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After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense aspect modality and evidentiality this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French German English Spanish) and also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian Estonian Avar Andi Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective.

In constructionist theory a constructicon is an inventory of constructions making up the full set of linguistic units in a language. In applied practice it is a set of construction descriptions – a “dictionary of constructions”. The development of constructicons in the latter sense typically means combining principles of both construction grammar and lexicography and is probably best characterized as a blend between the two traditions. We call this blend constructicography.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The present volume is a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field of constructicography. After a general introduction follow six chapters presenting constructicon projects for English German Japanese Brazilian Portuguese Russian and Swedish respectively often in relation to a framenet of the language. In addition there is a chapter addressing the interplay between linguistics and language technology in constructicon development and a final chapter exploring the prospects for interlingual constructicography.<br/>This is the first major publication devoted to constructicon development and it should be particularly relevant for those interested in construction grammar frame semantics lexicography the relation between grammar and lexicon or linguistically informed language technology.

The correct interpretation of Multiword Units (MWUs) is crucial to many applications in Natural Language Processing but is a challenging and complex task. In recent years the computational treatment of MWUs has received considerable attention but there is much more to be done before we can claim that NLP and Machine Translation (MT) systems process MWUs successfully. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This volume provides a general overview of the field with particular reference to Machine Translation and Translation Technology and focuses on languages such as English Basque French Romanian German Dutch and Croatian among others. The chapters of the volume illustrate a variety of topics that address this challenge such as the use of rule-based approaches compound splitting techniques MWU identification methodologies in multilingual applications and MWU alignment issues.

Building on a substantial earlier literature the chapters in this volume further advance knowledge and understanding of properties of the noun phrase in English. The empirical material for the papers includes both historical and present-day data with the two often shedding light on each other in a process of mutual illumination. The topics addressed are: the structure of nounless NPs like the poor and the obvious; the article/zero alternation in expressions like go to (the) church; developments in the early history of adjective stacking; the semantics of N + clause units in present-day English; the history of N + BE + clause constructions; and the decline of two anaphoric NPs in Early Modern English. The volume will appeal to scholars working in this area and will also help those interested in the general field of English grammar to keep abreast of recent methods and results in NP-related work.

This book is a collection of eleven research articles which altogether serve as a contribution to the study of verb complementation and other constructions an area of investigation which bridges observations on the spectrum of lexico-grammar syntax and semantics. In terms of methodological approaches and the types of linguistic patterns examined the chapters cast light on the subject from a variety of perspectives and the volume is structured in a way that groups the various perspectives under three main themes according to their main focus and/or methodological approaches namely: the semantic and functional descriptions of constructions; the investigation into the distribution of complementation patterns; and the study of innovative patterns in ESL contexts and languages other than English. All chapters in this volume employ data from large electronic corpora where possible – the BNC COCA COHA GloWbE NOW and newly compiled corpora representing regional varieties of English.

Egophoricity refers to the grammaticalised encoding of personal knowledge or involvement of a conscious self in a represented event or situation. Most typically a marker that is egophoric is found with first person subjects in declarative sentences and with second person subjects in interrogative sentences. This person sensitivity reflects the fact that speakers generally know most about their own affairs while in questions this epistemic authority typically shifts to the addressee. First described for Tibeto-Burman languages egophoric-like patterns have now been documented in a number of other regions around the world including languages of Western China the Andean region of South America the Caucasus Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. This book is a first attempt to place detailed descriptions of this understudied grammatical category side by side and to add to the cross-linguistic picture of how ideas of self and other are encoded and projected in language. The diverse but conceptually related egophoric phenomena described in its chapters provide fascinating case studies for how structural patterns in morphosyntax are forged under intersubjective interactional pressures as we link elements of our speech to our speech situation. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Category change broadly defined as the shift from one word class to another is often studied as part of other changes such as grammaticalization or lexicalization but not in its own right. This volume offers a survey of different types of category change and their properties e.g. abrupt versus gradual changes morphological versus syntactic changes or context-independent versus context-sensitive changes. The purpose of this collection of papers is to explore the concepts of linguistic category and category change from the perspective of Construction Grammar. Using data from a variety of languages the authors address a number of themes that are central to current theorizing about category change such as the question of whether or not categories should be considered discrete entities how new categories arise or whether category change can be considered as the emergence of a new construction i.e. a new form-meaning pairing. The novel approach advanced in this volume will be of interest to historical linguists as well as to general linguists working on the nature of linguistic categories.

The contributions to this volume honor Joan Bybee’s 2005 LSA Presidential address “Grammar is Usage and Usage is Grammar” as a cumulative articulation of Professor Bybee's long and influential career in linguistics. The volume begins with a functional examination of child language acquisition of ergative languages. The next three contributions successively investigate the grammaticalization of Greek postural verbs Spanish third person pronouns and American Sign Language topicalization constructions. The two following papers report on usage-based phonological studies of Spanish /s/ and /d/ respectively. The book concludes with four papers that address usage-based effects concerning the grammatical status of ain’t in African American English Spanish verbs of “becoming” and English lexis and prefabs. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience of functional and cognitive linguistic researchers.

This book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified ranging from languages rich in compounds such as German Saami Estonian and Finnish to languages poor in compounds such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech like Russian Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.

The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles and in Romance.

This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities constraints of cognitive processing together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements explored from different approaches both formal and functional and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based sociolinguistic and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.

Over the last three decades Brazilian Portuguese bare nominals have turned into a hot topic in the cross-linguistic study of nominal syntax and semantics. This contribution is the first comprehensive book-length treatment of the issue covering both the long-standing discussion about the adequate analysis of these forms as well as the establishment of a solid empirical basis for future research. The book goes further than previous accounts in also taking into consideration the phonetic-phonological dimension showing the advantages of a more comprehensive account. The empirical section outlines an innovative approach in which different methods and data types are combined and focuses on the underresearched definite / specific / referential uses and interpretations of bare singulars. The book also addresses the traditional topics in the study of bare nominals – genericity the mass/count distinction NP-internal plural agreement the NP/DP distinction and syntax-semantics-phonology interface questions – in the light of the new findings.

Focusing on objects this book aims at contributing to the on-going inquiry into modelling structures with missing arguments. In addition to offering detailed discussion and analyses of a unique combination of three very different systems (English Polish and Hungarian) a larger goal here is to provide a framework for deriving cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the domain of object drop. Variation of this type is hypothesised to follow first and foremost from the association of heads in the extended nominal projection with phonemic features and from the system of interpretation of nominal expressions in a language. The book will be of interest to both theoretically- and descriptively-oriented researchers since even though its focus is theoretical a detailed discussion of the empirical facts including some novel findings drawn from corpus studies and grammaticality judgements is also offered.

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.

Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context its developmental context its social context and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition structure change and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics grammaticalization language variation and change discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.

The present volume is centered on the notional domain of additivity. Many linguistic phenomena are based on additivity (i.e. are incremental) and additive relations are a mechanism that underlies a wide array of text types. Specifically the present volume is centered on the class of function words which have been labeled among many others Additive Focusing Modifiers (FMs). The chapters gathered in this volume deal with the syntactic prosodic and pragmatic properties of Additive FMs and new lines of research on these items are pursued including (i) the historical development of Additive FMs and the use of these forms in older stages of the European languages; (ii) the pragmatic and sociolinguistic properties of Additive FMs in particular of the functions they play in discourse and their distribution in different language varieties; (iii) the processing of Additive FMs by adults in particular by relying on reading experiments involving eye tracking and self-paced reading; (iv) the use of Additive FMs in language contact situations and (v) the acquisition of Additive FMs by different learner groups.

In middle-class Anglo-speaking circles imperatives are considered impolite forms that command another to do something; etiquette manuals recommend avoiding them. The papers in this collection de-construct such lay beliefs. Through the empirical examination of everyday and institutional interaction across a range of languages they show that imperatives are routinely used for constructing turns that further sociality in interactional situations. Moreover they show that for understanding the use of an imperatively formatted turn its specific design (whether it contains e.g. an overt subject object modal particles or diminutives) and its sequential and temporal positioning in verbal and embodied activities are crucial. The fact that the same type of imperative turn is appropriate under the same circumstances across linguistically diverse cultures suggests that there are common aspects of imperative turn design and common pragmatic dimensions of situations warranting their use. The volume provides new insights into the resources and processes involved when social actors try to get another to do something.

This book focuses on important methodological and theoretical issues in Chinese and Japanese L1 and L2 acquisition. All contributions discuss experiments using the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) on three syntactic and semantic domains binding scope interaction and wh- and logical expressions. The issues in these grammatical domains are particularly well suited for TVJT studies as the task allows for the testing of particular interpretations among alternative representations and reveals children’s and adults’ understandings of these constructions. The book is a tribute to Stephen Crain’s contribution to the field of Chinese and Japanese language acquisition within the framework of Generative Grammar. It is a state-of-the-art collection that offers a picture of cutting-edge research on children’s and adult’s Chinese and Japanese acquisition. Readers will find the book a rich source of ideas and the starting point of new projects.

The proposed framework of concept linking combines insights of construction grammar with those of traditional functional descriptions to explain particularly challenging but often neglected areas of English grammar such as negation modality adverbials and non-finite constructions. To reach this goal the idea of a unified network of constructions is replaced by the triad of verb-mediated constructions attribution and scope-based perspectivizing each of them understood as a syntactically effective concept-linking mechanism in its own right but involved in interfaces with the other mechanisms.

In addition concept linking supplies a novel approach to early child language. It casts fresh light on widely accepted descriptions of early two-word utterances and verb islands in usage-based models of language acquisition and encourages a new view of children’s ‘mistakes’.

Intended readership: Constructionist and cognitive linguists; linguists and psychologists interested in language acquisition; teachers and students of English grammar and grammar in general.

This book approaches the concept of boundary central in linguistic theory and the related notion of phase from the perspective of the interaction between syntax and its interfaces. A primary notion is that phases are the appropriate domains to explain most interface linguistic phenomena and that the study of (narrow) interfaces helps to understand conditions on the internal structure of the Language Faculty. The first part of this volume is dedicated to introducing the notion of boundary cycle and phase and also the current debates regarding internal interfaces in particular the syntax-phonology syntax-semantics syntax-discourse syntax-morphology and syntax-lexicon interfaces in order to show how the notion of boundary/phase is related to (or even determines) most of their characteristics. The four sections of the second part deal with (morpho)phonology/ syntax and the role or boundaries/phases; the syntax-discourse and syntax-semantics interface; and the lexicon-syntax interface while the notion of boundary/phase cross-cuts the main topics addressed.

This book investigates the role that ambiguous evidence can play in the acquisition of syntax. To illustrate this the book introduces a probabilistic learning model for syntactic parameters that learns a grammar of best fit to the learner’s evidence. The model is then applied to a range of cross-linguistic case studies – in Swiss German Korean and English – involving child errors grammatical variability and implicit negative evidence. Building on earlier work on language modeling this book is unique for its focus on ambiguous evidence and its careful attention to the effects of parameters interacting with each other. This allows for a novel and principled account of several acquisition puzzles. With its inter-disciplinary approach this book will be of broad interest to syntacticians language acquisitionists and cognitive scientists of language.

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.

Imperatives and directive strategies have intrigued both formalists and functionalists. They continue to search for the answers to questions like “what are the semantics of the imperative?” “how is it used (in the world’s languages)?” and “which factors determine the choice between imperatives and other directive strategies?”. This volume takes a broadly functional-typological perspective and contributes to the literature in several respects. It presents new data from a variety of languages some of which have not been studied in depth before. It exemplifies the benefits of traditional methodologies as well as the potential of more innovative ones. In addition the volume sheds new light on the imperative as a typological notion its meaning and uses and its interaction with other grammatical categories. It also offers new insights into the relation between different directive strategies within and across languages and into the (dis)similarities between equivalent directive strategies in a language family.

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 book addresses the long discussed issue of Japanese interactive markers (traditionally called sentence-final particles) in a new light and provides the comprehensive linguistic documentation of the interactional functions of seven interactive markers: ne na yo sa wa zo and ze. By adopting three key notions ‘involvement’ ‘formality’ and ‘gender’ the study not only reveals the functions and pragmatic effects of each marker but also sheds light on some fundamental issues of the nature of spoken discourse in general including how speakers collaborate with each other to create and sustain their conversations and how linguistic functions of verbal forms interface with sociocultural norms. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields such as Japanese linguistics pragmatics sociolinguistics discourse analysis and applied linguistics and to teachers and learners of Japanese and of a second/foreign language.

The chapters in this volume take different approaches to the exploration of language acquisition processes in various populations (monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition L2 acquisition) and address issues in syntax morphology pragmatics language processing and interface phenomena. This volume is a tribute to Juana M. Liceras’ fundamental and enduring contribution to the field of Spanish Second Language Acquisition (SLA). All the chapters in the volume are linked to or inspired by Juana’s extensive body of work and like Juana’s research they all stand at the crossroads of formal and experimental linguistics. Together the studies presented in this volume are a reflection of Juana’s impact both as a mentor and as a collaborative researcher while at the same time showcasing current trends and new directions in the field of generative SLA.

The contributions of this book deal with the issue of language variation. They all share the assumption that within the language faculty the variation space is hierarchically constrained and that minimal changes in the set of property values defining each language give rise to diverse outputs within the same system. Nevertheless the triggers for language variation can be different and located at various levels of the language faculty. The novelty of the volume lies in exploring different loci of language variation by including wide-ranging empirical perspectives that cover different levels of analysis (syntax phonology and prosody) and deal with different kinds of data mostly from Romance and Germanic languages from dialects idiolects language acquisition language attrition and creolization analyzed from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

The volume is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to synchronic variation in phonology and syntax; the second part deals with diachronic variation and language change and the third part investigates the role of contact attrition and acquisition in giving rise to language change and language variation in bilingual settings.

This volume is a useful tool for linguistics of diverse theoretical persuasions working on theoretical and comparative linguistics and to anyone interested in language variation language change dialectology language acquisition and typology.

This book is the first comprehensive corpus study of element order in Old English and Old High German which brings to light numerous differences between these two closely related languages. The study’s innovative approach relies on translated texts which allows the authors to tackle the problem of the apparent incomparability of OE and OHG textual records and to identify the areas of OE and OHG syntax potentially influenced by the Latin source texts. This is especially important from the point of view of OE research where Latin is rarely considered to be a significant variable. The book’s profile and content is of direct interest to historical linguists working on OE and/or OHG (and Old Germanic languages in general) but it can also greatly benefit several other groups of researchers: scholars applying corpus methods to the study of dead languages historical linguists generally linguists researching element order as well as specialists in translation studies.

This unique volume comprises a monograph and a set of articles by renowned typologist Emma Geniušienė which all focus on the topic of morphologically passive constructions in Lithuanian. It is the first translation into English of the author’s original work from the 1970s. It offers a rich treasury of data a detailed structural description of all morphologically passive constructions and an examination of the functions which these constructions have in the discourse. The addition of modern interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses to hundreds of linguistic examples and expert editorial work have turned the hard-to-access material into a timeless resource available for the first time to a broad international readership. The volume will be of value to descriptive linguists typologists morphologists and formal syntacticians as well as to scholars of information structure and functional text analysis. It is an exciting addition to the linguistic literature and a fitting tribute to the author.

The phenomenon of insubordination can be defined diachronically as the recruitment of main clause structures from subordinate structures or synchronically as the independent use of constructions exhibiting characteristics of subordinate clauses. Long marginalised as uncomfortable exceptions insubordinated clause phenomena turn out to be surprisingly widespread and provide a vital empirical testing ground for various central theoretical issues in current linguistics – the interplay of langue and parole the emergence of structure the question of where productive syntactic rules give way to constructions the role of prosody in language change and the question of how far grammars are produced by isolated speakers as opposed to being collaboratively constructed in dialogue. This volume – the first book-length treatment on the topic – assembles studies of languages on all continents by scholars who bring a range of approaches to bear on the topic from historical linguistics to corpus studies to typology to conversational analysis.

How hearers arrive at intended meaning which elements encode processing instructions in certain languages how procedural meaning and prosody interact how diverse types of utterances are interpreted how epistemic vigilance mechanisms work which linguistic elements assist those mechanisms how a critical attitude to information and informers develops when a second language is learnt or why some perlocutionary effects originate are some of the varied issues that have intrigued pragmatists and relevance theorists in particular and continue to fuel research. In this collection readers will discover new proposals based on the cognitive framework put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson three decades ago. Their gripping insightful and stimulating discussions combined in some cases with meticulous and in-depth analyses show the directions relevance theory has recently followed. Moreover this collection also unveils fruitful and promising interactions with areas like morphology prosody language typology interlanguage pragmatics machine translation or rhetoric and argumentation and avenues for future research.

This volume brings together a number of articles on the form and function of extra-clausal constituents a group of linguistic elements which have puzzled linguists by defying analysis in terms of ordinary sentence grammar. Given their high frequency and communicative importance these elements can however no longer be dismissed as a marginal linguistic phenomenon. In recent years this awareness has resulted not only in more systematic treatments of extra-clausal constituents but has also highlighted the need to account for them in grammatical theory. Based on (mainly English) corpus data the volume investigates the discourse-pragmatic semantic syntactic and phonological features of a range of extra-clausal constituents including discourse markers free adjuncts left dislocands insubordinate clauses and various kinds of adverbials. The individual chapters adopt a number of different perspectives investigating the diachronic development of extra-clausal constituents their multi-functionality and their use in bilingual settings also addressing the question of how they can be incorporated into existing models of grammar.

This book deals with how to ask questions in the languages of China. The syntactic morphological and lexical forms for distinguishing interrogatives take centre stage; intonation is also dealt with but more peripherally than question particles disjunctive and negative constructions and word order. 140 languages spoken in China are covered coming from four major families: Sino-Tibetan Altaic Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic accompanied by a few mixed languages. The approach is areal-typological i.e. these focal languages are compared to the languages of the world as represented in typological samples and within China areal patterns of the structural variables are examined.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book will be an indispensable reference for future work on interrogatives in a typological context and for areal studies of the language situation in China and more generally East Asia.<br/> <br/>

This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories but also to usage-based methodologies. Accordingly the chapters in this volume comprise a range of studies not based on synchronic contemporary English but include Dutch old English Italian and Spanish. This volume also features studies from a wider range of statistical sophistication: some chapters use more traditional frequency- and attestation-based approaches some chapters use inferential statistical techniques to explore lexically specific preferences and patterns in constructional slots and some chapters use multifactorial hypothesis-testing techniques or multivariate exploratory tools to discover patterns in corpus data that a mere eye-balling or simple statistical tools would not uncover.

The leitmotif but not exclusive theme of the present volume is Ronald Langacker’s (1987) thesis that “lexicon morphology and syntax form a continuum of symbolic units serving to structure conceptual content for expressive purposes”. The concept of the lexicogrammar continuum contrasts especially with mainstream generative grammar but also although less radically with other cognitive linguistic paradigms such as Construction Grammar. The contributors to this volume explore the lexicogrammar continuum and other issues of the architecture of language mostly from a cognitive linguistic perspective. A wide range of theoretical and methodological themes is covered such as the integration of discourse and interactional phenomena into Cognitive Grammar the status of introspective data figurative language and thought (i.e. metaphor and metonymy) morphosyntactic constructions and phonological structure. Besides English (including Old English) languages analyzed in some detail include Polish Czech Dutch Estonian Georgian German Danish and Portuguese.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in cognitive linguistics especially Cognitive Grammar Construction Grammar metaphor and metonymy and corpus linguistics.<br/>

Discourse Reflexivity in Linear Unit Grammar: The case of IMDb message boards represents a significant landmark. Not only is it the first in-depth corpus-based study to be based on Linear Unit Grammar it is also the first study to present a unified model of both Linear Unit Grammar and Linear Unit Discourse Analysis. To illustrate this model the book focuses on the role of discourse reflexivity in the linear structure of online message board discourse from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) webpage. It is shown that discourse reflexivity plays a central role in the linear structure and antagonism characteristic of this type of discourse. This book will particularly appeal to those who have an interest in carrying forward the innovations in the description of grammar lexis and discourse proposed by John Sinclair in his lifetime as well as to those with a specific interest in discourse reflexivity and computer-mediated communication.

This book deals with sentential proforms and their relationship to their associated clauses. Sentential proforms are highly interesting from the point of view of grammatical theory since their occurrence is determined not only by syntax but also by prosody and semantics. The present volume contributes to a better understanding of the interfaces between these different levels. By providing syntactic prosodic semantic psycholinguistic and corpus-based support this book underpins the claim that there exist different sentential proform types in German and Dutch that these proform types correlate with different verb classes and that their associated related clauses are located in different syntactic positions. The present volume also looks at a Hungarian sentential proform construction which is similar to the German(ic) structure but at the same time is different in its licensing conditions.

This volume addresses the relation between finiteness and nominalization which is far more complex than the simple opposition finite-nonfinite. The contributions analyze finiteness cross-linguistically from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives focusing on a number of topics that has not been thoroughly explored in the literature. First the correlation between finiteness and nominalization is also affected by a third factor information structure. Second there is a correlation between the continuum of finiteness and the scale from main/independent clauses to dependent clauses. Given that of nominalized constructions occur not only in dependent clauses but also in independent clauses it is possible to grade according to degree of nominalization which can then be related to the scale of finiteness. Finally each of these scales can also be seen as a product the diachronic process of re-finitization and of finitization.

The field of morphology is particularly heterogeneous. Investigators differ on key points at every level of theory. These divisions are not minor issues about technical implementation but rather are foundational issues that mold the underlying anatomy of any theory. The field has developed very rapidly both theoretically and methodologically giving rise to many competing theories and varied hypotheses. Many drastically different and often contradictory models and foundational hypotheses have been proposed. Theories diverge with respect to everything from foundational architectural assumptions to the specific combinatorial mechanisms used to derive complex words. Today these distinct models of word-formation largely exist in parallel mostly without proponents confronting or discussing these differences in any major forum. After forty years of fast-paced growth in the field morphologists are in need of a moment to take a breath and survey the drastically different points of view within the field. This volume provides such a moment.

Syntactic movement is a pervasive phenomenon in natural language and as such has played a key role in syntactic theorizing. Nonetheless an understanding of the mechanism that allows a constituent to appear to the right of its base-generated position has remained elusive. This groundbreaking research monograph aims to address this gap in our knowledge by expanding the inventory of languages and data sets traditionally considered in the literature. Specifically Ortega-Santos analyzes the interplay between focus word order and ellipsis in Spanish. A major finding that emerges from the analysis is that the tension between linearization requirements and rightward movement is diminished by ellipsis. Current debates on the syntax of the VOS order and preverbal subjects in Null-Subject Languages also figure prominently in the discussion as novel empirical evidence for the existence of null expletives is provided: a non-trivial issue for our understanding of the Extended Projection Principle and subjecthood across languages.

This volume brings together a collection of articles exploring tense and aspect phenomena in a variety of non-related languages: Indo-European (Albanian Bulgarian Armenian English Norwegian Hindi) Hamito-Semitic (Berber Zenaga Berber Arabic varieties Neo-Aramaic) African (Wolof Langi) Asian (Badaga Korean Mongolian languages – Khalkha Buriat Kalmuck – Thaï Tibetic languages) Amerindian (Yucatec Maya Sikuani) Greenlandic (Eskimo) and Oceanian (Nêlêmwa). Each article is grounded in solid empirical knowledge. It offers an in-depth study of aspectual and temporal devices as manifested in many diverse and complex ways from a cross-linguistic perspective and seeks to contribute to our understanding of the domain under consideration and more broadly to linguistic typology and theoretical linguistics especially the enunciative approach. The book gives readers access to a collection of data and is of particular interest to scholars working on aspectuality and temporality on pragmatics on areal linguistics and on typology.

<i>Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields</i> is a volume of empirical research papers incorporating recent theoretical methodological and interdisciplinary advances in the field of intonation as they relate to the Ibero-Romance languages. The volume brings together leading experts in Catalan Portuguese and Spanish as well as in the intonation of Spanish in contact situations. The common thread is that each paper examines a specific topic related to the intonation of at least one Ibero-Romance language framing the analysis in an experimental setting. The novel findings of each chapter hinge on critical connections that are made between the study of intonation and its related fields of linguistic inquiry including syntax pragmatics sociophonetics language acquisition and special populations. In this sense the volume expands the traditional scope of Ibero-Romance intonation including in it work on signed languages (LSC) individuals with autism spectrum disorder and individuals with Williams Syndrome. This volume establishes the precedent for researchers and advanced students who wish to explore the complexities of Ibero-Romance intonation. It also serves as a showcase of the most up-to-date methodologies in intonational research.

Though “pejoration” is an important notion for linguistic analysis and theory there is still a lack of theoretical understanding and sound descriptive analysis. In this timely collection the phenomenon of pejoration is studied from a number of angles. It contains studies from phonology morphology syntax semantics and pragmatics and deals with diverse languages and their variants. The collection will appeal to all those linguists with a genuine interest in locating pejoration at the grammar-pragmatics interface.

This volume a case study on the grammar of third person references in two genres of spoken Ecuadorian Spanish examines from a discourse-analytic perspective how genre affects linguistic patterns and how researchers can look for and interpret genre effects. This marks a timely contribution to corpus linguistics as many linguists are choosing to work with empirical data. Corpus based approaches have many advantages and are useful in the comparison of different languages as well as varieties of the same language but what is often overlooked in such comparisons is the genre of language under examination. As this case study shows genre is an important factor in interpreting patterns and distributions of forms.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book also contributes toward theories of anaphora referentiality and Preferred Argument Structure. It is relevant for scholars who work with referentiality genre differences third person references and interactional linguistics as well as those interested in Spanish morphosyntax.

Until recently little attention has been paid within syntax to components of discourse meaning that go beyond information structure and fall into the domain of non-at-issue meaning operating at the level of illocutionary force. To approach this domain many of the contributions of this volume deal with the syntax of discourse particles. However the issue of how to account for discourse particles within a more explicit map of the illocutionary domain is a good starting point for considering further phenomena related to the syntax of speech acts. By focusing on speech-act related particles and/or meaning domains this volume makes a new contribution to the field as existing collections either do not offer a comparatively narrow focus on particles or are not limited to syntax-oriented approaches. The primary audience of this volume are researchers and graduate students interested in state-of-the-art approaches to the syntax-discourse interface within the cartographic approach to syntax.

The Going Romance conferences are a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. This volume assembles a selection of the papers that were presented at the 27th edition of Going Romance which was organized by the University of Amsterdam in November 2013. The papers present the theoretical analysis of subjects that cover three main themes of interest within current Romance linguistics: word order the verb and the DP. The range of languages discussed is broad and includes not only standard continental but also non-continental Romance languages and not only standard languages but also dialectal variation. Furthermore Romance is analyzed not only from a synchronic perspective (including acquisition) but also from a diachronic point of view.

In much writing on language change there is a tacit assumption that change operates on a single source construction to produce an innovative target construction. This volume challenges this assumption by showing that many changes involve interactions between multiple source constructions. In fact the involvement of multiple source constructions is unexceptional. The phenomenon is observed in phonology morphology syntax and semantics. It is seen in language-internal change as well as in contact-induced change. Interactions may obtain between independent but historically related constructions as well as between historically unrelated constructions. The contributions to this volume on the one hand present specific case studies on changes involving multiple source constructions in various domains of grammar and in a variety of languages. On the other hand they discuss how such changes can be accommodated in current theoretical models of language.

Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 37:3 (2013).

This volume offers a variety of perspectives on two of the main topics situated at the crossroads between lexical semantics and syntax namely: (a) aspect and its correspondence with syntactic structure; and (b) the delimitation of syntactic structures from verb classes. Almost from Aristotle’s Metaphysics it has been assumed that verbs invoke a mental image about the way in which eventualities are distributed over time. When it comes to determining time schemata the lexical class to which the verb belongs represents a first step. Speaking about verb classes does not exclusively mean a semantic similarity; rather verb classes exhibit a bundle of common features and thus show a set of recursive behavior patterns. Beyond the meaning of the verb both semantic and syntactic factors together with pragmatic ones play a decisive role when establishing the aspectual classification of an eventuality. The contributions collected in this book approach the aforementioned lines either analyzing the relationships between aspect and syntactic structure or traversing the path from a verb class to its syntactic manifestation. Some of them stress diachronic filiations while others include processes of word formation in the debate; some of them focus on certain classes such as movement verbs or psychological verbs while others examine specific constructions. A number of chapters also discuss relevant theoretical issues concerning the analysis of aspect. In sum the kaleidoscopic view provided by this book allows the reader to delve deeper into one of the most controversial – as well as exciting – topics within current linguistics.