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This book examines three controversial generalizations concerning wh-island effects in Chinese: argument and adjunct asymmetry subject and object asymmetry and D-linked and non-D-linked asymmetry. Experiments under the factorial definition of island effects reveal that: (1) both argument and adjunct wh-in-situ are sensitive to the wh-island displaying no asymmetry; (2) subject wh-in-situ manifests a larger magnitude of island effects whereas object wh-in-situ shows a smaller size due to the confounding of double name penalty exhibiting a special pattern of asymmetry; (3) D-linked and non-D-linked who-in-situ evince no asymmetry while D-linked and non-D-linked what-in-situ demonstrate a marginal asymmetry. Findings support the theory of covert wh-movement on the interpretation of Chinese wh-in-situ. The pattern of wh-island effects can be attributed to the violation of locality principles during wh-feature movement. This book is primarily tailored for researchers interested in the study of Chinese wh-questions and generative linguistics in the broad sense.

The book presents two fundamental theories that characterize the cultural-historical perspective in cognitive semantics: the Four-Level Theory of Cognitive Development (FLTCD) and the Sociocultural Theory of Lexical Complexes (STLC) as well as their application to the analysis of specific material. In particular the book analyzes the sociocultural history of the MACHINE metaphor specifically its use in the texts of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The practical embodiment of STLC is demonstrated through the analysis of lexical complexes such as otkryvat' ‘to open’ kamen' ‘stone’ and intelligencija ‘intelligentsia.’ In the final chapter of the monograph FLTCD and STLC are used for the diachronic analysis of semantic change. The monograph will be of interest to a wide range of linguists psychologists cultural anthropologists and philosophers who consider language as a sociocultural phenomenon.

This book is about one of the most fundamental action sequences found across human societies and socio-cultural contexts: polar questions and their responses. Question–answer sequences are among the most basic building blocks for sequences of action in interaction and are ubiquitous among the languages of the world. Among different types of questions polar questions are the most common occurring with greater frequency in all studied languages. This volume presents a collection of conversation analytic studies into responses to polar questions across ten different typologically diverse languages in a range of action environments and social contexts. The studies explore different ways in which speakers can respond to polar questions and the relationships between response design the action implemented by the response and the context in which it occurs. Taken together the studies assembled in the volume present a nuanced view of polar responses as a situated social action.

This volume presents eight studies of linguistic phenomena in Nordic languages (notably Danish Norwegian and Swedish) from a construction grammar perspective. The contributions both deepen and widen the focus of construction grammar applied to Nordic languages by dealing with a variety of topics such as the constructional network pseudo-coordination additional language learning and emerging multilingualism prototypical semantics in argument structure constructions and domain-specific discourse and language behavior. The volume showcases the vibrant research activity within part of the construction grammar community dealing with Nordic languages contributing to the knowledge about the structure use and learning of these languages as well as to the field of construction grammar as a whole.

Individual Differences in Anaphora Resolution: Language and cognitive effects explores anaphora resolution from different perspectives and investigates various aspects of the phenomenon as contributions include research protocols that combine old and new experimental methodologies as well as theoretical and empirical approaches. A central theme across volume contributions are the multiple linguistic and extralinguistic factors that constrain anaphora resolution its processing and acquisition by a variety of populations (children and adults monolinguals bilinguals and second language learners) as well as the mechanisms underlying anaphora resolution. Anaphora resolution constitutes an ideal environment to test the interaction between domain-general cognitive systems and domain-specific linguistic sub-routines since variability in referential preferences is not related to binding constraints (an integral part of syntax per se) but is closely tied to processing (functional constraints) modulated by the integration of discourse-filtered information.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic Romance Uralic and Mayan.

This e-book is made available as Open Access under the CC BY 4.0 license.

Professor Albert Costa (1972-2018) was one of the most influential scholars in the fields of psycholinguistics and bilingualism. This book provides a faithful look at the most relevant lines of research in which he worked during his academic career. Written by some of his close collaborators and friends the book presents a coherent summary of the most relevant psycholinguistic theories on language processing and bilingualism including critical reviews to current models of lexical access the representation of cognate words neurolinguistic models of bilingualism cross-linguistic effects in bimodal bilinguals (sign language) prediction processes and linguistic alignment in bilinguals the influence of foreign-language effects in social cognition and the effects of bilingualism in emotion and decision making processing. This volume is a tribute to Prof. Costa and his work and is born from a deep love and respect for his way of approaching the science of multilingualism from a psycholinguistic perspective.

Urban Panamanian English presents the first detailed account of the English used by the descendants of the Afro-Caribbean builders of the Panama Canal. It offers an up-to-date sociolinguistic account of the Panamanian West Indian community of Panama City and Colón including empirical coverage of the advanced state of language shift taking place among bilinguals. The book also showcases spoken interview data and takes stock of the variety’s grammatical features. In particular it provides an advanced quantitative study of variation in the use of verbal -s which contributes to longstanding discussions regarding the principles constraining this variable in Englishes world-wide. This work of documentation and description richly complements existing research on Panamanian Creole English and spotlights Panama as part and parcel of the English-speaking Caribbean. As such this book is of interest to all scholars and students of language contact variation and change.

The study departs from the observation that in expressing ideas some languages encode more details than others. It investigates whether languages encode events and/or objects at a coarse-grained (e.g. put glass) as opposed to a fine-grained (e.g. lay wine glass) level systematically. The level of detail is termed granularity which is viewed as a cline from fine-grained (semantic specificity) to coarse-grained meaning (semantic generality). Four languages are investigated: German English Greek and Turkish. The study draws on elicited data from a naming task. The verbalization of events is based on event and object descriptions in selected semantic domains. The results reveal significant granularity effects between languages and language types (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed). The study is relevant for scholars interested in linguistic typology lexical and semantic typology contrastive linguistics event representation psycholinguistics and cognitive semantics.

This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties past and present. Specifically the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages including English Dutch and German but also Danish Swedish and Norwegian as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are among others issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family.

This e-book is made available as Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

In this volume the emergence of English in Saipan is examined in the complex context of its colonial past. The focus lies on the influence of the American era on the linguistic outcomes in Saipan. Sociolinguistic interviews with indigenous Chamorros and Saipan Carolinians were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. A general overview of the English spoken in Saipan and detailed analyses of selected morphosyntactic features are presented. The English spoken by the local people presents an interesting transitional phase of English becoming a first language with unique local ‘island’ features. Results shed light on linguistic constraints globally and on social constraints in Saipan that motivate language variation and change locally. This volume contributes to the literature of language variation and change lesser-known varieties of English and the description and categorization of emerging English varieties within the canon of World Englishes.

This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction) and investigates (ii) the relationships between locative existential and information structure (iii) the quantification of the pivot and (iv) the issue of negative existentials. It brings together different and complementary approaches (functional cognitive pragmatic typological comparative diachronic philosophical) based on a wide variety of data sources. The contributions illustrate how the so-called existential construction can take a variety of forms – more or less grammaticalized – and functions – ranging from the expression of literal existence to that of localization and discursive focus – in a wide range of languages. The book will be valuable for linguists researchers or students interested in the cross-linguistic manifestations of existential constructions at the interface between syntax semantics and information structure.

English Complex Words is a lively essential companion for multilingual explorations of word-formation processes both in English and across 40 other languages. It offers today’s broadest available coverage of English prefixation suffixation and compounding. Comprising a treasury of real language items this book offers students a unique chance to conduct their own research and analyses using a goldmine of carefully-selected authentic examples and corpus data. Readers will become familiar with 96 affixes and 13 compound types by working through thought-provoking morphological cases and their construction patterns. Through these challenging and hands-on activities junior researchers identify morphological nuances among multiple languages. Instructors in multilingual classrooms can find satisfying activities to address the needs of international students. This academically stimulating coursebook can serve as a core text for Word Formation and Morphology courses. As a supplemental source it may suit a range of Linguistics courses directed at both graduate and undergraduate students.

Bilingualism is a ubiquitous global phenomenon. Beyond being a language experience bilingualism also entails a social experience and it interacts with development and learning with cognitive and neural consequences across the lifespan. The authors of this volume are world renowned experts across several subdisciplines including linguistics developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. They bring to light bilingualism’s cognitive developmental and neural consequences in children young adults and older adults. This book honors Ellen Bialystok and highlights her profound impact on the field of bilingualism research as a lifelong experience. The chapters are organized into four sections: The first section explores the complexity of the bilingual experience beyond the common characterization of “speaking multiple languages.” The next section showcases Ellen Bialystok’s earlier impact on psychology and education; here the contributors answer the question “how does being bilingual shape children’s development?” The third section explores cognitive and neuroscientific theories describing how language experience modulates cognition behavior and brain structures and functions. The final section shifts the focus to the impact of bilingualism on healthy and abnormal aging and asks whether being bilingual can stave off the effects of dementia by conferring a “cognitive reserve.”

This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic evidential hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position prosody the semantics of the adverbial its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory the semantics/pragmatics interface the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure as well as for syntacticians semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality syntactic and interpretational.

A great majority of people around the world know more than one language. So how does knowing one language affect the learning and use of additional languages? The question of cross-language influences is the focus of this book. Do bilinguals hear understand and produce language and meaning differently because of the languages they speak? How well can theoretical and computational models of language processing and acquisition explain and predict bilingual use patterns and acquisition trajectories? What learner language and context characteristics influence bilingual comprehension and production? This book provides a state-of-the-art review and critique of research into cross-language influences in phonology lexicon and morphosyntax and suggests directions for future research. The interdisciplinary nature of the book bridges the gap between research on bilingualism and second language acquisition. The book will be of interest to graduate students teachers and researchers in linguistics and second language acquisition cognitive psychology and language education.

There is an ever-growing body of work on New Englishes and the time has come to take stock of how research on varieties of English is carried out. The contributions in this volume critically explore the gamut of familiar and unfamiliar methods applied in data collection and analysis in order to improve upon old methods and develop new methods for the study of English around the world. The authors present novel approaches to the use of the International Corpus of English critical insights into phonological analyses of New Englishes applications of linguistic dialectology in territories in which New Englishes are used improvements on attitudinal research and an array of mixed-methods approaches. The contributions in this volume also include a range of Englishes considered not only in situ but also in online and diaspora settings and thus question received understandings of what counts as New Englishes.

This book presents a 100% novel approach to phraseology: A language-universal deductive calculus of all theoretically possible phraseological expressions (= phrasemes) is proposed implemented in 51 rigorously defined notions. Nine major classes of phrasemes are established and illustrated: lexemic idioms (shoot the breeze) lexemic collocations (pay a visit; helicopter parents) lexemic nominemes (the Northern Palmyra) and lexemic clichés (What’s your name?; to put it differently); morphemic idioms (forget) morphemic collocations (Londoner ~ Muscovite) morphemic nominemes (Greenland) and morphemic clichés (antidepressant); and syntactic idioms (Her be late?!?). An additional class of pragmatically constrained lexemic expressions is described: pragmatemes (No parking; At attention!; Roger.). Each phraseme class is supplied with precise methodology for a lexicographic description; a number of lexical entries for representatives of all classes are given. The language data come from English and Russian. General Phraseology: Theory and Practice is meant as a contribution towards the elaboration of a unified notional system for linguistics.

This scholarly edition invites us to reconsider our assumptions about the French language by showcasing the oeuvre of one of the pioneers of diachronic Spoken French corpus linguistics William J. Ashby and the ground-breaking findings to come out of his influential Tours corpora (1976 & 1995) including two real-time studies appearing for the first time in English translation. To help readers visualize just how radically different the morphosyntax morphophonology and semantics of Spoken French are from French-on-the-page the editor has developed a glossing framework designed to capture the systemic radically-prefixal morphology of Spoken French and the variability of change-in-progress. The model presented here and used to gloss the examples from the Tours corpus is also suitable for corpus-tagging. The volume is organized into sections preceded by an Editor’s note and followed by suggestions for further reading and closes with an appendix of French corpora. This scholarly edition was written for advanced undergraduates graduate students and scholars in the field.

This volume examines the development of poetic literacy including the specific processes used by expert poetry readers and professional poets. In doing so it provides a much needed synthesis of research findings across diverse domains such as human development the scientific study of literature cognitive psychology neuroscience psycholinguistics and education. An important feature of the book is its exploration of the new and relatively unexplored area of research on the development of poetic writing. Both theoretical and practical the volume will be of interest to researchers as well as educators. The detailed explication of expert knowledge and the trajectory through which relative novices become relative experts should allow educators to make evidence-based decisions. Valuable guidelines for developmentally-appropriate practice in pedagogical settings are provided to better optimize learning and inspire students from preschool to graduate school and beyond.

This volume is intended as a celebration of Kristin Davidse’s work and its impact within the broad traditions of cognitive functional and usage-based grammars. Reflecting this wide functionalist lens the contributions develop ideas central to Neo-Firthian theories of grammar (in particular Semiotic Grammar and SFL) the Prague School Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) and broader cognitive-functional (e.g. Construction Grammar) and usage-based approaches (e.g. Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization theory corpus-based sociolinguistics). The range of topics addressed makes the volume particularly relevant to linguists investigating information structure construction grammar functional discourse grammar spatial deixis pronoun and case systems and/or the semantics of verbal constructions.

Clitics those “funny little words” like English contracted future tense and pluperfect tense/conditional mood markers (’ll and ’d) or French pronominal objects (le ‘him’ la ‘her’ lui ‘to him/her’ etc.) have long been a source of fascination for linguists. Lacking an inherent stress that characterizes “well-behaved” words clitics prosodically depend on a stressed sentence element called their host which makes them look and in some contexts behave like affixes (parts of words). Some clitics Serbian second-position clitics being the case in point also obey stringent linear ordering rules different from those holding for fully-fledged sentence elements. This monograph offers a comprehensive formalized description of second-position clitics in standard Serbian from the viewpoint of the Meaning-Text theory an approach relying on syntactic dependencies and oriented towards speech production which sets it apart from most contemporary frameworks. It will be of interest for general linguists Slavists and advanced learners of Serbian.

This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics semantics discourse analysis psycholinguistics interactional linguistics natural language processing) in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English German different varieties of French Indonesian Belgian sign language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining of names language acquisition second language learning and various genres such as news articles narratives satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust depending on the context.

This volume approaches the interaction of evidentiality with some other related categories such as modality and mirativity from an innovative angle: its connection to informational configuration. The aim of this book is to analyze the impact of shared knowledge on TAME categories as well as to explore its reflection on different verb choices. It provides an innovative theoretical view as well as a robust typological crosslinguistic perspective.