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This book adopts a broad cognitive-pragmatic perspective on irony which sees ironic meaning as the result of complex inferential activity arising from conflicting conceptual scenarios. This view of irony is the basis for an analytically productive integrative account capable of bridging gaps among disciplines and of recontextualizing and solving some controversies. Among the topics covered in its pages readers will find an overview of previous linguistic and non-linguistic approaches. They will also find definitional and taxonomic criteria an exhaustive exploration of the elements of the ironic act and a study of their complex forms of interaction. The book also explores the relationship between irony banter and sarcasm and it studies how irony interacts with other figurative uses of language. Finally the book spells out the conditions for “felicitous” irony and re-interprets traditional ironic types (e.g. Socratic rhetoric satiric etc.) in the light of the unified approach it proposes.

This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories such as Focus and Topic to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. <br/> This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.<br/>

Gender as a morphosyntactic feature is arguably “an endlessly fascinating linguistic category” (Corbett 2014: 1). One may even say it is among “the most puzzling of the grammatical categories” (Corbett 1991: 1) that has raised probing questions from various theoretical and applied perspectives. Most languages display semantic and/or formal gender systems with various degrees of opacity and complexity and even closely related languages present distinct differences creating difficulties for second language learners. The first three chapters of this volume present critical reviews in three different areas – gender assignment in mixed noun phrases subtle gentle biases and the gender acquisition in child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish – while the next six chapters present new empirical evidence in the acquisition of gender by bilingual children adult L2/L3 learners and heritage speakers of various languages such as Italian German Dutch or Mandarin-Italian.

The city as a complex socio-cultural structure plays a central role economically administratively as well as culturally. Factors such as higher population density a more expansive infrastructure and larger social and cultural diversity compared to rural areas have a substantial impact on urban society and urban communication.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Focusing on the latter the contributions to this volume discuss the characteristics and dynamics of urban language use considering aspects such as contact variation and change as well as identity indexicality and attitudes but also spatial factors including mobility urbanisation/counterurbanisation and diffusion processes.<br/>The collected articles provide an update of ‘first wave’ approaches of variationist sociolinguistics but also establish a connection to ‘third wave’ research for readers from a broad range of fields especially sociolinguistics variationist linguistics and dialectology. The book presents modern methodological and conceptual ideas and a wealth of new findings but also serves as a reference work combining theoretical discussions with results from recent empirical studies.

This volume contains a selection of 18 peer-reviewed papers presented at the 31st edition of Going Romance. Phenomena found in Romance languages (European Portuguese French Italian Spanish Romanian) in Romance dialects (Cosentino Salentino southern Calabrese Neapolitan and Trevigiano) and even in creoles with a Romance lexifier (Makista and Kristang) either benefit from in-depth analyses confined to one single variety or are subjected to comparative analysis (dialect vs standard language dialect vs different major language(s) cross-dialectal comparison cross-Romance comparison and even comparison of language families). Theoretical and experimental approaches complement one another as do diachrony and synchrony. Individually and as a whole these contributions show how the Romance languages contribute to a better understanding of issues which are relevant in the current linguistic landscape: acquisition n-words ellipsis phenomena focus and polarity ditransitive constructions grammaticalization theory differential object marking language ecology event structure cyclicity passives and many more.

As the first collective volume to focus exclusively on corpus-based approaches to register variation this book provides an exhaustive account of the range and depth of possibilities that the domain of register variation in English has to offer. It illustrates register variation analysis in different theoretical frameworks such as Probabilistic Grammar Systemic Functional Linguistics and Information Theory and proposes a new framework within the Text Linguistic Approach: the continuous-situational analytical framework. Several of the contributions apply Multi-Dimensional Analysis to corpus data in order to unveil register (dis)similarities while others rely on logistic regression models and periodization techniques based on Kullback-Leibler divergence. The volume includes both inter-register and intra-register variation analysis of a wide spectrum of varieties speakers and periods: British and American English learner varieties L2 varieties and also contains diachronic studies covering early and late Modern English. This broad scope should be a source of inspiration for anyone interested in historical and ongoing register variation in a vast range of varieties of English worldwide.

The book presents a new perspective on clausal syntax and its interactions with lexical and discourse function information by analysing Hungarian sentences. It also demonstrates ways in which grammar engineering implementations can provide insights into how complex linguistic processes interact. It analyses the most important phenomena in the preverbal domain of Hungarian finite declarative and wh-clauses: sentence structure operators verbal modifiers negation and copula constructions. Based on the results of earlier generative linguistic research it presents the fundamental empirical generalisations and offers a comparative critical assessment of the most salient analyses in a variety of generative linguistic models from its own perspective. It argues for a lexical approach to the relevant phenomena and develops the first comprehensive analysis in the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. It also reports the successful implementation of crucial aspects of this analysis in the computational linguistic platform of the theory Xerox Linguistic Environment.

This volume includes fourteen papers on the acquisition of Romance languages eleven of which were presented at the Romance Turn 9 held in Bucharest in September 2018. The studies offer new insights into central issues in the literature such as syntactic complexity in both typical and impaired language settings intervention effects the acquisition of phenomena which involve both syntactic parameters and an external interface as well as cross-linguistic interference effects. They present novel longitudinal and experimental data on the first language acquisition and second language learning of French Italian European and Brazilian Portuguese Romanian and Spanish. A unique feature of this volume is the focus on the interaction of language specific properties and of factors which are not specific to the faculty of language in the narrow sense such as data processing the nature of the input discourse structure computational load sociolinguistic properties and the development of Theory of Mind.

This volume brings together studies that combine both traditional and contemporary tools in the study of syntactic geolectal variation with a special focus on a subset of Iberian varieties. There is an increasing body of research on syntactic micro-variation but the interaction between dialectology (which makes use of atlases corpora databases questionnaires interviews etc.) and formal syntactic studies has traditionally been weak (or even nonexistent) which is precisely the gap the contributions in this book aim at filling in. From a broader perspective this collection is meant as a contribution to the subfield of linguistic variation and to the more general field of Romance linguistics with special interest in Spanish and in other Iberian languages. The volume is meant for both researchers and students interested in linguistic variation or dialectology and specifically in syntactic variation in Iberian languages.

This book illustrates recent developments in cartographic studies seen from a comparative perspective. The different chapters explore various aspects of theoretical and descriptive syntax bearing on such topics as selection causativity binding light verb constructions the structure of the high and low peripheral zones. Syntactic issues in the study of dialects and ancient languages are also addressed. The languages investigated include French Hebrew Standard Dutch and the Ghent dialect Etruscan Japanese English Arabic Mandarin Chinese and the Teochew dialect. The intended readers of this book include researchers and students working on natural language syntax the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics and comparative and typological linguistics as well as scholars interested in particular languages such as East Asian and Romance languages.

From its beginnings the study of the mental lexicon has been at the crossroads of research and scholarship. This volume presents a polylogue--a textual conversation of many voices. It is designed to capture the excitement within the field and generate a deeper understanding of key issues and debates for established researchers students and readers interested in language and cognition. The first chapter examines how the mental lexicon itself can be seen as a polylogue. In the following six chapters authors tackle the fundamental questions concerning future research on lexical representation and processing in an interactive structure that presents new perspectives and captures the excitement of the field. The themes include the value of cross-linguistic megastudies the nature of meaning how to capture truly natural language what can be learned from lexical acquisition the advantages of a functionalist perspective and the role of schemas in understanding morphology and the lexicon.

Many theories of language acquisition struggle to account for the morphological complexity and diversity of the world’s languages. This book examines the acquisition of complex morphology of Murrinhpatha a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia. It considers semi-naturalistic data from five children (1;9-6;1) collected over a two-year period. Analysis of the Murrinhpatha data is focused on the acquisition of polysynthetic verb constructions large irregular inflectional paradigms and bipartite stem verbs which all pose interesting challenges to the learner as well as to theories of language acquisition. The book argues that morphological complexity which broadly includes factors such as transparency predictability/regularity richness type/token frequency and productivity must become central to our understanding of morphological acquisition. It seeks to understand how acquisition is impacted by differences in morphological systems and by the ways in which children and their interlocutors use these systems.

Control typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC) Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control split control or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.

There is ample evidence that language users including second-language (L2) users can predict upcoming information during listening and reading. Yet it is still unclear when how and why language users engage in prediction and what the relation is between prediction and learning. This volume presents a collection of current research insights and directions regarding the role of prediction in L2 processing and learning. The contributions in this volume specifically address how different (L1-based) theoretical models of prediction apply to or may be expanded to account for L2 processing report new insights on factors (linguistic cognitive social) that modulate L2 users’ engagement in prediction and discuss the functions that prediction may or may not serve in L2 processing and learning. Taken together this volume illustrates various fruitful approaches to investigating and accounting for differences in predictive processing within and across individuals as well as across populations.

Input Processing is a theoretical framework on which the pedagogical paradigm called Processing Instruction is predicated. In this book new data on the acquisition of Italian and Modern Standard Arabic are presented and analyzed within this framework. Each study in the book explores how input processing strategies affect the acquisition of a particular linguistic feature and/or structure in the two languages. The studies use both offline (e.g. sentence and discourse-level tasks) and online tests (e.g. eye-tracking) to measure the effects of this instructional training.

This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars and touching on a very wide range of topics approaches and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based paradigmatic approach to morphology.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes from the further exploration of paradigms to studies involving words stems and affixes to examinations of competition inheritance and defaults to investigations of morphomes to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. <br/>The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.

Dynamic Variation in Second Language Acquisition makes a cutting-edge contribution to knowledge about how second language learners develop their second language. Drawing comprehensively on Processability Theory’s theoretical understanding that individual variation dynamically interacts with ordered stages of language acquisition the book provides an informative critical analysis of historical and contemporary debates about the role of variation in linguistic variation particularly second language variation. Richly illustrated with a forensic year-long study of how eight adolescent learners of English vary in their acquisition of syntax and morphology this monograph shows that learners vary in their timing of development between two distinct learner types along a continuum and without skipping stages. The book uncovers how learner variation is dynamic and quite (although not entirely) systematic and how this variation contributes to change in the second language. It will be essential reading for researchers students and practitioners.

Adpositions are used universally to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In many languages however adpositions also seem to have extended their diachronic life one step further becoming verbal affixes. The main focus of this book is the tail-end of the diachronic life cycle of adpositions. That is the process by which having arisen first as nominal-attached prepositions or post-positions they wind up attaching themselves to verbs. Our core puzzle is thus fairly transparent: How and why should morphemes that pertain functionally to nominals and begin their diachronic life-cycle as nominal grammatical operators wind up as verbal morphology? While the core five chapters of this book focus on the rise of verb-attached prepositions in Homeric Greek its theoretical perspective is broader perched at the intersection of three closely intertwined core components of the study of human language: (a) the communicative function of grammar; (b) the balance between universality and cross-language diversity of grammars; and (c) the diachrony of grammatical constructions how they mutate over time. While paying well-deserved homage to the traditional Classical scholarship this study is firmly wedded to the assumption indeed presupposition that Homeric Greek is just another natural language spoken before written designed as an instrument of communication and subject to the same universal constraints as all human languages. And further that those constraints--so-called language universals--express themselves most conspicuously in diachronic change. Lastly in analyzing the synchronic variation and text distribution of prepositional constructions in Homeric Greek this study relies primarily on the theory-laden method of Internal Reconstruction.

How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the importance of reconciling the two modalities into a unified account through the investigation of possible connections between the two systems. Authored by key researchers in psycholinguistics neuroscience and language development this volume encompasses state of the art research on the relation between production and comprehension processes in bilingual children and adults. Articles highlight the most recent methodological approaches as well as a variety of language pairs and linguistic structures. Indispensable for students and researchers working in the areas of language acquisition and processing neurolinguistics and experimental linguistics this volume will also appeal to educators and clinicians focusing on language development and processing in multilingual children and adults. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5 (2019).

Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics but also specialists in the philosophy of language and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics cognitive sciences psycholinguistics anthropology).

The former Soviet Union (USSR) provides the ideal territory for studying language contact between one and the same dominant language (Russian) and a wide range of genealogically and typologically diverse languages with varying histories of language contact. This is the first book that bundles different case studies and systematically investigates the impact of Russian at all linguistic levels from the lexicon to the domains of grammar to discourse and with varying types of outcomes such as relatively rapid language shift structural changes in a relatively stable contact situation pidginization and super variability at the post-pidgin stage. The volume appeals to linguists studying language contact and contact-induced language change from a broad range of perspectives who want to gain insight into how one of the largest languages in the world influences other smaller languages but also experts of mostly minority languages in the sphere of the former Soviet Union.

The last few years have seen a steadily increasing interest in constructional approaches to language contact. This volume builds on previous constructionist work in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) and the volume Constructions in Contact (2018) and extends its methodology and insights in three major ways. First it presents new constructional research on a wide range of language contact scenarios including Afrikaans American Sign Language English French Malayalam Norwegian Spanish Welsh as well as contact scenarios that involve typologically different languages. Second it also addresses other types of scenarios that do not fall into the classic language contact category such as multilingual practices and language acquisition as emerging multilingualism. Third it aims to integrate constructionist views on language contact and multilingualism with other approaches that focus on structural social and cognitive aspects. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar is a framework particularly well suited for analyzing a wide variety of language contact phenomena from a usage-based perspective.

While research on language change has formulated robust empirical generalisations about processes and motivations underlying the emergence and spread of linguistic elements their decline and loss is less well understood. So far a systematic investigation into the processes and motivations of decline and loss in language change is lacking. This book is a first step towards remedying this state of affairs. It brings together a varied set of empirical investigations into decline and loss spanning morphology syntax and the lexicon in different languages. Their authors apply diverse methodologies and represent different theoretical approaches. On the basis of this broad span of studies authors and editors propose generalisations related to decline and loss and assess similarities and differences with processes and motivations of emergence and spread. The book aims to inspire and provide hypotheses for further studies of decline and loss. It will appeal to historical linguists and others interested in language change.

This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics Construction Grammar and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes. It contributes to Construction Grammar theory by adopting a verb-based rather than construction-based perspective on argument structure. This allows the probing of the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon. From a variationist perspective it seeks to (i) identify features of New Englishes and gauge whether these features exhibit traces of conventionalization and (ii) assess whether the degree of institutionalization of the New Englishes correlates with linguistic behavior both from a social and cognitive perspective thereby contributing to the budding effort to integrate the cognitive and social dimensions into the modeling of linguistic variation in World Englishes.

This book is a collection of contemporary essays and squibs exploring the mental representation of Spanish and other languages in the Romance family. Although largely formal in orientation they incorporate experimental and corpus data to inform questions of synchronic and diachronic importance. As a whole these contributions explore two areas of particular interest to linguistic theorizing. The first is linguistic interfaces with chapters on syntax-information structure syntax-prosody syntax-semantics and lexicon-phonology. The second consists of explorations of noun phrases of all sizes—from clitics to nominalized clauses. The results and conclusions of these studies encourage researchers to continue to explore individual languages in particular in order to gain insight on human language in general. This edited volume in honor of Dr. Paula Kempchinsky is reflective of the diversity of approaches that inspired her teaching research and mentoring for over thirty years at the University of Iowa and beyond.