Browse Books

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

This book pioneers a tridimensional approach to (dis)fluency evaluating fluency across three different dimensions mainly speech gesture and interaction. Drawing from an extensive video dataset covering different languages and speech genres in French and English the present research goes beyond traditional production-oriented models of so-called ‘disfluency’ phenomena and aims to unravel the complexities of human multimodal production and interactive processes. Designed for linguists communication scholars and researchers this work resonates with the latest trends in different fields (Second Language Acquisition Interactional Linguistics and Gesture studies). It introduces a fresh perspective on disfluency by integrating visual-gestural features such as hand gestures gaze and facial expressions captured in situated interaction.

Differential marking as applied to direct objects has long been discussed as one of the characterizing traits of many Romance languages. There is however wide consensus that a detailed investigation into the nature of this phenomenon raises numerous challenges both at the empirical and theoretical level. Many questions are still being raised regarding which precise morpho-syntactic strategies count as differential object marking whether the data can be unified and subsequently how they are to be unified formally and theoretically. Additionally a thorough investigation of this phenomenon is still needed for many Romance languages and especially at the micro-variation level. This volume brings together original papers addressing various aspects of differential object marking in Romance languages focusing on micro-variation from both a descriptive and formal perspective touching on diachrony language contact synchrony and using a large set of methodologies.

This book proposes a new solution to the long-standing puzzle of auxiliary selection in Romance languages in particular Italian. The following questions are addressed: why the perfect auxiliary appears in the two forms be and have within a single language what drives this distribution and how cross-linguistic data can be accounted for. The solution to these issues consists of an Agreebased analysis that accounts for auxiliary selection in root clauses and restructuring in Standard Italian and in Italo-Romance varieties which is also compatible with participle agreement. By answering these questions the book also touches upon more theoretical and foundational problems such as the distribution of labor between syntax morphology and the lexicon and the conditions on the operation Agree (in particular multiple probing locality and minimality). This work contributes to the discussion in the fields of formal morpho-syntax theoretical linguistics and Romance linguistics.

This book is a phonological investigation of place assimilation phenomena in two major Arabic dialects: Cairene Egyptian and Baghdadi Iraqi. The studied phenomena involve interactions between consonants (various types of local assimilation) between vowels (monophthongization) or between consonants and vowels (emphasis spread and labialization). Throughout the content chapters the patterns for each of these processes are carefully described and validated by ample data and then analyzed representationally using a minimalist model of feature geometry. The analysis follows a holistic approach as the representations are consistently used for all the segmental phenomena within a dialect. The first exclusive treatment of place assimilation in colloquial Arabic this book will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of Arabic linguistics and dialectology and to phonologists in general and can be a point of reference for researchers examining the details of such phenomena in other dialects of Arabic as well.

To date the field of L3 acquisition research has had a heavy focus on the initial state of the L3 grammar. While this initial state research is critical to understanding L3 acquisition as a whole in order for an explanatory understanding of language acquisition in the multilingual mind the field needs to expand its scope beyond this area of focus. This volume brings together L3 acquisition and multilingualism researchers in order to discuss the state of the field and introduce new ideas related to the development of post-initial L3 knowledge and the relationship among languages in the multilingual mind. It includes contributions related to syntactic phonological and lexical development beyond the L3 initial state. The purpose of this volume is to expand the current academic discussions within this field by emphasizing the role of the developmental process in an L3 context with the hope of inspiring further research in this domain.

The range of meanings expressed by derivatives formed by the attachment of the four principal verb-forming suffixes - ate - en - ify and - ize has been the subject of extensive analysis for over two decades. From a descriptive perspective the research reported in this volume constitutes the most comprehensive usage-based analysis of verbal derivatives available to date and provides register-based and diachronic comparisons of usage and distribution patterns across corpora of spoken English. The semantic analysis adopts the seven well-established semantic categories of verbal derivatives and extends the set to twenty by including further meaning classes documented in the morphological literature and additional senses that emerged from the contextualized analysis of complex verbs in the datasets. From a theoretical standpoint the novel approach involves the explicit linking of affix schemas to argument structure constructions and proposes a unified model of verb-forming suffixation that accounts for the multi-functional characteristics of verbal derivatives from a constructional perspective.

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

This book represents a detailed discussion and corpus analysis of Theme in English and German originals and translations. The empirical results are based on thousands of clauses from four different registers cover a variety of linguistic aspects including multiple Themes marked Themes participant roles agency and identifiability and are tested statistically using regression analyses. The book sheds light on one of the most elusive concepts of the systemic functional linguistics framework Theme by comparing it with different approaches related concepts and realizations in different languages and by examining empirically different Theme models contrastive differences and translation effects. Given that Theme in English and German is realized formally by being the first clause constituent and is thus effectively a syntactic phenomenon this monograph is not only relevant for functional linguists but any interested in English and German word order differences and their effects on translations.

Corpus Dialectology combines the fields of corpus linguistics and dialectological mapping. It concerns documentation of linguistic variation and mapping of linguistic spaces and boundaries while ascribing renewed importance to the methodology and the material itself especially data processing and statistical analysis. This approach considers phenomena that have received little attention to date such as migration language contact mobility and educational level as well as the differentiation between rural and urban spaces. Transparently described and intersubjectively comprehensible encodings permit the enhancement of dialectometry in the context of Digital Humanities and further development of linguistic theories of variation and change as well as different levels of structure (phonology morphosyntax semantics). This book contains nine chapters on ongoing corpus dialectological research projects. They discuss current issues of data collection for example the validity of crowdsourced data explore challenges and possibilities of data analysis and offer theoretical reflections on virtual Romance geolinguistics.