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Building on a substantial earlier literature the chapters in this volume further advance knowledge and understanding of properties of the noun phrase in English. The empirical material for the papers includes both historical and present-day data with the two often shedding light on each other in a process of mutual illumination. The topics addressed are: the structure of nounless NPs like the poor and the obvious; the article/zero alternation in expressions like go to (the) church; developments in the early history of adjective stacking; the semantics of N + clause units in present-day English; the history of N + BE + clause constructions; and the decline of two anaphoric NPs in Early Modern English. The volume will appeal to scholars working in this area and will also help those interested in the general field of English grammar to keep abreast of recent methods and results in NP-related work.

This book is the first on Cantonese that deals with the grammaticalization phenomenon systematically. Focusing on a group of twelve directional particles this book tracks their grammaticalization pathways from full-fledged directional verbs to directional particles indicating meanings relating to tense-aspect modality and quantification in the post-verbal position. Some of these particles have undergone further grammaticalization to convey speaker’s subjective as well as intersubjective stances.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book is also unique in its diachronic component. Examples in the book are drawn from various sources including early Cantonese pedagogical texts Cantonese films and contemporary Cantonese corpora with data ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This book will be a valuable resource not only for all linguists interested in the development of grammatical forms but also for teachers and students in conversation/discourse analysis psychology and anthropology interested in deepening their understanding of the interaction between language structure and use.<br/>

The volume addresses a number of closely connected methodological descriptive and theoretical issues in the study of metonymy and includes a series of case studies broadening our knowledge of the functioning of metonymy. As regards the methodological and descriptive issues the book exhibits a unique feature in metonymy literature: the discussion of the structure of a detailed web-based metonymy database (especially its entry model) and the descriptive criteria to be applied in its completion. The theoretical discussion contributes important challenging insights on several metonymy-related topics such as contingency source prominence “complex target” source-target contrast / asymmetry conceptual integration hierarchies triggers de-personalization and de-roling and many others. The case studies deal with the role of metonymy in morphology monoclausal if only constructions emotional categories and iconicity in English and other languages including one sign language. Beside cognitive linguists especially metonymy researchers the book should appeal to researchers in A.I. sign language rhetoric lexicography and communication.

Prosodic development is increasingly recognized as a fundamental stepping stone in first language acquisition. Prosodic sensitivity starts developing very early with newborns becoming attuned to the prosodic properties of the ambient language and it continues to develop during childhood until early adolescence. In the last decades a flourishing literature has reported on the varied set of prosodic skills that children acquire and how they interact with other linguistic and cognitive skills. This book compiles a set of seventeen short review chapters from distinguished experts that have contributed significantly to our knowledge about how prosody develops in first language acquisition. The ultimate aim of the book is to offer a complete state of the art on prosodic development that allows the reader to grasp the literature from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of psychology linguistics cognitive science speech therapy and education.

Classification is a popular topic in typological descriptive and theoretical linguistics. This volume is the first to deal specifically with the diachrony of linguistic systems of classification. It comprises original papers that examine the ways in which linguistic classification systems arise change and dissipate in both natural circumstances and in circumstances of attrition. The role of diffusion in such processes is explored as well as the question of what can be diffused. The volume is not restricted to nominal systems of classification but also includes papers dealing with the less well-known phenomenon of verbal classification. Languages from a wide spread of world regions are examined including Africa Amazonia Australia Eurasia Oceania and Mesoamerica. The volume will be of interest to linguistic typologists descriptive linguists historical linguists and grammaticalization theorists.

Spoken language is characterized by the occurrence of linguistic devices such as discourse markers (e.g. so well you know I mean) and other so-called “disfluent” phenomena which reflect the temporal nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension. The purpose of this book is to distinguish between strategic vs. symptomatic uses of these markers on the basis of their combination function and distribution across several registers in English and French. Through deep quantitative and qualitative analyses of manually annotated features in the new DisFrEn corpus this usage-based study provides (i) an exhaustive portrait of discourse markers in English and French and (ii) a scale of (dis)fluency against which different configurations of discourse markers can be diagnosed as rather fluent or disfluent. By bringing together discourse markers and (dis)fluency under one coherent framework this book is a unique contribution to corpus-based pragmatics discourse analysis and crosslinguistic fluency research.

This book offers an original treatment of the lexical form look. The work is innovative in that it establishes that the Columbia School conception of an invariant meaning – hitherto found primarily in grammar – is equally operative in core vocabulary items like look and see. The upshot is that grammar and lexicon are both amenable to synchronic monosemic analysis. The invariant meaning proposed for look explains the full range of its distribution without the need to posit as linguistic units ‘look-noun’ and ‘look-verb’ ‘look-visual’ and ‘look-intellectual’ or constructions such as have-a-look look-like etc. The analysis places look in opposition with see seem and appear for which tentative meanings are posited as well. The hypotheses are supported through qualitative analyses of attested examples and quantitative predictions tested in a massive corpus. These predictions offer new knowledge about the distribution of look see and other forms that may provide useful for other scholars.

This book develops a grammar model which accounts for discourse ellipses in spoken Norwegian. This is a previously unexplored area which has also been sparsely investigated internationally. The model takes an exoskeletal view where lexical items are inserted late and where syntactic structure is generated independently of lexical items. Two major questions are addressed. Firstly is there active syntactic structure in the ellipsis site? Secondly how are discourse ellipses licensed? It is argued that both structural and semantic restrictions are required to account for the empirical patterns. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Discourse ellipses can be seen as a contextual adaptation. Ellipsis is only possible in certain contexts. The existence of ellipsis may lead to the impression that syntax is partly destroyed. However the analysis shows that narrow syntax is not affected. The underlying structure stays intact as the licensing restrictions concern only phonological realization. Hence the grammar of discourse ellipses is best characterized as an interface phenomenon.

Category change broadly defined as the shift from one word class to another is often studied as part of other changes such as grammaticalization or lexicalization but not in its own right. This volume offers a survey of different types of category change and their properties e.g. abrupt versus gradual changes morphological versus syntactic changes or context-independent versus context-sensitive changes. The purpose of this collection of papers is to explore the concepts of linguistic category and category change from the perspective of Construction Grammar. Using data from a variety of languages the authors address a number of themes that are central to current theorizing about category change such as the question of whether or not categories should be considered discrete entities how new categories arise or whether category change can be considered as the emergence of a new construction i.e. a new form-meaning pairing. The novel approach advanced in this volume will be of interest to historical linguists as well as to general linguists working on the nature of linguistic categories.

The contributions to this volume honor Joan Bybee’s 2005 LSA Presidential address “Grammar is Usage and Usage is Grammar” as a cumulative articulation of Professor Bybee's long and influential career in linguistics. The volume begins with a functional examination of child language acquisition of ergative languages. The next three contributions successively investigate the grammaticalization of Greek postural verbs Spanish third person pronouns and American Sign Language topicalization constructions. The two following papers report on usage-based phonological studies of Spanish /s/ and /d/ respectively. The book concludes with four papers that address usage-based effects concerning the grammatical status of ain’t in African American English Spanish verbs of “becoming” and English lexis and prefabs. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience of functional and cognitive linguistic researchers.

Email has become a ubiquitous medium of communication. It is used amongst people from the same speech community but also between people from different language and cultural backgrounds. When people communicate they tend to follow rules of speaking in their native language termed by scholars as pragmatic transfer which may cause misunderstandings and lead to cross-cultural communication breakdown. This book examines pragmatic transfer by Chinese learners of English at different proficiency levels when writing email requests and refusals. To meet the need for developmental research in L2 pragmatics it also explores whether pragmatic transfer increases or decreases as language proficiency improves. This book will appeal to researchers and students in interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics second language acquisition English as a second/foreign language and intercultural communication.

Developmental research has long focused on regularities in language acquisition minimizing factors that might be responsible for variation. Although researchers are now increasingly concerned with one or another of these factors this volume brings together research on three different sources of variation: language-specific properties the nature of the input to children across contexts and several aspects of the learners themselves. Chapters explore these sources of variation within an interdisciplinary and comparative approach allying theories and methodologies stemming from linguistics psycholinguistics developmental psychology and neuroscience. The comparative perspective involves different languages contexts of use types of learners (first/second language acquisition monolingual/bilingual learners autism language impairment) as well as vocal and visuo-gestural communicative modalities (co-verbal gestures sign language acquisition). The volume points to the need to enhance interdisciplinary research using complementary methodologies to further examine sources of variation and to integrate variation into a more general developmental theory.

Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics offers a panorama of current research into multiple varieties of Spanish from several different regions (Mexico Puerto Rico Spain Costa Rica Argentina Bolivia Peru Honduras) Catalan Brazilian Portuguese as well as varieties in contact with English and Purépecha. The first part of the volume focuses on the structural aspects and use of these languages in the areas of syntax semantics sociolinguistics diachrony phonetics phonology and morphology. The second part discusses the effect of interacting multiple grammars namely first language acquisition second language acquisition varieties in contact and bilingualism. As a whole the contributions in this volume provide a methodological balance between qualitative and quantitative approaches to Language and in this way represent contemporary trends in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics.

Within the current discussion on grammatical interfaces the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax with morphology playing a prominent role especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.

This book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified ranging from languages rich in compounds such as German Saami Estonian and Finnish to languages poor in compounds such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech like Russian Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.

Les unités linguistiques ayant pour fonction (paradoxale) de signifier une relation entre d’autres unités de discours suscitent depuis l’Antiquité un intérêt toujours renouvelé. Défi pour le grammairien dont ils subvertissent les « parties du discours » ces « mots-outils » que l’on peut prendre pour des « mots vides » obligent le linguiste à interroger les rapports entre syntaxe et sémantique logique et linguistique système et discours signe et implicite. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Les onze études réunies dans ce livre s’attachent à décrire les processus de fonctionnement de morphèmes appartenant à des langues diverses (allemand français italien latin vietnamien) qui marquent une relation de liaison ou d’intégration. Ces études de cas détaillées menées selon différents cadres théoriques (typologie cognitivisme psycho-mécanique grammaire fractale linguistique de l’énonciation argumentation dans la langue linguistique textuelle) du point de vue synchronique ou diachronique mettent en valeur le caractère premier de la variation dans les systèmes linguistiques. <br/>Un chapitre introductif pose les repères terminologiques historiques et théoriques pour l’étude de catégories de signes linguistiques – prépositions conjonctions connecteurs – marqués par la transcatégorialité et la polyfonctionalité.

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in the study of bilingualism. It also reflects the enormous increase in different language combinations (including dialects) being investigated and the use of new methodologies. Moreover the volume illustrates the growing interdisciplinarity of cross-linguistic influence research considering extra-linguistic cognitive and social factors besides linguistics. It demonstrates that the time is ripe for a more integrated approach from different disciplines such as theoretical linguistics psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to obtain a better understanding of bilingual child acquisition. As such it is of interest to (psycho/socio)linguists psychologists and education specialists who study or want to learn about (child) bilingualism.

Negation is one of the most discussed phenomena within linguistics on all language levels though it never seems to be exhausted. This operator establishes complex sentence structures and constantly challenges – from a cognitive syntactical semantic and morphologic viewpoint – presuppositions on language internal relations as rational and logic. It therefore arouses interest through all fields within language sciences. From a pragmatic perspective where negation is conceived a marked structure using negation often produces meanings beyond the one of a reversed affirmation "it is not the case that X”. This book explores the various uses and pragmatic meanings of negation in authentic communication in different text types and in different languages predominately romance languages. The multilingual composition marries a macro-micro perspective where aspects of genre sociocultural context memory rhetoric and argumentation interplay with the negative morpheme’s nature and embedded instructions. This broad approach makes this book a unique contribution to negation studies and to pragmatics in general. The book is important and enriching reading for scholars in all linguistic domains but particularly for researchers in semantics pragmatics argumentation and discourse analysis.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Sonic Signatures is devoted to the representation of sound patterns and sound structures across a diverse range of typologically distinct languages with the overall aim of understanding the nature of linguistic data structures from a principled balance between representational economy and the interfaces of phonology with other domains including acoustic and visual. The volume embraces data spanning from Nivkh vowel harmony to Maxakalí sign language and from the representation of consonant clusters in adult Laurentian French and to those found in child Greek and child Brazilian Portuguese. The volume strives towards concrete commitments to the theoretical understanding of empirical territory both familiar but with a novel take (English stress) and novel but with immediate relevance (Hungarian suffix allomorphy). With authors contributing from five continents the book offers a range of perspectives on the representation of sound patterns while nonetheless retaining a tight focus on the core questions of which characteristics and signatures are specifically encoded for these patterns in the phonological component of the language faculty.

In recent years an increasing number of linguists have re-examined the question of whether markedness has explanatory power or whether it is a phenomenon that begs explanation itself. This volume brings together a collection of articles with a broad range of critical viewpoints on the notion of markedness in phonological theory. The contributions span a variety of phonological frameworks and relate to morphosyntax historical linguistics neurolinguistics biolinguistics and language typology. This volume will be of particular interest to phonologists of both synchronic and diachronic persuasions and has strong implications for the architecture of grammar with respect to phonology and its interfaces with morphosyntax and phonetics.

The book tackles the sociobiological bases of Information Structure (IS) inquiring both its evidential and neurobiological underpinnings in human communication. Its purpose is to delve into the epistemic and neurocognitive rationales behind the realization of informational hierarchies in a sentence. The book zooms in on an interplay that between IS and evidentiality that has never been explored in IS studies and seeks to recast IS phenomena in an epistemological perspective. The neurocognitive approaches discussed propose neurophysiological investigations on IS processing both with ERP and ERS vs. ERD measurements. In its overall structure and general purposes the book is conceived for interested scholars working in the fields of linguistics neuropragmatics experimental psychology philosophy of language and cognitive sciences in general and it adds some further contribution to ongoing psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimental research on the processing of topic-focus and presupposition-assertion dichotomies.

Over the last three decades Brazilian Portuguese bare nominals have turned into a hot topic in the cross-linguistic study of nominal syntax and semantics. This contribution is the first comprehensive book-length treatment of the issue covering both the long-standing discussion about the adequate analysis of these forms as well as the establishment of a solid empirical basis for future research. The book goes further than previous accounts in also taking into consideration the phonetic-phonological dimension showing the advantages of a more comprehensive account. The empirical section outlines an innovative approach in which different methods and data types are combined and focuses on the underresearched definite / specific / referential uses and interpretations of bare singulars. The book also addresses the traditional topics in the study of bare nominals – genericity the mass/count distinction NP-internal plural agreement the NP/DP distinction and syntax-semantics-phonology interface questions – in the light of the new findings.

This volume is both a state-of-the-art display of current thinking on second language development as a complex system. It is also a tribute to Diane Larsen-Freeman for her decades of intellectual leadership in the academic disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. The chapters therein range from theoretical expositions to methodological analyses pedagogical proposals and conceptual frameworks for future research. In a balanced and in-depth manner the authors provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of second language development with a wealth of insights that promise to break the status-quo of current research and take it to exciting new territory. The book will appeal to both seasoned and novice researchers in applied linguistics second language acquisition bilingualism cognitive psychology and education as well as to practitioners in second or foreign language teaching of any language.

Contrastive Linguistics is an expanding field as witnessed by the publication in recent years of an increasing number of monographs collected volumes and journal articles. The present volume which comprises an introduction and ten chapters dealing with lexical contrasts between English and other languages shows advances within the well-established lexical work in the field. Each of the chapters takes lexical items as its starting point and compares English with one or more languages. The languages represented are Spanish Lithuanian Swedish German Norwegian and Czech. Furthermore they emphasise the link between lexis and grammar not only within the same language but also across languages. Finally several studies represent one of the more recent developments of contrastive linguistics namely a growing focus on genre and register comparisons. The book should appeal to both established scholars and advanced students with an interest in lexis genre corpus linguistics and/or contrastive linguistics.

Pragmatics forms nowadays an integral part of the description not only of modern languages but also of ancient languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek. This book explores various pragmatic phenomena in these two languages which are accessible through corpora consisting of a broad range of text types. It comprises empirical synchronic studies that deal with three main topics: (i) speech acts and pragmatic markers (ii) word order and (iii) discourse markers and particles. The specificity of this book consists in the discussion and application of various methodological approaches. It provides new insights into the pragmatic phenomena encountered compares where possible the results of the investigation of the two languages and draws conclusions of a more general nature. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on pragmatics in general and to scholars of Latin and Ancient Greek in particular.

The current volume contains a selection from papers presented at the 45th meeting of the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 45) which took place from May 6 to 9 2015 at the University of Campinas Brazil. A volume of selected papers such as this one will ultimately be successful contingent upon the success of the event itself which proved a strong commitment to theoretical and empirical rigor to the studies in Romance linguistics. All the chapters in this volume are high-quality papers on the state-of-the-art in linguistic research into Romance languages. The studies offer a variety of topics on the syntax phonology semantics-pragmatics L2 acquisition and contact situations of Romance languages (Peninsular and American Spanish; European Brazilian and African Portuguese; French; Italian) Romance dialects (Borgomanerese) and Romance-based creoles (Palenquero).

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks concern ancient languages (Hittite Greek Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian German English Kiswahili) and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers applied to different forms and structures such as adverbs adjectives evaluative affixes discourse markers reduplication exclamative clauses coordination prosodic elements and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.

The philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two. Normative pragmatics aims to explain how linguistic practices are sufficient to confer contentful states in those who engage in them. Inferential semantics provides a theory of such pragmatic significances in terms of the inferential relations that articulate conceptual contents. Rational expressivism is the thesis that concept application is essentially a process of turning something that can only be done into something that can also be said. Such a threefold structure is the core of normative inferentialism. This book is a concise self-contained and comprehensive presentation of this philosophical enterprise. It guides the reader through the analysis of Brandom's imposing theoretical apparatus the discovery of the roots of his approach in American pragmatism and German idealism till the exploration of some of its most interesting and recent outcomes in pragmatics and semantics. It is a valuable resource for both those who approach Brandom's work for the first time and those who are interested in the potential of normative inferentialism.

This book offers an original treatment of the Italian clitic si. Sharply separating encoded grammar from inference in discourse it proposes a unitary meaning for si including impersonals passives and reflexives. Si signals third-person participancy but makes no distinctions of number gender or case role. The analysis advances the Columbia School framework by relying on just these straightforward oppositions attributing variety of interpretation largely to language use rather than to grammar. The analysis places si within a network of oppositions involving all the other clitics. Data come primarily from twentieth-century and more recent published and on-line literature. The book will be of interest to functional linguists students of reflexivity and scholars of the Italian language.

Published in 2005 Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming – A new theory of words and language introduced a completely new theory of language based on how words are used in the real world. In the ten years that have passed the theory has since gained traction in the field of corpus-linguistics. This volume brings together some of the most important contributions to the theory in areas such as language teaching and learning discourse analysis stylistics as well as the design of language learning software. Crucially this book introduces aspects of the language that have so far been given less focus in lexical priming such as spoken language figurative language forced primings priming as predictor of genre and historical primings. The volume also focuses on applying the lexical priming theory to languages other than English including Mandarin Chinese and Finnish.

This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive metaphorical) motion and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1–L2 acquisition translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation experimentation and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.

This book focuses on important methodological and theoretical issues in Chinese and Japanese L1 and L2 acquisition. All contributions discuss experiments using the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) on three syntactic and semantic domains binding scope interaction and wh- and logical expressions. The issues in these grammatical domains are particularly well suited for TVJT studies as the task allows for the testing of particular interpretations among alternative representations and reveals children’s and adults’ understandings of these constructions. The book is a tribute to Stephen Crain’s contribution to the field of Chinese and Japanese language acquisition within the framework of Generative Grammar. It is a state-of-the-art collection that offers a picture of cutting-edge research on children’s and adult’s Chinese and Japanese acquisition. Readers will find the book a rich source of ideas and the starting point of new projects.

Among emotions surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics surprise like other emotions has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in psychological approaches and the effects of surprise on language. This cross-disciplinary volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion cognition and language by bringing together nine contributions on surprise from different backgrounds – psychology human-agent interaction linguistics. Using different methods at different levels of analysis all contributors concur in defining surprise as a cognitive operation and as a component of emotion rather than as a pure emotion. Surprise results from expectations not being met and is therefore related to epistemicity. Linguistically there does not exist an unequivocal marker of surprise. Surprise may be either described by surprise lexemes which are often associated with figurative language or it may be expressed by grammatical and syntactic constructions. Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:2 (2015)

This book presents the latest research on the syntax of the “Insular Scandinavian” languages (Faroese and Icelandic) with contributions from thirteen experts and a significant introductory chapter by the four editors. The topics covered include some that have figured extensively in recent literature on Scandinavian syntax and its implications for syntactic theory: case agreement embedded clause word order stylistic fronting and the nature of “expletive” constructions. The volume is conceived around the topic of variation both within and between the two languages studied—as well as more generally—and stands out for the wealth of new empirical detail from both Faroese and Icelandic relating to each of the topics and theoretical issues discussed. Each chapter is written in a way to make it accessible to a wide audience within linguistics; the book will be essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in the syntax of the Germanic languages.

Language Variation - European Perspectives VI showcases a selection of papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which was held in Leipzig in 2015. The volume includes plenaries by Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere (“The large and the small of it: Big issues with smaller samples in the study of language variation”) Martin Haspelmath and Susanne Maria Michaelis (“Analytic and synthetic: Typological change in varieties of European languages”) and Jürgen Erich Schmidt (“Dynamics variation and the brain“). In addition the editors have selected 11 papers which exemplify the breadth of research on European languages. The contributions to this volume encompass languages as varied as Swedish Greek Galician Dutch German Swedish English (including English-lexified contact varieties) French Spanish Croatian Luxembourgish and Romani. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives and particularly the combination of different methods attests to the scope of research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages.

Language-contact phenomena in Mesoamerica and adjacent regions present an exciting field for research that has the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of language contact and the role that it plays in language change. This volume presents and analyzes fresh empirical data from living and/or extinct Mesoamerican languages (from the Mayan Uto-Aztecan Totonac-Tepehuan and Otomanguean groups) neighboring non-Mesoamerican languages (Apachean Arawakan Andean languages) as well as Spanish. Language-contact effects in these diverse languages and language groups are typically analyzed by different subfields of linguistics that do not necessarily interact with one another. It is hoped that this volume which contains works from different scholarly traditions that represent a variety of approaches to the study of language contact will contribute to the lessening of this compartmentalization. The volume is relevant to researchers of language contact and contact-induced change and to anyone interested both in the historical development and present features of indigenous languages of the Americas and Latin American Spanish.

This monograph explores the grammar of modifier PPs in Japanese concentrating on their word order. The study argues that (i) modifier PPs are hierarchically arranged and (ii) there is an interesting fine-grained correlation between different PP types and Modal/Aspect functors which indicates that Temporal and Locative appear relatively freely with respect to a certain range of the Modal/Aspect functors in the middle field whereas the rest of the PP types are more constrained in this respect. Unlike cartographic approaches to PPs (Schweikert 2005 Cinque 2006) the book adopts the working hypothesis that the fine-grained hierarchies can be derived in a constrained manner along the lines of Svenonius and Ramchand (2014) and proposes that the properties of the PPs characterized by (i) and (ii) can be captured in a sortal domain analysis. The book appeals to a linguistic audience interested in modifier syntax as well as in Japanese.

The fourth volume in the VARGReB series presents an in-depth investigation of Lithuanian copular constructions from the viewpoint of Cognitive Grammar. Apart from the fundamental problems of the ontology and taxonomy of copular sentences the author also discusses a number of more specific questions on which the Lithuanian data contrasted with those of English and other languages hitherto dealt with in the literature can shed an interesting light such as the nature and distinctive features of specificationals the problem of subjecthood in this subtype of copular constructions the aspectual semantics of copular sentences etc. The attention given to the grammatical context of copular constructions and the multifarious relationships linking them to other construction types enhances the book’s relevance to the field of Lithuanian studies whereas the dialogue and confrontation between the Cognitive perspective adopted by the author and the more formal approaches hitherto applied to the problem of copular sentences will add to its interest for the general reader.

While comparative constructions have been extensively studied in the past decades the expression of equality and similarity has so far attracted little attention in the typological literature. The fifteen contributions assembled in this volume study similative and equative constructions in typologically and genetically distant languages albeit with a focus on Africa and from a range of perspectives. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that also shed light on the diachronic development of similative and equative constructions in language contact situations. Sources of similative morphemes and lexically expressed concepts of likeness are examined and little-known multifunctionality patterns and grammaticalisation targets of similative morphemes – such as purpose clause markers modality morphemes and markers of glottonyms – are discussed. Based on a sample of 119 languages worldwide a new typology of equative constructions is proposed. The book should be of interest to typologists semanticists specialists of grammaticalization historical linguistics and syntax.

This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles creoles and other contact varieties and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa Asia the Americas and the Pacific the book provides new perspectives on creole typology cross-creole comparisons and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features both structural and semantic the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally the book reflects critically on the findings and methods and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics biolinguistics sociolinguistics language typology and semantics.

In recent years issues of verbal valency valency alternations and verb classes have seen a new upsurge of interest from a variety of perspectives. This book comprises articles investigating valency phenomena on a contrastive basis within Romance Germanic and Slavic and also in Basque and in the West-African language Ga as well as classical Greek and Sanskrit. Phenomena include transitive and ditransitive constructions and alternations involving reflexives cognate objects ’null’ objects case (in its syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects) and infinitives mostly in a synchronic perspective. Aiming at a closer understanding of the range of regularities falling within the concept of valency frames the book offers a representative array of current assumptions hypotheses methodologies and new findings within the overall field. The volume will provide a valuable resource for researchers and students both in general linguistics and in the relevant language particular disciplines.

As language is a multifaceted phenomenon the study of language as long as it is geared at providing a comprehensive picture of it cannot be restricted to one component or one approach. This applies to the many different components of language as well including semantics.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>If we want to fully understand the phenomenon of language meaning we must not limit our research to lexical semantics syntax-induced meaning or pragmatics. In order to enable ourselves to construct a consistent account of meaning we need to extract relevant information from research done in different frameworks and from different theoretical standpoints.<br/>This volume brings together a number of computational psycholinguistic as well as theoretical studies which highlight and illustrate how research done in one subfield of linguistics can be relevant to others.<br/>The articles highlight the different ways in which one can work with different aspects of language meaning.

Syllable weight is a crucially important concept in the fields of phonology and morphology. It impacts analyses and explanation whether theoretical typological or descriptive. African linguistics was critical in the original development of the concept and as this book demonstrates the concept is critical to our understanding of complex phenomena in African languages including stress tone allomorphy minimal word requirements and metrics. This volume includes a broad overview of syllable weight as a phonological variable and then provides detailed case studies covering an array of African languages from various phyla spoken across the continent. This should prove to be an essential book for scholars and students in the area of general phonology and African linguistics. The editor of the book Distinguished Professor Paul Newman is an internationally well-known expert on African linguistics in general and the Hausa language in particular. It was he who first introduced the term ‘syllable weight’ in a seminal article published nearly a half century ago.

This book presents a detailed analysis of the Chinese pivotal constructions (PVCs) and their diachronic developments from a constructionalist perspective with the focus on the growth of the constructional hierarchies of these constructions and the changes with respect to both the form and meaning properties over time. The most important enabling factor behind the diachronic developments of the PVCs has been the sanction of the new instances conflicting with the constructions’ specifications. Throughout history the PVCs have grown along the two dimensions i.e. inclusiveness and multileveledness leading to a steady increase in the sizes of their constructional hierarchies. The two-dimensional expansion of the PVCs’ constructional hierarchies has been accompanied by the gradual relaxation of the conditions constraining the earliest instances on multiple schematicity levels. This book will be valuable to scholars working on diachronic construction grammar and language change as well as to those interested in the history of Chinese language.

Situated within the long-established domain of temporality research in Second Language Acquisition this book aims to provide an update on recent research directions in the field through a range of papers which explore relatively new territory. Those areas include the expression of modality and counterfactuality the effect of first language transfer aspectuo-temporal comprehension aspectuo-temporal marking at a wider discursive level and methodological issues in the study of the acquisition of aspect. The studies presented explore English and French as second languages involving both child and adult learners from a range of first language backgrounds in both instructed and naturalistic learning contexts. The studies draw on both spoken and written data which explore various facets of the learners’ second language comprehension and production. The volume offers new but complementary insights to previous research as well as pointing to directions for future research in this burgeoning field of study.

This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of argument realisation in complex predicates and complex events at the syntax-semantic interface across a wide variety of the world’s languages ranging over languages such as German Irish Sicilian and Italian Lithuanian Estonian and other Finno-Ugric languages Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra from Australia’s Western Desert region Japanese Tepehua (Totonacan Mexico) Cheyenne Mexican Spanish Boharic Coptic and Persian. This volume examines the syntactic variation of complex events complex predicates and multi-verb constructions within a single clause where the clause is view as representing a single event studying their semantics and syntax within functional cognitive and constructional frameworks to arrive at a better understanding of their cross linguistic behaviour and how they resonate in syntax. These constructions manifest considerable variability in cross-linguistic comparisons of complex predicate formation. In European languages for example typically one of the verbs in a verb-verb construction highlights a phase of an underspecified event while the matrix verb specifies the actual event. In contrast serial verbs require each verb to provide a sub-event dimension within a complex event that is viewed holistically as unitary in syntax. This book contributes to an understanding of complex events complex predicates and multi-verb constructions across languages their syntactic constructional patterns and argument realisation.

This book addresses the long discussed issue of Japanese interactive markers (traditionally called sentence-final particles) in a new light and provides the comprehensive linguistic documentation of the interactional functions of seven interactive markers: ne na yo sa wa zo and ze. By adopting three key notions ‘involvement’ ‘formality’ and ‘gender’ the study not only reveals the functions and pragmatic effects of each marker but also sheds light on some fundamental issues of the nature of spoken discourse in general including how speakers collaborate with each other to create and sustain their conversations and how linguistic functions of verbal forms interface with sociocultural norms. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields such as Japanese linguistics pragmatics sociolinguistics discourse analysis and applied linguistics and to teachers and learners of Japanese and of a second/foreign language.

The increasing diversity of the U.S. Latino population has given rise to a growing population of “mixed” Latinos. This is a study of such individuals raised in Chicago Illinois who have one Mexican parent and one Puerto Rican parent most of whom call themselves “MexiRicans.” Given that these two varieties of Spanish exhibit highly salient differences these speakers can be said to experience intrafamilial dialect contact. The book first explores the lexicon discourse marker use and phonological features among two generations of over 70 MexiRican speakers finding several connections to parental dialect neighborhood demographics and family dynamics. Drawing from critical mixed race theory it then examines MexiRicans’ narratives about their ethnic identity including the role of Spanish features in the ways in which they are accepted or challenged by monoethnic monodialectal Mexicans and Puerto Ricans both in Chicago and abroad. These findings contribute to our understandings of dialect contact U.S. Spanish and the role of language in ethnic identity.

The contributions of this book deal with the issue of language variation. They all share the assumption that within the language faculty the variation space is hierarchically constrained and that minimal changes in the set of property values defining each language give rise to diverse outputs within the same system. Nevertheless the triggers for language variation can be different and located at various levels of the language faculty. The novelty of the volume lies in exploring different loci of language variation by including wide-ranging empirical perspectives that cover different levels of analysis (syntax phonology and prosody) and deal with different kinds of data mostly from Romance and Germanic languages from dialects idiolects language acquisition language attrition and creolization analyzed from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

The volume is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to synchronic variation in phonology and syntax; the second part deals with diachronic variation and language change and the third part investigates the role of contact attrition and acquisition in giving rise to language change and language variation in bilingual settings.

This volume is a useful tool for linguistics of diverse theoretical persuasions working on theoretical and comparative linguistics and to anyone interested in language variation language change dialectology language acquisition and typology.

Although in the early days of generative linguistics Slovenian was rarely called on in the development of theoretical models the attention it gets has subsequently grown so that by now it has contributed to generative linguistics a fair share of theoretically important data. With 13 chapters that all build on Slovenian data this book sets a new milestone. The topics discussed in the volume range from Slovenian clitics which are called on to shed new light on the intriguing Person-Case Constraint and to provide part of the evidence for a new generalization relating the presence of the definite article and Wackernagel clitics to functional elements such as the future auxiliary and possibility modals the latter of which are discussed also from the perspective of language change. Even within the relatively well-researched topics like wh-movement new findings are presented both in relation to the structure of the left periphery and to the syntax of relative clauses.