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In this research monograph Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here the author looks at a different phenomenon syntactic agreement and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages including Tagalog Swahili and Lavukaleve it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

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.

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).

Situated at the interface between corpus linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics this volume focuses on conjunctive markers expressing contrast in English and French. The frequency and placement patterns of the markers are analysed using large corpora of texts from two written registers: newspaper editorials and research articles. The corpus study revisits the long-standing but largely unsubstantiated claim that French requires more explicit markers of cohesive conjunction than English and shows that the opposite is in fact the case. Novel insights into the placement preferences of English and French conjunctive markers are provided by a new approach to theme and rheme that attaches more importance to the rheme than previous studies. The study demonstrates the significant benefits of a combined corpus and Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to the cross-linguistic analysis of cohesion.

This book describes the repertoire and uses of referring expressions by French-speaking children and their interlocutors in naturally occurring dialogues at home and at school in a wide range of communicative situations and activities. Through the lens of an interactionist and dialogical perspective it highlights the interaction between the formal aspects of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes the discourse-pragmatic dimension and socio-discursive interactional and dialogical factors. Drawing on this multidimensional theoretical and methodological framework the first part of the book deals with the relation between reference and grammar while the second part is devoted to the role of the communicative experience. Progressively a set of arguments is brought out in favor of a dialogical and interactionist account of children’s referential development. This theoretical stance is further discussed in relation to other approaches of reference acquisition. Thus this volume provides researchers and students with new perspectives and methods for the study of referring expressions in children.

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.

The chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of ‘unit’ in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and interactional linguistics. This volume contributes to and extends this discussion by examining the nature of units in actual usage in a range of genetically and typologically unrelated languages English Finnish Indonesian Japanese and Mandarin engaging with fundamental theoretical issues. The chapters show that categories originally created for the description of Indo-European languages have limited usefulness if our goal is to understand the nature of human language in general. The authors thus question the status of traditionally accepted linguistic units especially their static understanding as a priori entities and suggest instead that an emergent and interactional view of both structure and function offers a better fit with the data from the languages examined. Originally published as special issue 43:2 (2019) of Studies in Language.

This cognitive contrastive study of ten languages (Chinese Dalabon English French Spanish Romanian Kurdish Khmer Polish Tibetan) focuses on the concept of giving from six main points of view namely argument structure lexical semantics and event structure role marking in the three argument construction and in other constructions lexicalization grammaticalization and constructionalization of the verb from a cognitive construction grammar point of view and central and extended meanings. It is proposed that a continuum approach to grammar and lexicon is needed in order to describe the typological and historical facts. The volume argues for a concrete and abstract transfer ‘cluster model’ involving coverage of lexical and grammatical extension or bleaching phenomena and that the semantic extensions (metaphorical and otherwise) exploit various portions of this schema. The volume is deeply anchored in the Cognitive Construction Grammar theoretical movement and proposes analyses of constructional phenomena to illustrate a grammar to lexicon continuum in synchrony and diachrony: language change grammaticalization chains constructionalization analysis and an invariant hypothesis of giving as a basic activity in human cognition.

OKAY has been termed ‘a spectacular expression’ and ‘America’s greatest invention.’ This volume offers an in-depth empirical study of the uses that have resulted from its global spread. Focusing on actions and interactional practices it investigates OKAY in a variety of settings in 13 languages. The collected work showcases the importance of a holistic analysis: prosodic realization and the placement of OKAY in its larger sequential and multimodal context emerge as constitutive for distinct uses in individual languages. An inductive approach makes it possible to identify practices not previously documented for example OKAY used for ‘qualified acceptance’ or as a ‘continuer’ and to document a core of recurrent similar uses across languages. This work also outlines new research directions for comparative analysis by offering first insights into the diachronic development of OKAY’s uses and the relationship of OKAY to other particles in specific languages.

In this book the traditional definition of ‘grammaticalization’ is challenged in the light of current developments in grammar theory. The main innovation of this approach is the focus on the feature composition of lexical items. From this perspective the loss of past participle agreement in Catalan is analyzed on the basis of newly collected data as a consequence of the grammaticalization of formal features. The emergence of syntactic formal features through grammaticalization is understood as a last-resort repair mechanism for pragmatically costly derivations. Further far-reaching implications of this proposal under discussion are: the interplay between (re-)parametrization economy cyclicity and grammaticalization; the characterization of free variation under a modified version of the Interface Hypothesis; and the precedence of syntactic over morphological change. This book is not only of interest to specialists in Romance languages but also to anyone working on diachronic linguistics.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual cognitive or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity identity and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways the topic remains under-researched though across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language with respect to its connection to cognition and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions diagnostics for mass and count the distribution and role of numeral classifiers abstract mass nouns and object mass nouns (furniture police force clothing).The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual cognitive or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity identity and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways the topic remains under-researched though across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language with respect to its connection to cognition and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions diagnostics for mass and count the distribution and role of numeral classifiers abstract mass nouns and object mass nouns (furniture police force clothing).

This volume brings together linguistic psychological and neurological research in a discussion of the Cognitive Dualism Hypothesis whose central idea is that human cognitive activity in general and linguistic cognition in particular cannot reasonably be reduced to a single monolithic system of mental processing but that they have a dualistic organization. Drawing on a wide range of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks that account for how language users mentally represent process and produce linguistic discourse the studies in this volume provide a critical examination of dualistic approaches to language and cognition and their impact on a number of fields. The topics range from formulaic language the study of reasoning and linguistic discourse and the lexicon–grammar distinction to studies of specific linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles comment adverbs extra-clausal elements in spoken discourse and the processing of syntactic groups.

Mood modality and evidentiality are popular and dynamic areas in linguistics. Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions – Categories co-text and context focuses on the specific issue of the ways language users express permission obligation volition (intention) possibility and ability necessity and prediction linguistically.

Using a range of evidence and corpus data collected from different sources the authors of this volume examine the distribution and functions of a range of patterns involving modalising expressions as predominantly found in standard American English British English or Hong Kong English but also in Japanese. The authors are particularly interested in addressing (co-)textual manifestations of modalising expressions as well as their distribution across different text-types and thus filling a gap research was unable to plug in the past. Thoughts on categorising or re-categorising modalising expressions initiate and complement a multi-perspectival enterprise that is intended to bring research in this area a step forward.

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness the emergence of fixed expressions their connection to social action the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of ‘units’ of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data mostly everyday conversation in English Estonian Finnish Japanese and Mandarin with some crosslinguistic comparison.

This volume provides a detailed investigation of perfects from all the branches of the Indo-European language family in some cases representing the first ever comprehensive description. Thorough philological examinations result in empirically well-founded analyses illustrated with over 940 examples. The unique temporal depth and diatopic breadth of attested Indo-European languages permits the investigation of both TAME (Tense-Aspect-Mood-Evidentiality) systems over time and recurring cycles of change as well as synchronic patterns of areal distribution and contact phenomena. These possibilities are fully exploited in the volume. Furthermore the cross-linguistic perspective adopted by many authors as well as the inclusion of contributions which go beyond the boundaries of the Indo-European family per se facilitates typological comparison. As such the volume is intended to serve as a springboard for future research both into the semantics of the perfect in Indo-European itself and verb systems across the world’s languages.

This book aims to explain the syntax and semantics of Norwegian verb particles. While particles have been claimed to be distributed optionally to the left (as LPrt) or right (as RPrt) of an associated DP in the linguistic literature the dialectologically oriented literature has shown for a long time that many Norwegian particles are preferred as LPrt (corresponding to English ‘throw out the dog’). While spatial particles can appear in both positions non-spatial particles primarily appear as LPrt. A complex predicate analysis is adopted for non-spatial particles and a small clause analysis for spatial particles. It is argued that a non-spatial LPrt construction triggers an atelic reading and the RPrt counterpart identifies a result state.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book combines traditional dialectology with modern linguistic theories and includes much Norwegian data that has not been shed theoretical light on before: simplex and complex spatial and non-spatial constructions phrasal particles ground promotion and unaccusatives. Several earlier theoretical accounts of Norwegian particles are reviewed in a separate chapter.

Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad range of data involving different kinds of motion events previously understudied such as caused motion (e.g. kick a ball across) and even visual motion (e.g. look into a hole). Special attention is also paid to deixis a hitherto neglected aspect of motion event descriptions. A wide range of languages is examined including those spoken in Europe Africa and Asia. The results provide new insights into the patterns languages deploy to represent motion events. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in language universals and typology as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with sub­ject inversion subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text begin­nings jokes stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives thus speech acts without com­mu­nicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contribu­tions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which in contrast to German and English sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.

This volume brings together a collection of original articles investigating state-of-the-art themes in morphology. The papers in the volume provide an in-depth analysis for spoken and sign languages within morphological word domain morphosyntax and morphophonology. Bringing data from a variety of languages including Turkish some understudied ones (e.g. Turkish Sign Language Late Ottoman Turkish) and also endangered languages (e.g. Karachay-Balkar Sauzini Cappadocian Aivaliot and Pharasiot Greek) the volume will be of special interest to a wide audience ranging from typologists to theoretical linguists and graduate students in linguistics and is expected to generate further research on the above mentioned languages as well as to contribute to the cross-linguistic literature on the themes explored in the volume.

This volume brings together selected papers from the first North American Conference in Iranian Linguistics which was organized by the linguistics department at Stony Brook University. Papers were selected to illustrate the range of frameworks diverse areas of research and how the boundaries of linguistic analysis of Iranian languages have expanded over the years. The contributions collected in this volume address advancing research and complex methodological explorations in a broad range of topics in Persian syntax morphology phonology semantics typology and classification as well as historical linguistics. Some of the papers also investigate less-studied and endangered Iranian languages such as Tat Gilaki and Mazandarani Sorani and Kurmanji Kurdish and Zazaki. The volume will be of value to scholars in theoretical frameworks as well as those with typological and diachronic perspectives and in particular to those working in Iranian linguistics.

Differential Object marking (DOM) a linguistic phenomenon in which a direct object is morphologically marked for semantic and pragmatic reasons has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics in the past few years. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages whereas it has disappeared from others; it is easily acquired by monolingual children but presents high instability and variability in bilingual acquisition and language contact situations. This edited collection contributes to further our understanding of the nature and development of DOM in the languages of the world in acquisition and in language contact variation and change. The thirteen chapters in this volume present new empirical data from Estonian Spanish Turkish Korean Hindi Romanian and Basque in different acquisition contexts and learner populations. They also bring together multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives to account for the complexity and dynamicity of this widespread linguistic phenomenon.

This book opens with Angelika Kratzer and Luigi Rizzi talking about contemporary issues such as non-recursiveness of focus and the semantics of topics. The chapters climb down the spine from the left periphery to DP: the value of subjunctive across the history of German expressive expressions in Brazilian Portuguese left and right dislocation and the speaker’s perspective in Italian Brazilian double subjects and left dislocated topic long versus short wh-movement in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French low adverbs and the raising of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese ellipsis and null objects in Brazilian and European Portuguese and bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese. The chapters propose original accounts for language variation and historical changes most of them focusing on Brazilian Portuguese a challenge to syntax and semantics. Thus the volume contributes to Brazilian and Portuguese Linguistics as well as to general and contemporary research on syntax and semantics of natural languages.

Whether you wish to deliver on a promise take a walk down memory lane or even on the wild side phraseological units (also often referred to as phrasemes or multiword expressions) are present in most communicative situations and in all world’s languages. Phraseology the study of phraseological units has therefore become a rare unifying theme across linguistic theories.

In recent years an increasing number of studies have been concerned with the computational treatment of multiword expressions: these pertain among others to their automatic identification extraction or translation and to the role they play in various Natural Language Processing applications. Computational Phraseology is a comparatively new field where better understanding and more advances are urgently needed. This book aims to address this pressing need by bringing together contributions focusing on different perspectives of this promising interdisciplinary field.

Theoretical linguistics in the generative tradition has payed much attention to issues related to silence ‒ children know the syntax of silence despite the fact that they do not have direct access to it throughout their language acquisition process. One of the issues that have been hotly discussed regarding silence in natural languages is whether it involves syntactic structure or not. This book is concerned with a particular instance of silence in natural languages what is called radical pro-drop showing that it is silently structured on the basis of novel data from Japanese as well as Chinese Korean Mongolian and Turkish. The discussion in this book also has consequences for the dichotomy between PF-deletion vs. LF-copying shedding a new light on the proper analysis of several syntactic phenomena in Japanese including wh-in-situ and control.

This volume contains selected papers from the 13th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Budapest 2017).The contributions address current issues in Hungarian linguistics including comparisons with other languages (e.g. English German Turkish Arabic Spanish).<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Specifically the phonetics and phonology papers present experimental and corpus studies of /h/ voicing the acoustics of Hungarian word stress and vowel harmony in harmonically mixed stems. The papers on syntax and semantics discuss object agreement and its locality restrictions equative markers in German and Hungarian diachronically and synchronically anaphoric possessor strategies and definite article distribution and the semantics of various aspectual adverbs. Experimental studies of information structure examine the linear placement of textually given topical constituents post-verbally exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German English and Hungarian and contextual factors licensing Hungarian structural focus.<br/>The broad range of topics ensures that this volume will interest scholars of Hungarian and theoretical linguists more generally.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic diachronic and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological syntactic and semantic literature namely that so-called reciprocal constructions encode symmetric relations. Instead they are analyzed as constructions encoding unspecified relations. In effect it provides a new proposal for the truth-conditional semantics of these constructions. More broadly this book introduces new ways of bringing together historical linguistics and formal semantics demonstrating how on the one hand the inclusion of historical data concerning the sources of reciprocal constructions enriches their synchronic analysis; and how on the other hand an analysis of the syntax and the semantics of these constructions serves as a key for understanding their historical origins.

The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic antitopic contrastive topic focus verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles sentence-final particles and other medial sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk including Basque French German Italian Kazakh Spanish and Turkish with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.

This volume explores how emergent patterns of complex syntax – that is syntactic structures beyond a simple clause – relate to the local contingencies of action formation in social interaction. It examines both the on-line emergence of clause-combining patterns as they are ‘patched together’ on the fly as well as their routinization and sedimentation into new grammatical patterns across a range of languages – English Estonian Finnish French German Hebrew Italian Mandarin and Swedish. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The chapters investigate how the real-time organization of complex syntax relates to the unfolding of turns and actions focusing on: (i) how complex syntactic patterns or routinized fragments of ‘canonical’ patterns serve as resources for projection (ii) how complex syntactic patterns emerge incrementally moment-by-moment out of the real-time trajectories of action (iii) how formal variants of such patterns relate to social action and (iv) how all of these play out within the multimodal ecologies of action formation.<br/>The empirical findings presented in this volume lend support to a conception of syntax as fundamentally temporal emergent dialogic sensitive to local interactional contingencies and interwoven with other semiotic resources.

Was Tesnière the founding father of dependency grammar or merely a culmination point in its long history? Leaving no doubt that the latter position is correct Chapters of Dependency Grammar tells the story of how dependency-oriented grammatical description developed from Antiquity up to the early 20th century. From Priscian’s Rome to Dmitrievsky’s Russia from the French Encyclopaedia to Stephen W. Clark’s school grammars in 19th century America it is shown how the concept of dependencies (asymmetric word-to-word relations) surfaced again and again assuming a central place in syntax. A particularly intriguing aspect of the storyline is that even without any direct contact or influence authors were making key breakthroughs in similar directions. In the works of Sámuel Brassai a Transylvanian polymath and Franz Kern a German grammarian the first dependency trees appear in 1873 and 1883 respectively predating Tesnière’s stemmas by several decades.

This volume provides a mechanism to uncover the extremely rich split-CP of V2 languages in both root and embedded clauses on the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. The movement of the inflected verbal head is triggered to agree with the profiled informational value of the fronted XP. The V2 “constraint” shall thus be observed as a sum of micro-V2s in which the inflected head creates Spec-Head configurations with the activated criterial positions in the relevant context. The “second linear” position of the verb results from the movement of the inflected verb to the highest activated criterial head. In other words there is no “bottleneck effect” but ordinary violations in terms of locality between fronted XPs. This monograph is aimed principally at postgraduate students and researchers interested in the description of natural languages adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures.

This collection is the fifth volume of selected papers to emerge from Columbia School (CS) linguistics conferences. A radically functionalist approach CS shares with Cognitive linguistics the view that grammar is composed of form-meaning correspondences. CS views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its users. The volume includes papers on methodological issues and innovative analyses on English Spanish and Mandarin that illustrate the value of the strict application of clearly spelled out theoretical principles to the execution of linguistic analysis. Four of the volume’s eleven papers are written in Spanish and all papers have abstracts in both English and Spanish. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical premises of CS and their differences from and similarities with cognitive-functional approaches. The collection will be of interest to researchers and laymen who aim to understand the role of language in human communication.

Dependency grammar (DG) is an approach to the syntax of natural languages with a long and venerable tradition yet awareness of its potential to serve as a basis for principled analyses of natural language syntax is minimal due to the predominance of phrase structure grammar (PSG). This book presents a DG of English with two main goals in mind. The first is to make the principles of dependency syntax accessible to a general audience so that the novice linguist as well as the seasoned syntactician becomes fully aware of what makes DG unique as an approach to the study of natural language syntax. The second is to present and develop a version of DG that then serves as a principled basis for the investigation of central areas of the syntax of English such as long-distance dependencies coordination ellipsis valency etc. An overarching theme in all this is that DG is simple compared to PSG yet despite this simplicity it is quite effective at shedding light on the nature of syntactic phenomena.

This volume surveys the phenomenon of syntactic complexity in a diversity of languages and from a diversity of theoretical perspectives. The topics include clause combining strategies such as relative complement and adverbial clauses serialization clausal nominalizations but also the switch reference systems involved in clause chains the role of insubordination and the influence of language contact in the development of syntactic complexity as well as the acquisition of complex clauses in child language and the grammaticalization processes leading to syntactic complexity. These studies illustrate the varied aspects involved in clause combining and help to understand how syntactic complexity works and evolves in the world’s languages how it varies across languages how it is influenced by language contact how it is acquired. As such this book gives the opportunity for readers to expand both their typological and their theoretical knowledge about syntactic complexity in a variety of languages.

Morphological variation is a rather young yet fascinating topic to study in its own right because it offers challenging evidence both for the autonomy of morphology (morphomic processes) as well as for its tight interconnection with other grammatical domains notably phonology and syntax. Covering a wide range of phenomena (e.g. negation structures form function-mismatches in the verbal and nominal domain loss of morphosyntactic feature values etc.) the contributions to this volume combine in-depth empirical studies with the explanatory potential of modern theories of grammar as well as approaches for capturing and modelling microtypological diversity.

As a distinctive syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) is one of the most interesting but least well-understood structures in the language. This book offers a comprehensive account of the history structure meaning and use of the PSC. Unlike previous descriptions which were framed in terms of pre-existing grammatical notions such as ‘topicalization’ ‘passivization’ and ‘ergativization’ this book offers a fresh look at the PSC in which its syntactic and semantic as well as its discourse functions are examined within the system of major construction-types of the language as a whole. The PSC being low in transitivity serves primarily the function of backgrounding in discourse. Typologically the PSC bears a resemblance to middle constructions in Indo-European and other languages raising interesting questions about ways to understand congruent and divergent syntactic structures across the world’s languages. This book will be of interest to students of Chinese Linguistics as well as Language Typology.

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio Beja Maa). In conclusion the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.

This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan Henk van Riemsdijk Alain Rouveret and scholars in Chinese Linguistics this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages computational and semantic aspects of resumption the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials system repairing strategies at interfaces the v-copy construction in Chinese the scope of disjunction interactions between focus negation and event quantification null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis child language acquisition of nominal structure word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax semantics theoretical linguistics and language acquisition as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.

This volume is a collection of articles dealing with the linguistic category of possession and its expression in languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia (Uralic Turkic Indo-European and Caucasian) with a few excursions into other parts of the world. Some papers engage in typological comparisons both within and beyond the borders of individual language families focusing on issues of motivation; meaning and forms used in expressing possession; typology of belong constructions; marking possession in possessor chains; non-canonical possessives and their relation to the category of familiarity; metaphoric shifts of possessive semantics. Others focus on possession in individual languages offering new precious pieces of information on the linguistic expression of possession in lesser known languages some of which are endangered and even unwritten. The volume will be of interest to both general linguists and typologists as well as to experts/students of the individual languages or language families analyzed in the papers.

Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings?

To account for these and related empirical questions this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.

Negation and speculation detection is an emerging topic that has attracted the attention of many researchers and there is clearly a lack of relevant textbooks and survey texts. This book aims to define negation and speculation from a natural language processing perspective to explain the need for processing these phenomena to summarise existing research on processing negation and speculation to provide a list of resources and tools and to speculate about future developments in this research area. An advantage of this book is that it will not only provide an overview of the state of the art in negation and speculation detection but will also introduce newly developed data sets and scripts. It will be useful for students of natural language processing subjects who are interested in understanding this task in more depth and for researchers with an interest in these phenomena in order to improve performance in other natural language processing tasks.

This book is a theoretically oriented comparative study of noun phrases and their semantic and morpho-syntactic properties. This is the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the nominal structure in Uzbek and compares it with corresponding structures in other article and article-less languages. Uzbek nominals represent a fertile ground to test the universality of the DP hypothesis and to make an insightful contribution to an ongoing debate about the functional architecture of the nominal domain in languages with and without articles. The study shows that the ordering of various nominal suffixes in Uzbek reflects a rich functional structure involving not only DP but also KP. The work also discusses elements such as determiners demonstratives quantifiers and adjectives and positioning of these elements within the nominal domain. This study is especially useful for researchers interested in theoretical linguistics comparative syntax and typology.

Dedicated to John B. Whitman this collection of seventeen articles provides a forum for cutting-edge theoretical research on a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a wide variety of Asian languages including Japanese Korean Chinese Austronesian Indo-Aryan and Thai. Ranging from syntax and morphology to semantics acquisition processing and phonology from synchronic and/or diachronic perspectives this collection reflects the breadth of the honoree’s research interests which span multiple research subfields in numerous Asian languages.

While universally present in languages negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages however negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language generally exhibit negative concord a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’ where several expressions each negative on its own come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

The contributions of this volume centre around the (ongoing) work of John Anderson Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh and Fellow of the British Academy who with detailed studies in phonology morphology semantics and syntax as well as careful discussions of historical and methodological issues in linguistics at large has been and still is the central figure in the development of a theory of language structure driven by the assumption of structural analogy between syntax and phonology and firmly grounded in the long-standing tradition of substantively based grammar behind it. The first contribution is a lengthy ‘interview’ based on a series of written interchanges by József Andor with John Anderson which focuses on the development of Anderson’s work and its relation to contemporaneous developments in linguistics. The following eight contributions centring on general issues concerning the historiography of localism the lexicon meaning and syntax and finally phonology deal with applications extensions answers to criticism and philosophical context of Anderson’s work.

In all languages humans frequently use linguistic combinations called phraseological units (PUs) in communicative acts. These PUs are characterized by their institutionalized fixation and in many cases by their opacity. Traditionally the work on phraseology has placed the emphasis on the total fixing of components and structures of verbal expressions. Variation in PUs is currently an uncontested fact and has been extensively studied and analyzed. In addition in the case of languages like Spanish English French spoken in many countries new creations or diatopic variants arise. While these diatopic expressions have been collected or analyzed in their territory of influence no comprehensive collection showing all the expressions and contrastive analysis to observe the similarities and differences between these diatopic creations with all their idiosyncratic and cultural references have been made so far.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The content of this volume deals with numerous linguistic lexicographic and translational problems in the context of language variation in general as well as specifically related to diatopic variation. The aim is to make progress in these challenging and highly interesting areas which still pose many comprehension and translation problems.

What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody syntax and pragmatics the typology of word order and intonation languages the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality and the role of synchronic variation and change. The studies presented in this volume cover a broad range of Romance languages including French Italian Portuguese and different varieties of Spanish. Moreover the book also offers new insights into non-Romance languages such as English German and Quechua.

Interest in non-canonically case-marked subjects has been unceasing since the groundbreaking work of Andrews and Masica in the late 70’s who were the first to document the existence of syntactic subjects in another morphological case than the nominative. Their research was focused on Icelandic and South-Asian languages respectively and since then oblique subjects have been reported for language after language throughout the world. This newfangled recognition of the concept of oblique subjects at the time was followed by discussions of the role and validity of subject tests discussions of the verbal semantics involved as well as discussions of the theoretical implications of this case marking strategy of syntactic subjects. This volume contributes to all these debates making available research articles on different languages and language families additionally highlighting issues like language contact differential subject marking and the origin of oblique subjects.

This edited volume showcases new work on discourse analysis by big names in the field and promising early-career researchers. Arising from the latest in the series of IWoDA workshops in Santiago de Compostela it provides novel insights into both the explicit and the implicit characteristics of discourse as used in verbal interaction. Discourse markers as their name indicates are among the explicit signals of coherence while discourse relations may be either explicit or implicit. Similarly the discourse used for purposes of evaluation stance-taking and interpersonal engagement is either overt or covert as is also true of the expression of emotions and empathy. This in general terms is the challenging terrain into which the contributors to this volume have ventured. The book combines theoretical issues with a practical orientation comparing languages analysing different registers studying the openings of Skype conversations and much more besides; it will prove highly relevant for postgraduate and advanced practitioners of discourse analysis interaction studies semantics and pragmatics.

In this book the micro-modular approach known as Tiernet within Conceptual Semantics is introduced. Constructions make up an important part in the approach but in this approach constructions are considered to be exceptions licensed links between micro-modules one of the kinds of symbolic modules in the approach. Similar to construction grammar approaches the micro-modular approach takes a solid interest in the ‘periphery’ and thus also studies irregular linking principles like constructions.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book details particulars in the development of generative grammar and the relation of Conceptual Semantics to this development and then introduces the micro-modular approach and shows its usefulness for the description of language generally by not only using examples from English but also and in particular by applying the micro-modular approach of Conceptual Semantics to data from Finnish.

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of interrelated syntactic phenomena from the history of core arguments to complements and non-finite clauses elements in the clause periphery as well as elements with potential scope over complete sentences and even larger discourse chunks. In one way or another however they all testify to an increasing awareness that even some of the most central phenomena of syntax – and the way they develop over time – are best understood by taking into account their communicative functions and the way they are processed and represented by speakers’ cognitive apparatus. In doing so they show that historical syntax and historical linguistics in general is witnessing a convergence between formerly distinct linguistic frameworks and traditions. With this fusion of traditions the trend is undeniably towards a richer and more broadly informed understanding of syntactic change and the history of English. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of (English) historical syntax and historical linguistics within the cognitive-linguistic as well as the generative tradition.