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This book provides a detailed and up to date review of the framework of phases (Chomsky 2000 and subsequent work). It explores the interaction between the narrow syntactic computation and the external systems from a minimalist perspective. As has sometimes been noted Phase Theory is the current way to study the cyclic nature of the system and 'phases' are therefore the natural locality hallmark being directly relevant for phenomena such as binding agreement movement islands reconstruction or stress assignment. This work discusses the different approaches to phases that have been proposed in the recent literature arguing in favor of the thesis that the points of cyclic transfer are to be related to uninterpretable morphology (the Φ-features on the heads C and v*). This take on phases is adopted in order to investigate raising structures binding subjunctive dependents and object shift (word order) in Romance languages as well as the nature of islands.

This book sheds new light on Appositive Relative Clauses (ARCs) a structure that is generally studied from a merely syntactic point of view in opposition to Determinative (or Restrictive) Relative Clauses (DRCs). In this volume ARCs are examined from a discourse/pragmatic point of view independently of DRCs in order to provide a positive definition of the structure. After a presentation of the morphosyntactic semantic and pragmatic characteristics of ARCs a taxonomy of their functions in discourse is established for both written and spoken English based on the results of a corpus-based investigation. Constraints are then defined within an information-packaging approach to syntactic structures to show why speakers choose ARCs over other competing allostructures i.e. syntactic structures that fulfil similar discourse functions (e.g. nominal appositives independent clauses adverbials noun premodifiers topicalization). The end result is a deeper understanding of the richness of ARCs in their natural contexts of use.

English causative constructions with cause get have and make are often mistakenly presented as (quasi-)synonymous and more or less interchangeable. This book demonstrates the value of corpus linguistics in identifying the syntactic semantic lexical and stylistic features that are distinctive for each of these constructions. It also underlines the usefulness of providing corpus studies with a solid theoretical foundation by showing how corpus linguistics can be fruitfully combined with cognitive linguistics which is used both as a starting point for the analysis (top-down approach) and as a framework within which to interpret the corpus results (bottom-up approach). From a methodological point of view the study illustrates the complementarity of corpus and elicitation data and offers tools and methods that could be used to investigate other syntactic structures. Finally the book also has a pedagogical dimension in that it examines how the research findings can be applied to foreign language teaching.

This book analyzes the different patterns found across subsaharan Africa to express information structure. Based on languages from all four African language phyla it documents the great diversity of linguistic means used to encode information-structural phenomena and is therefore highly relevant for some of the most pertinent questions in modern linguistic theory. The special contribution of this volume is the perspective on a variety of information-structurally related phenomena which go far beyond classical notions such as focus and topic. Detailed investigations are dedicated to so far less discussed focal subcategories like focus on verbal operators or the thetic-categorical distinction. Finally the information-structural configuration of unmarked canonical sentence structures is recognized. The papers provide evidence that the formal means to encode information-structural categories range from means such as morphological markers or syntactic operations famous in linguistics to less well-known strategies such as defocalization rather than focalization.

Speak and write perfect English!



• BBI teaches you how to combine words with words to form phrases (so you can say “

mortgaged to the hilt; I want something badly”). • BBI also teaches you how to combine words into structures to form clauses and sentences (so you can say “I

want you to go = What I want is for you to go”). • So BBI helps you with both vocabulary and grammar.

• BBI shows you important vocabulary and grammatical differences between American and British English.

• BBI gives you plenty of examples that can serve as models for your own use of English.

• Some of these examples are authentic quotations from works of American and British literature.





This Third Edition of the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English is an expanded and updated version of the First Edition (1986) and its Revised Edition (1997) both of which were favorably received. In this third edition the contents of the BBI have been increased by over 20%.

In the selection and presentation of new material many sources have been used including:

• Internet searches;

• The British National Corpus;

• Reading and listening to English-language material;

• For Grammatical Patterns:

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Randolph Quirck et al.); • For Collocations: Lists of Lexical Functions (compiled by Igor Mel’cuk et al.).





The BBI has been “highly recommended” by the English-Speaking Union.

Using the BBI: A workbook with exercises is now available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/z.bbi.workbook

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) dedicated much of his life to some of the most central debates of his time. For him our chance of progress towards the happiness of mankind lies in the capacity to recognize the value of the different perspectives through which humans approach the world. Controversies supply the opportunity to exercise this capacity by approaching the opponent not as an adversary but as someone from whose point of view we can enrich our own viewpoint and improve our knowledge.

This approach inspired the creation of this series. The book – the first in the series devoted to Leibniz – presents his views through actual controversies in which he participated in several domains. Leibniz’s original ‘theory of controversies’ thus appears not only as what the thinker thinks about how one should use reason in a controversy but also how he puts in practice the kind of rationality he preaches.

For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co. The principal focus of this book concerns various shifts of complements which verbs of implicit negation (e.g. forbid forbear avoid prohibit and prevent) have experienced in the history of English. Forbid for example was once followed by that-clauses while in contemporary English it is in usual cases followed by to-infinitives except in the fixed form God forbid that … Although a number of English verbs have undergone similar syntactic changes the paths they have selected in their historical development are not always the same. Unlike forbid the verb prevent is now followed by gerunds often with the preposition from. This book describes some of the most representative paths followed by different verbs of implicit negation and reveals the major complement shifts that have occurred throughout the history of English. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students specializing in English linguistics historical linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Terminology in Everyday Life contains a selection of fresh and interesting articles by prominent scholars and practitioners in the field of terminology based on papers presented at an international terminology congress on the impact of terminology on everyday life. The volume brings together theory and practice of terminology and deals with such issues as the growing influence of European English on terminology terminology on demand setting up a national terminological infrastructure the relevance of frames and contextual information for terminology and standardisation through automated term extraction and editing tools. The book wants to demonstrate that terminology is of everyday importance and is of interest to everyone interested in the theory and practice of terminology from terminologists to computer specialists to lecturers and students.

The papers in this volume derive from the 13th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 2008). They all address the main topic of the meeting viz. variation and change in morphology. Inflectional and derivational morphology are represented on equal terms. The focus is on cases of language-internal variation such as pattern competition base variation form–function mismatches or morphological pleonasm. Other recurring themes are language contact as a cause of variation the output-orientedness of morphological patterns and linguistic economy.The contributions cover a wide variety of languages both Indo-European (Romance Germanic and Slavic; Latin Lithuanian and Romani) and non-Indo-European (Hungarian Maay Chinese).

Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages such as childhood and adolescence ignoring for the most part healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of scrutiny. This book examines the discourse of adulthood and accounts for sociolinguistic variation with regards to age and gender through the exploration of a 90000 word age-and gender-differentiated spoken corpus of Irish English. The book explores both the distribution and use of a number of high frequency pragmatic features of spoken discourse that appear as key items in the corpus. Part 1 of the book provides an introduction a theoretical overview of age as a sociolinguistic variable and a description on how to compile a small spoken corpus for sociolinguistic research. Part 2 consists of five chapters which investigate and explore key features such as hedges vague category markers intensifiers boosters and high-frequent items of taboo language in relation to the variables age and gender. The book is of interest to undergraduates or postgraduates taking formal courses in sociolinguistics applied linguistics pragmatics or discourse analysis. It is also of interest to students and researchers interested in using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research.