar like afterthoughts or split questions which have been independently argued to display a bisentential structure. Under alternative monoclausal approaches to RD the striking similarities between these phenomena must be rendered anecdotal.
Hispanic Contact Linguistics : Theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Luis A. Ortiz López,
Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo and
Melvin González-Rivera
This volume comprises cutting edge research on language contact and change. The chapters present a wide scope of settings in which Spanish is in contact with other languages such as Catalan English and Quechua; a large breadth of geographical areas (e.g. United States Puerto Rico Colombia Brazil Argentina); and varied participant groups ranging from dialect contacts second-language learners and heritage speakers to balanced bilinguals and code-switchers. Taken together the chapters provide rich empirical descriptions of data pertaining to different levels of language diverse – naturalistic and experimental – methodological approaches to data collection as well as theoretical implications of the findings. The interdisciplinary perspective adopted by the authors contributes to the linguistic analysis and offers important insights into theoretical linguistics in general and into theories of sociolinguistics language variation bilingualism and second language acquisition.
Normativity in Language and Linguistics
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Aleksi Mäkilähde,
Ville Leppänen and
Esa Itkonen
This volume sets out to discuss the role of norms and normativity in both language and linguistics from a multiplicity of perspectives. These concepts are centrally important to the philosophy and methodology of linguistics and their role and nature need to be investigated in detail. The chapters address a range of issues from general questions about ontology epistemology and methodology to aspects of particular subfields (such as semantics and historical linguistics) or phenomena (such as construal and code-switching). The volume aims to further our understanding of language and linguistics as well as to encourage further discussion on the metatheory of linguistics. Due to the fundamental nature of the issues under discussion this volume will be of interest to all linguists regardless of their background or fields of expertise and to philosophers concerned with language or other normative domains.
Language Variation - European Perspectives VII : Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), Malaga, June 2017
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda,
Francisco Díaz-Montesinos,
Antonio-Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and
Matilde Vida-Castro
This volume contains a selection from papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9) which was held at the University of Malaga (Spain) from June 6 to 9 2017. The volume includes plenaries by Manuel Almeida (“Language hybridism: On the origin of interdialectal forms”) and Frans Hinskens (“Of clocks clouds and sound change”). In addition the editors have selected 13 papers encompassing different languages and language varieties — not only from large language families such as Romance and Germanic but also small language families like Greek or smaller languages like Croatian — and covering a large range of topics on sociolinguistics and linguistic variation. The book displays a contemporary picture of the research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages. Readers interested in every field related to language and language use will enjoy a wide variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives on speech variation historical sociolinguistics and foreign language acquisition and learning.
Reference Point and Case : A Cognitive Grammar exploration of Korean
Dec 2019
Book
Author(s):
Chongwon Park
This monograph answers the rarely discussed questions of why complicated grammatical case phenomena exist in Korean and what the connection is between the case forms and their functions. The author argues that the case forms in Korean reflect patterns of the human cognitive process. While this approach may seem rather obvious to non-linguists it is indeed a novel claim in contemporary linguistic theory. In order to provide technical analyses of Korean case phenomena such as multiple nominative/accusative non-nominative subject and adverbial case constructions this book adopts an independently established descriptive construct known as reference point in the framework of Cognitive Grammar. The author demonstrates that the notion of reference point not only explains a substantially wider set of data but also leads to a more reasonable generalization. The intended readership of this book are researchers who are interested in case phenomena irrespective of their theoretical orientation.
A Criterial Approach to the Cartography of V2
Dec 2019
Book
Author(s):
Giuseppe Samo
This volume provides a mechanism to uncover the extremely rich split-CP of V2 languages in both root and embedded clauses on the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. The movement of the inflected verbal head is triggered to agree with the profiled informational value of the fronted XP. The V2 “constraint” shall thus be observed as a sum of micro-V2s in which the inflected head creates Spec-Head configurations with the activated criterial positions in the relevant context. The “second linear” position of the verb results from the movement of the inflected verb to the highest activated criterial head. In other words there is no “bottleneck effect” but ordinary violations in terms of locality between fronted XPs. This monograph is aimed principally at postgraduate students and researchers interested in the description of natural languages adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures.
Metaphor Identification in Multiple Languages : MIPVU around the world
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Susan Nacey,
Aletta G. Dorst,
Tina Krennmayr and
W. Gudrun Reijnierse
This volume explores linguistic metaphor identification in a wide variety of languages and language families. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in researching language and metaphor from students to experienced scholars. Its primary goals are to discuss the challenges involved in applying the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) to a range of languages across the globe and to offer theoretically grounded advice and guidelines enabling researchers to identify metaphors in multiple languages in a valid and replicable way. The volume is intended as a practical guidebook that identifies and discusses procedural challenges of metaphor identification across languages thus better enabling researchers to reliably identify metaphor in a multitude of languages. Although able to be read independently this volume – written by metaphor researchers from around the world – is the ideal companion volume for the 2010 Benjamins book A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU.
Widening Contexts for Processability Theory : Theories and issues
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Anke Lenzing,
Howard Nicholas and
Jana Roos
This book explores relationships between Processability Theory approaches and other approaches to SLA. It is distinctive in two ways. It offers PT-insiders a way to see connections between their familiar traditions and theories with other ways of working. Parallel to this it offers readers who work in other traditions ways of connecting with a research tradition that makes specific testable claims about second language acquisition processes. These dual perspectives mean that both beginning and established SLA researchers as well as those seeking to connect their work with views of language learning will find something of interest. Studies of multiple languages and multiple aspects of language are included. Chapters cover areas as diverse as literacy language comprehension language attrition and language testing.
Cognitive Linguistics and the Study of Chinese
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Dingfang Shu,
Hui Zhang and
Lifei Zhang
Bringing together contributions from a group of prominent researchers within a cognitive-linguistic framework this volume sheds light on linguistic structures and usages characteristic of the Chinese language including noun-verb inclusion the conceptual spatialization of actions existential constructions conceptual structures and coherence idioms and metaphors language acquisition of caused motion etc. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The contributions are committed to the principle of “converging evidence” that has been advocated in Cognitive Linguistics since its inception. Some studies in this volume combine introspective methods with theoretical analysis while others rely on corpus-based experimental and neuroscientific methods. Featuring diverse topics and multiple methods this collection will be useful to readers who are interested in the grammatical and conceptual structure of Chinese as well as in the state-of-the-art of Cognitive Linguistics in China.
Semantic Plurality : English collective nouns and other ways of denoting pluralities of entities
Nov 2019
Book
Author(s):
Laure Gardelle
This monograph proposes a comparative approach to all the ways of denoting ‘more than one’ entity from collective and aggregate nouns (with the first-ever typology) to count plurals partly substantivised adjectives and conjoined NPs. This semantic feature approach to plurality which cuts across number the count/non-count distinction and lexical/NP levels reveals a very consistent Scale of Unit Integration which establishes clear-cut boundaries for collective nouns and accommodates cases such as three elephant cattle or a chain of islands. The study also offers a refined understanding of aggregate nouns (a category nearly as large as that of collective nouns) and quantification in pseudo-partitives develops Guillaume’s notion of ‘internal plurality’ and proposes the innovative concept of ‘hyperonyms of plural classes’ (e.g. furniture). The Animacy Hierarchy is also found to be influential beyond hybrid agreement. The book aims to be accessible to scholars of any theoretical background interested in these topics.
Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Nancy Stern,
Ricardo Otheguy,
Wallis Reid and
Jaseleen Sackler
This collection is the fifth volume of selected papers to emerge from Columbia School (CS) linguistics conferences. A radically functionalist approach CS shares with Cognitive linguistics the view that grammar is composed of form-meaning correspondences. CS views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its users. The volume includes papers on methodological issues and innovative analyses on English Spanish and Mandarin that illustrate the value of the strict application of clearly spelled out theoretical principles to the execution of linguistic analysis. Four of the volume’s eleven papers are written in Spanish and all papers have abstracts in both English and Spanish. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical premises of CS and their differences from and similarities with cognitive-functional approaches. The collection will be of interest to researchers and laymen who aim to understand the role of language in human communication.
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15 : Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 30, Frankfurt
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Ingo Feldhausen,
Martin Elsig,
Imme Kuchenbrandt and
Mareike Neuhaus
In 2016 the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this.The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena ranging from morphosyntax to prosody. Some are discussed from a synchronic perspective others from a diachronic perspective or in the context of language acquisition. In addition to frequently-studied languages such as French Italian Portuguese Romanian and Spanish this volume features lesser-studied varieties including Aromanian Gallo and Sardinian.
Lexicalization patterns in color naming : A cross-linguistic perspective
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Ida Raffaelli,
Daniela Katunar and
Barbara Kerovec
The volume presents sixteen chapters focused on lexicalization patterns used in color naming in a variety of languages. Although previous studies have dealt with categorization and perceptual salience of color terms few studies have been consistently conducted in order to investigate phonological morphological syntactic and semantic devices languages use to form color terms.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/> The aim of this volume is to approach color data from a relativist and typological perspective and to address some novel viewpoints in the research of color terms such as: (a) the focus on language structure per se in the study of lexicalization data; (b) investigation of inter- and intra-language structural variation; (c) culture and language contact as reflected in language structure.<br/>Topics of this book have a broad appeal to researchers working in the fields of linguistics anthropology sociology and psychology.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Nigel Duffield,
Trang Phan and
Tue Trinh
This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers representing a wide spectrum of frameworks approaches and methods from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects to corpus-based discussions of language and gender to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes to laboratory experiments and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics and Southeast Asian languages more generally.
Case Studies in Fluid Construction Grammar : The verb phrase
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Luc Steels and
Katrien Beuls
Construction grammar enjoys great popularity among empirical linguists typologists psycholinguists and language educators because it puts meaning and function of language at the forefront of linguistic analysis. This book shows that construction grammar gives us also a powerful new way to conceive and implement operational parsing and production systems which could be used as a basic component of a wide range of Artificial Intelligence applications such as dialog systems language tutoring applications or translation assistants. The book focuses on a particular formalism Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) that has emerged recently as a solid platform for writing and testing grammars from a constructional point of view. It introduces the basics of FCG and illustrates its use through a number of case studies all centering around the verb phrase. The case studies consider the verb phrase in different languages (Dutch English Spanish Russian) and examine different challenging linguistic phenomena ranging from word order flexibility language change and language acquisition to the complex semantics of the verb phrase particularly for aspect. The book is intended for those who want a first contact with FCG and see how different non-trivial analyses of language phenomena can be expressed. It is also an excellent first step for those who want to explore FCG to build language applications.
Originally published as special issue of Constructions and Frames 9:2 (2017).
Originally published as special issue of Constructions and Frames 9:2 (2017).
The Internal Context of Bilingual Processing
Aug 2019
Book
Author(s):
John Truscott and
Michael Sharwood Smith
This book offers a broad-based account of bilingual processing drawing on research findings and current thinking from various domains across cognitive science. The theoretical approach adopted is the Modular Cognition Framework in which language processing is characterized as an interaction between dedicated linguistic systems and the other modules of the human mind. The latter provide the 'internal context' of bilingual processing. This internal context involves goals value emotion self and representations of the external context. The book combines all these elements into a coherent picture of the bilingual's internal context and the way it shapes processing. It then shows how some central concepts in cognitive science and bilingualism fit in with – and follow from – this view. These concepts include working memory consciousness attention effort codeswitching and the possible cognitive benefits of being bilingual. The book should be of interest to professionals in the field as well as postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates.
Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age : Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language
Aug 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Marianna Bolognesi,
Mario Brdar and
Kristina Despot
This book describes methods risks and challenges involved in the construction of metaphor and metonymy digital repositories. The first part of this volume showcases established and new projects around the world in which metaphors and metonymies are harvested and classified. The second part provides a series of cognitive linguistic studies focused on highlighting and discussing theoretical and methodological risks and challenges involved in building these digital resources. The volume is a result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between cognitive linguists psychologists and computational scientists supporting an overarching idea that metaphor and metonymy play a central role in human cognition and that they are deeply entrenched in recurring patterns of bodily experience. Throughout the volume a variety of methods are proposed to collect and analyze both conceptual metaphors and metonymies and their linguistic and visual expressions.
Nominalization in Languages of the Americas
Aug 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Roberto Zariquiey,
Masayoshi Shibatani and
David W. Fleck
Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas yet they have not been approached as foundational grammatical structures for constructions such as relative clauses and complement clauses. This is due to an imbalance in past scholarship which has tended to focus on these constructions at the expense of the nominalization structures underlying them. The papers in this collection treat grammatical nominalizations in their own right and as a starting point for the investigation of their uses in complex grammatical structures. A representative sample of Amerindian languages with focus on South America examines properties of grammatical nominalizations such as their multiple functions their internal and external syntax and their diachronic development. Among the far-reaching theoretical conclusions reached by the studies in this volume is that the various types of relative clauses recognized in the typological literature are actually no more than epiphenomena arising from the different uses of grammatical nominalizations.
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXX : Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic Linguistics, Stony Brook, New York, 2016 and Norman, Oklahoma, 2017
Jul 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Amel Khalfaoui and
Matthew A. Tucker
This volume contains selected papers from the Thirtieth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics that was held at Stony Brook University in 2016 as well as two articles that are based on papers presented at the Thirty-First Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held at the University of Oklahoma in 2017. The chapters are theoretical and experimental explorations of a variety of linguistic topics and engage ideas ranging over three broad areas of research: phonetics and phonology syntax and experimental and computational linguistics. They deal with Classical and Modern Standard Arabic as well as a variety of dialects including Iraqi Egyptian Moroccan and Syrian Arabic.
A Dependency Grammar of English : An introduction and beyond
Jul 2019
Book
Author(s):
Timothy Osborne
Dependency grammar (DG) is an approach to the syntax of natural languages with a long and venerable tradition yet awareness of its potential to serve as a basis for principled analyses of natural language syntax is minimal due to the predominance of phrase structure grammar (PSG). This book presents a DG of English with two main goals in mind. The first is to make the principles of dependency syntax accessible to a general audience so that the novice linguist as well as the seasoned syntactician becomes fully aware of what makes DG unique as an approach to the study of natural language syntax. The second is to present and develop a version of DG that then serves as a principled basis for the investigation of central areas of the syntax of English such as long-distance dependencies coordination ellipsis valency etc. An overarching theme in all this is that DG is simple compared to PSG yet despite this simplicity it is quite effective at shedding light on the nature of syntactic phenomena.
Morpho-Syntactic Patterns in Spoken Korean English
Jul 2019
Book
Author(s):
Sofia Rüdiger
Morpho-Syntactic Patterns in Spoken Korean English presents fundamental research on the use of English by South Korean speakers. Despite the extraordinary and vibrant status of the English language in South Korean society (demonstrated for example by the notion of English Fever) research on the forms of English in the South Korean context has been sadly neglected in the study of World Englishes. This monograph is the first to provide a rich and contextualized description of the Korean English morpho-syntactic repertoire. It draws on the specifically compiled Spoken Korean English (SPOKE) corpus to shed light on Korean uses of plural marking articles pronouns prepositions and verbs in spoken English and demonstrates that English is indeed the language of those who use it. This volume will be highly relevant for researchers interested in Expanding Circle Englishes Asian Englishes spoken language corpora and morpho-syntactic variation.
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXI : Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Norman, Oklahoma, 2017
Jul 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Amel Khalfaoui and
Youssef A. Haddad
This volume brings together ten peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The articles are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology sociolinguistics and pragmatics and language acquisition. Including data from North African Levantine and Gulf varieties of Arabic as well as Arabic varieties spoken in diaspora these articles address issues that range from phonetic neutralization and diminutive formation to diglossia dialect contact and language acquisition in heritage speakers. The book is valuable reading for linguists in general and for those working on descriptive and theoretical aspects of Arabic linguistics in particular.
The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French : Descriptive, experimental and formal studies on motion expression
Jul 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Michel Aurnague and
Dejan Stosic
Research on the semantics of spatial markers in French is known mainly through Vandeloise’s (1986 1991) work on static prepositions. However interest in the expression of space in French goes back to the mid-1970s and focused first on verbs denoting changes in space whose syntactic properties were related to specific semantic distinctions such as the opposition between “movement” and “displacement”. This volume provides an overview of recent studies on the semantics of dynamic space in French and addresses important questions about motion expression among which “goal bias” and asymmetry of motion the status of locative PPs the expression of manner fictive or non-actual motion. Descriptive experimental and formal or computational analyses are presented providing complementary perspectives on the main issue. The volume is intended for researchers and advanced students wishing to learn about both spatial semantics in French and recent debates on the representation of motion events in language and cognition.
Diverse Scenarios of Syntactic Complexity
Jul 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Albert Álvarez González,
Zarina Estrada-Fernández and
Claudine Chamoreau
This volume surveys the phenomenon of syntactic complexity in a diversity of languages and from a diversity of theoretical perspectives. The topics include clause combining strategies such as relative complement and adverbial clauses serialization clausal nominalizations but also the switch reference systems involved in clause chains the role of insubordination and the influence of language contact in the development of syntactic complexity as well as the acquisition of complex clauses in child language and the grammaticalization processes leading to syntactic complexity. These studies illustrate the varied aspects involved in clause combining and help to understand how syntactic complexity works and evolves in the world’s languages how it varies across languages how it is influenced by language contact how it is acquired. As such this book gives the opportunity for readers to expand both their typological and their theoretical knowledge about syntactic complexity in a variety of languages.
Developments in English Historical Morpho-Syntax
Jun 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Claudia Claridge and
Birte Bös
Spanning the time from Old English to modern American English this volume provides fresh perspectives on core issues and theories in the morphosyntactic history of English nominal verbal and adverbial constructions. The contributions discuss the loss rise and restructuring of morphonological marking periphrastic verbal constructions auxiliary variation and evolution as well as changing word order options. Favouring corpus-linguistic frequency-based and statistical approaches the studies are firmly empirically grounded. The book is aimed at scholars interested in the history of the English language and in language variation and change.
Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change : Studies in honor of Henning Andersen
Jun 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Lars Heltoft,
Iván Igartua,
Brian D. Joseph,
Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh and
Lene Schøsler
This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis actualization and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology word order and constructional syntax.
Morphological Variation : Theoretical and empirical perspectives
Jun 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Antje Dammel and
Oliver Schallert
Morphological variation is a rather young yet fascinating topic to study in its own right because it offers challenging evidence both for the autonomy of morphology (morphomic processes) as well as for its tight interconnection with other grammatical domains notably phonology and syntax. Covering a wide range of phenomena (e.g. negation structures form function-mismatches in the verbal and nominal domain loss of morphosyntactic feature values etc.) the contributions to this volume combine in-depth empirical studies with the explanatory potential of modern theories of grammar as well as approaches for capturing and modelling microtypological diversity.
Agreement in Language Contact : Gender development in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Jun 2019
Book
Author(s):
Florian Dolberg
Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical functional account uses rigorous innovative methodology interdisciplinary evidence and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation change and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics morpho-syntax language variation and change or language contact to name but a few.
Patient-Subject Constructions in Mandarin Chinese : Syntax, semantics, discourse
Jun 2019
Book
Author(s):
Xiaoling He
As a distinctive syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) is one of the most interesting but least well-understood structures in the language. This book offers a comprehensive account of the history structure meaning and use of the PSC. Unlike previous descriptions which were framed in terms of pre-existing grammatical notions such as ‘topicalization’ ‘passivization’ and ‘ergativization’ this book offers a fresh look at the PSC in which its syntactic and semantic as well as its discourse functions are examined within the system of major construction-types of the language as a whole. The PSC being low in transitivity serves primarily the function of backgrounding in discourse. Typologically the PSC bears a resemblance to middle constructions in Indo-European and other languages raising interesting questions about ways to understand congruent and divergent syntactic structures across the world’s languages. This book will be of interest to students of Chinese Linguistics as well as Language Typology.
Learner Corpora and Language Teaching
May 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Sandra Götz and
Joybrato Mukherjee
While native corpora and corpus linguistic tools and methods have been used and applied for quite some time in the development of learning and teaching materials learner corpora are only just beginning to impact the field of language teaching testing and assessment. This volume helps to close this still existing gap and highlights the great potential of learner corpus research for language pedagogy by presenting a selection of 11 original studies on learner corpora conducted by established experts as well as by excellent young researchers. The papers included in the volume present new corpora and methods; studies on written as well as spoken learner corpora and on using data-driven learning scenarios in the classroom.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>All papers include sections on practical and concrete language-pedagogical applications. This volume will be of significant interest to researchers working in corpus linguistics learner corpus research second language acquisition and English for Academic and Specific Purposes as well to language teachers and materials developers.
Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives
May 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Kimi Akita and
Prashant Pardeshi
This volume explores new frontiers in the linguistic study of iconic lexemes known as ideophones mimetics and expressives. A large part of the literature on this long-neglected word class has been dedicated to the description of its sound symbolism marked morphophonology and grammatical status in individual languages. Drawing on data from Asian (especially Japanese) African American and European languages the twelve chapters in this volume aim to establish common grounds for theoretical and crosslinguistic discussions of the phonology morphology syntax semantics pragmatics acquisition and variation of iconic lexemes. Not only researchers who are interested in linguistic iconicity but also theoretical linguists and typologists will benefit from the updated insights presented in each study.
Sensory Linguistics : Language, perception and metaphor
Apr 2019
Book
Author(s):
Bodo Winter
One of the most fundamental capacities of language is the ability to express what speakers see hear feel taste and smell. Sensory Linguistics is the interdisciplinary study of how language relates to the senses. This book deals with such foundational questions as: Which semiotic strategies do speakers use to express sensory perceptions? Which perceptions are easier to encode and which are “ineffable”? And what are appropriate methods for studying the sensory aspects of linguistics? After a broad overview of the field a detailed quantitative corpus-based study of English sensory adjectives and their metaphorical uses is presented. This analysis calls age-old ideas into question such as the idea that the use of perceptual metaphors is governed by a cognitively motivated “hierarchy of the senses”. Besides making theoretical contributions to cognitive linguistics this research monograph showcases new empirical methods for studying lexical semantics using contemporary statistical methods.
Typology of Pluractional Constructions in the Languages of the World
Apr 2019
Book
Author(s):
Simone Mattiola
The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio Beja Maa). In conclusion the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.
Prepositions, Case and Verbal Prefixes : The case of Slavic
Apr 2019
Book
Author(s):
Petr Biskup
This monograph is concerned with prepositional elements in Slavic languages prepositions verbal prefixes and functional elements of prepositional nature. It argues that verbal prefixes are incorporated prepositions projecting their argument structure in the complement of the verbal root and that their meaning is based on the two-argument meaning of prepositions enriched with the CAUSE operator. The book investigates idiomaticity in the realm of prefixed verbs and proposes a novel analysis of non-compositional prefixed verbs based on the operation of predicate transfer. It also offers a uniform analysis of cases. Prepositional as well as non-prepositional cases are treated as a reflection of the agreement operation whereat the type of prepositional case is determined by semantic properties of the decomposed preposition. Furthermore it examines prepositions from a diachronic perspective and argues that they can be grammaticalised as future markers under certain circumstances.
Interfaces in Grammar
Apr 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Jianhua Hu and
Haihua Pan
This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan Henk van Riemsdijk Alain Rouveret and scholars in Chinese Linguistics this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages computational and semantic aspects of resumption the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials system repairing strategies at interfaces the v-copy construction in Chinese the scope of disjunction interactions between focus negation and event quantification null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis child language acquisition of nominal structure word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax semantics theoretical linguistics and language acquisition as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research : Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Apr 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Tania Ionin and
Matthew Rispoli
This edited volume contains a representative sample of papers presented at the 7th meeting of the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America (GALANA-7) conference. The book features three streams of research (Variation in Input First Language Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition) each of which investigates the nature of language acquisition from the generative perspective. A unique feature of the GALANA-7 conference and of this volume is the bringing together of research on generative language acquisition and research on the role that cross-dialectal input variation plays in acquisition. This volume should be of interest to scholars and students of first language acquisition second language acquisition and input variation.
The Determinants of Diachronic Stability
Mar 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Anne Breitbarth,
Miriam Bouzouita,
Lieven Danckaert and
Melissa Farasyn
While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles both empirical and theoretical. Empirically the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated and inversely superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically the questions of whether stable variation is possible and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change and to scholars working on the history of Germanic Romance and Sinitic languages.
Possession in Languages of Europe and North and Central Asia
Mar 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Lars Johanson,
Lidia Federica Mazzitelli and
Irina Nevskaya
This volume is a collection of articles dealing with the linguistic category of possession and its expression in languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia (Uralic Turkic Indo-European and Caucasian) with a few excursions into other parts of the world. Some papers engage in typological comparisons both within and beyond the borders of individual language families focusing on issues of motivation; meaning and forms used in expressing possession; typology of belong constructions; marking possession in possessor chains; non-canonical possessives and their relation to the category of familiarity; metaphoric shifts of possessive semantics. Others focus on possession in individual languages offering new precious pieces of information on the linguistic expression of possession in lesser known languages some of which are endangered and even unwritten. The volume will be of interest to both general linguists and typologists as well as to experts/students of the individual languages or language families analyzed in the papers.