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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings?

To account for these and related empirical questions this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.

This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated with the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained classification and diagnostics of Chinese motion morphemes from the perspective of scale structure but also the first to more comprehensively account for the ordering of Chinese motion morphemes. The findings of this study will not only enrich the literature on motion events but more importantly further our understanding of the nature of motion events and the way motion events are conceived and represented in the Chinese language. The major proposals and the cognitive functional approach of this work will also shed light on studies beyond motion. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in motion events syntax-semantic interface and typology.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena whose formal manifestation and underlying licensing conditions represent the convergence of two or more areas of the grammar an area of investigation particularly invigorated in recent generative research by developments such as phase theory (cf. Chomsky 2001; 2008) and the cartographic enterprise (cf. Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999). In this respect the dialects of Italy are no exception in that they present comparative Romance linguists and theoretical linguists alike with many valuable opportunities to study the linguistic interfaces as highlighted by the many case studies presented in this volume which provide a series of original insights into how different components of the linguistic system – syntactic phonetic phonological morphological semantic and pragmatic – do not necessarily operate in isolation but rather interact to license phenomena whose nature and distribution can only be fully understood in terms of the formal mapping between the interfaces.

This book is a theoretically oriented comparative study of noun phrases and their semantic and morpho-syntactic properties. This is the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the nominal structure in Uzbek and compares it with corresponding structures in other article and article-less languages. Uzbek nominals represent a fertile ground to test the universality of the DP hypothesis and to make an insightful contribution to an ongoing debate about the functional architecture of the nominal domain in languages with and without articles. The study shows that the ordering of various nominal suffixes in Uzbek reflects a rich functional structure involving not only DP but also KP. The work also discusses elements such as determiners demonstratives quantifiers and adjectives and positioning of these elements within the nominal domain. This study is especially useful for researchers interested in theoretical linguistics comparative syntax and typology.

Metaphor has recently been reconceptualised as a fundamental part of the human conceptual system. It can hence be expressed in language but also in other modalities and media of communication including gesture and body language sound and music and film and visuals. In spite of this theoretical landslide however the wide range of nonverbal metaphor and its processing has neither been empirically investigated on the same scale nor with the same rigour as metaphor in language. The overarching goal of this book is to report on the findings of a research program aimed at exploiting the vast cognitive linguistic and psycholinguistic expertise on metaphor in language for a new behaviourally founded approach to the structure and processes of metaphor in one of these nonverbal manifestations namely static visuals. The book presents concepts and methods for the identification and analysis of metaphor in document structure as well as new approaches to the study of visual metaphor processing. Its results are intended to further the development of an encompassing and robust cognitive-scientific theory of metaphor by including visual metaphor while also enriching our understanding of the communicative possibilities and effects of visual metaphor in multimodal discourse.

This book presents a study that triangulates the meanings of expressions across English German and Japanese via their perception-based conceptual representations. In an online experiment native speakers of the three languages were asked to design visual representations of expressions referring to baldness phenomena. These sets of visualizations are used to determine conceptual overlap or distance between expressions in the three languages resulting in lexical-conceptual 'maps' for MALE BALDNESS. The study is discussed against the background of an embodied perceptual symbol-based understanding of linguistic meaning. A section of the book further applies this perspective to the issue of translation developing a process model of translation based on the concept of cognitive equivalence.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book presents a novel approach to lexical semantics from a cognitive linguistic perspective tested through a methodologically innovative experiment. It is a compelling read to scholars in cognitive semantics contrastive semantics embodied cognition and cognitive translation studies.<br/>

Dedicated to John B. Whitman this collection of seventeen articles provides a forum for cutting-edge theoretical research on a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a wide variety of Asian languages including Japanese Korean Chinese Austronesian Indo-Aryan and Thai. Ranging from syntax and morphology to semantics acquisition processing and phonology from synchronic and/or diachronic perspectives this collection reflects the breadth of the honoree’s research interests which span multiple research subfields in numerous Asian languages.

The last three decades have seen the emergence of Construction Grammar as a major research paradigm in linguistics. At the same time very few researchers have taken a constructionist perspective on language contact phenomena. This volume brings together for the first time a broad range of original contributions providing insights into language contact phenomena from a constructionist perspective. Focusing primarily on Germanic languages the papers in this volume demonstrate how the notion of construction can be fruitfully applied to investigate how a range of different language contact phenomena can be systematically analyzed from the perspectives of both form and meaning.

Current theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers areas as different as phonology morphology syntax and the lexicon. A broad range of Romance languages is considered as well as Albanian Greek and Hungarian shedding new light on many classical topics. The first section focuses on morphosyntax both in the narrow sense and with regard to its interfaces. The second section focuses on clitics and pronouns. The third section deals with a number of issues in phonology and syntax-phonology interface. The last section turns the reader’s attention beyond formal linguistics itself and examines variation in the light of neurosciences pathology historical linguistics and political discourse.

The chapters in this volume present a state of the art of grammaticalization research in the 2010s. They are concerned with the application of new models such as constructionalization the ongoing debate about the status and modelling of the development of discourse markers and reveal a renewed interest in the typological application of grammaticalization and in the cognitive motivations for unidirectionality. The contributors consider data from a wide range of languages including several that have not or marginally been looked at in terms of grammaticalization: Chinese Dutch (varieties of) English French German Japanese Maltese Old Saxon Spanish and languages of the South Caucasian and Zhuang Tai-Kadai families. The chapters range from theoretical discussions to fine-grained analyses of new historical and comparative language data. This volume will be of interest to linguists studying morphosyntactic changes in a range of languages and in particular to those interested in models for grammatical change.

The polarity of a sentence is crucial for its meaning. It is thus hardly surprising that languages have developed devices to highlight this meaning component and to contrast statements with negative and positive polarity in discourse. Research on this issue has started from languages like German and Dutch where prosody and assertive particles are systematically associated with polarity contrast. Recently the grammatical realization of polarity contrast has been at the center of investigations in a range of other languages as well. Core questions concern the formal repertoire and the exact meaning contribution of the relevant devices the kind of contrast they evoke and their relation to information structure and sentence mood. This volume brings together researchers from a theoretical an empirical and a typological orientation and enhances our understanding of polarity with the help of in-depth analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons dealing with the syntactic semantic pragmatic and/or prosodic aspects of the phenomenon.

This volume presents a collection of papers using the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) to analyse and explain a number of specific constructions or phenomena (external possessor contructions and binominal constructions negation modification modality polysynthesis and transparency) from different perspectives language-specific comparative and typological. In addition to applying the theory to the topics in question these papers aim to contribute to the further development of the theory by modifying and extending it on the basis of new linguistic evidence from a range of languages thus providing the latest state-of-the-art in FDG. The volume as a whole however does more than this as separately and together the papers collected here aim to demonstrate how FDG with its unique architecture can provide new insights into a number of issues and phenomena that are currently of interest to theoretical linguists in general.

What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody syntax and pragmatics the typology of word order and intonation languages the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality and the role of synchronic variation and change. The studies presented in this volume cover a broad range of Romance languages including French Italian Portuguese and different varieties of Spanish. Moreover the book also offers new insights into non-Romance languages such as English German and Quechua.

Interest in non-canonically case-marked subjects has been unceasing since the groundbreaking work of Andrews and Masica in the late 70’s who were the first to document the existence of syntactic subjects in another morphological case than the nominative. Their research was focused on Icelandic and South-Asian languages respectively and since then oblique subjects have been reported for language after language throughout the world. This newfangled recognition of the concept of oblique subjects at the time was followed by discussions of the role and validity of subject tests discussions of the verbal semantics involved as well as discussions of the theoretical implications of this case marking strategy of syntactic subjects. This volume contributes to all these debates making available research articles on different languages and language families additionally highlighting issues like language contact differential subject marking and the origin of oblique subjects.

This volume explores how the patterning of surface variation can shed light on the grammatical representation of variable phenomena. The authors explore variation in several domains addressing intra- and inter-dialectal patterns using diverse sources of data including corpora of naturally-occurring speech and judgment studies and drawing on lesser-studied varieties of familiar languages such as Northwest British Englishes and varieties of Canadian French. Ultimately the contributions serve to expand our understanding of the nature of the mental representations and abstract processes required to support variation in language. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Variation 16:2 (2016)

This volume presents a range of studies testing some of the latest models and hypotheses in the field of second/third language acquisition such as the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008 2016) the Scalpel Model (Slabakova 2017) and the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace & Serratrice 2009) to name a few. The studies explore a variety of linguistic properties (e.g. functional morphology linguistic properties at the syntax-discourse interface) by focusing on distinct populations (L2 acquisition L3/LN acquisition Heritage Speakers) while also considering the links between experimental linguistic research generative linguistics and in some cases language pedagogy. Dedicated to Roumyana Slabakova each chapter can be directly linked to her work in terms of the empirical testing of extant hypotheses the formulation of new models and ideas and her efforts to advance the dialogue between different disciplines and frameworks. Overall the contributions in the volume bear evidence of Slabakova’s enduring influence in the field as a collaborator teacher and researcher.

This volume compiles eight original chapters dedicated to different topics within bilingual grammar and processing with special focus on code-switching. Three main features unify the contributions to this volume. First they focus on making a contribution to our understanding of the human language within a coherent theoretical framework; second they understand that a complete theory of the human language needs to include data from bilinguals’ I-languages; and third they are committed to obtaining reliable data following experimental protocols.

This book contains a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented at the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46) that took place in April 2016 at Stony Brook University (SUNY) New York. The most current research and debates on bilingualism historical linguistics morphology phonology semantics sociolinguistics and syntax can be found in its pages. This collection will be of interest to Romance linguists and general linguists as well.

This volume explores typological variation within nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages. Using abundant data generally from original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages it presents a far more detailed picture of nonverbal predication constructions than previously published grammatical descriptions. On the one hand it addresses the fact that current typologies of nonverbal predication are less developed than those of verbal predication; on the other it provides a wealth of new data and analyses of Amazonian languages which are still poorly represented in existing typologies. Several contributions offer historical insights either reconstructing the sources of innovative nonverbal predicate constructions or describing diachronic pathways by which constructions used for nonverbal predication spread to other functions in the grammar. The introduction provides a modern typological overview and also proposes a new diachronic typology to explain how distinct types of nonverbal predication arise.

In recent years Cognitive Linguistics (CL) has established itself not only as a solid theoretical approach but also as an important source from which different applications to other fields have emerged. In this volume we identify some of the current most relevant topics in applied CL-oriented studies – analyses of figurative language (both metaphor and metonymy) in use constructions and typology – and present high-quality research papers that illustrate best practices in the research foci identified and their application to different fields including intercultural communication the psychology of emotions second and first language acquisition discourse analysis and translation studies. It is also shown how different methodologies –the use of linguistic corpora psycholinguistic experiments or discourse analytic procedures– can shed some light on the basic premises of CL as well as providing insights into how CL can be applied in real world contexts. Finally all the studies included in the volume are based on empirical data and there are some analyses of languages other than English (Japanese Russian Spanish Danish German and Polish) thus overcoming the contentions that CL-theoretically-based research is often based on linguistic intuition and focused only on the English language.

We hope that the present volume will not only contribute to a better understanding of how CL can be applied but that it will also help to encourage even further more robust empirical research in this field.

Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 14:1 (2016).

This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics) the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators) and at the level of the sentence which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty and junior and seasoned researchers alike.

Evidentiality in communication is better investigated in delimited and recognizable contexts where the multiple levels of meaning in interactional practices are manifested. Taking this viewpoint the present volume explores the interrelations between evidentials and textual genre in Spanish. Adopting a discursive perspective all of the chapters examine how the functional category of evidentiality is brought into discourse which set of linguistic strategies evidentiality makes explicit what counts as evidence in certain contexts and in certain textual genres and what particular pragmatic meanings these mechanisms acquire invoke and project onto the on-going discourse. In particular this book is concerned with the relationship between evidential expressions and the pragmatic meaning(s) triggered by those expressions and the role of genre in shaping the evidential meanings. The volume is addressed to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars in the disciplines of Pragmatics Discourse Analysis Sociolinguistics Communication Studies and Psychology.

Statements are always under the threat of the potential counter-question How do you know? To pre-empt this question language users often indicate what kind of access they had to the communicated content: Their own perception inference from other information ‘hearsay’ etc. Such expressions grammatical or lexical have been studied in recent years under the cover term of evidentiality research. The present volume contributes 11 new studies to this flourishing field all exploring evidential phenomena in a range of languages (Dutch Estonian Finnish French German Khalkha Mongolian Spanish Tibetan Yurakaré) using a variety of methodologies. Evidential meaning is discussed in relation to other semantic dimensions such as epistemic modality semantic roles commitment quotative meaning and tense. The volume is of interest to scholars and students who are interested in up-to-date methods and frameworks for studying evidential meaning and the various ways it is expressed in the languages of the world.

The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest in what are variously termed discourse markers or discourse particles. The greatest area of growth has centered on particles that occur in sentence-initial or turn-initial position and this interest intersects with a long-standing focus in Conversation Analysis on turn-taking and turn-construction. This volume brings together conversation analytic studies of turn-initial particles in interactions in fourteen languages geographically widely distributed (Europe America Asia and Australia). The contributions show the significance of turn-initial particles in three key areas of turn and sequence organization: (i) the management of departures from expected next actions (ii) the projection of the speaker's epistemic stance and (iii) the management of overall activities implemented across sequences. Taken together the papers demonstrate the crucial importance of the positioning of particles within turns and sequences for the projection and management of social actions and for relationships between speakers.

Typological hierarchies are widely perceived as one of the most important results of research on language universals and linguistic diversity. Explanations for typological hierarchies however are usually based on the synchronic properties of the patterns described by individual hierarchies not the actual diachronic processes that give rise to these patterns cross-linguistically. This book aims to explore in what ways the investigation of such processes can further our understanding of typological hierarchies. To this end diachronic evidence about the origins of several phenomena described by typological hierarchies is discussed for several languages by a number of leading scholars in typology historical linguistics and language documentation. This evidence suggests a rethinking of possible explanations for typological hierarchies as well as the very notion of typological universals in general. For this reason the book will be of interest not only to the broad typological community but also historical linguists cognitive linguists and psycholinguists.