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Any behavior that arouses as swearing does controversy disagreement disdain shock and indignation as often as it imbues passion sincerity intimacy solidarity and jocularity should be an obvious target of in-depth scholarship. Rigorous scholarly investigation of the practice of swearing acknowledges its social and cultural significance and allows us to discover and better understand the historical psychological sociological and linguistic aspects (among others) of swearwords and swearword usage. The present volume brings together a range of themes and issues central to the existing knowledge of swearing and considers these in two key ‘new’ arenas that is in languages other than English and/or in contexts and media other than spoken interaction. Many of the chapters analysed are based on large and robust collections of data such as corpora or questionnaire responses which allow for patterns of swearing to emerge. In other chapters personally observed instances of swearing comprise the focus allowing for a close analysis of the relationship between sociolinguistic context and pragmatic function. In each chapter the cultural aspects of swearing are considered ultimately affirming the importance of the study of swearing and further establishing the legitimacy of swearing as a target of research.

This volume surveys a variety of verb valency change phenomena among diverse languages and from diverse theoretical viewpoints. It offers typological studies comparing languages in topics like applicative polysemy complex predicate formation and locative alternation but also works describing the different valency-changing operations in specific languages including West Circassian Huasteca Nahuatl Tlachichilco Tepehua and Seri and works dealing with specific valency change constructions such as tla- constructions in Nahuatl resultatives in Yaqui antipassives in Mocoví and labile verbs in Arabic. This book aims to put this variety of backdrops in perspective and to clarify the notion and mechanisms of verb valency change. Both scholars and expert readers will get in these works a better understanding of the different verb valency changing operations and of the typological aspects involved in this phenomenon together with a better grasp of how argument realization and verb morphology are connected in some languages.

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.

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.

The study of negation across languages has left no stone unturned with respect to a range of frequently-researched areas such as negative raising negative concord and the behavior of quantifiers under negative scope. Past research has chiefly focused on the category of negation from a cross-linguistic perspective with probably less attention devoted to the study of negation across dialects of languages or across contact languages. The observation of universal quantification in the scope of negation in the English spoken in Singapore for example is an area which has been largely under-researched in the literature as has the rarely-reported phenomenon of negative raising in Singapore English. The present volume profiles some of the problems of negation in English and Singapore English framed against the background of studies of negation in other contact dialects of English and pidgins/creoles and offering a diverse range of theoretical approaches to the problems.

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.

This volume presents a cross-linguistic investigation of clausal noun-modifying constructions in genetically varied languages of Eurasia. Contrary to a common premise that in any language adnominal clauses that share some features of relative clauses constitute a structurally distinct construction some languages of Eurasia exhibit a General Noun-Modifying Clause Construction (GNMCC) -- a single construction covering a wide range of semantic relations between the head noun and the clause. Through in-depth examination of naturally-occurring and elicited data from Ainu languages of the Caucasus (e.g. Ingush Georgian Bezhta Hinuq) Japanese Korean Marathi Nenets Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Cantonese Mandarin Rawang) and Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish Sakha) the chapters discuss whether or not the language in question exhibits a GNMCC and the range of noun modification covered by such a construction. The findings afford us new facts new theoretical perspectives and the first step toward a more global assessment of the possibilities for GNMCCs.

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 monograph explores the syntax and information structure of bare argument ellipsis. The study concentrates on stripping which is identified as a subtype of bare argument ellipsis typically associated with focus sensitive particles or negation. This monograph presents a unified account of stripping located at the syntax-information structure interface and argues for a licensing mechanism which is strongly tied to the focus properties of the construction. Under this view types of bare argument ellipsis such as stripping and pseudostripping which have received different treatments in the literature are shown to be subject to the same licensing mechanism. This analysis is also extended to instances of bare argument ellipsis in embedded contexts which have received little attention in the literature so far. Integrating theoretical and experimental reasoning this study presents a series of experiments investigating the extraction prosody and context properties of stripping and thus arrives at a comprehensive and unified account.