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This volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP’s recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental if not universal category whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position) as well as their pragmatic functions in an extensive range of genres such as advertising TV series charity appeals mother/child interaction or computer-mediated communication. Moreover one section is devoted to the pragmatics of antecedentless pronouns and so-called ‘impersonal’ personal forms. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and students interested in the pragmatics of functional words.

This is the first book entirely and exclusively devoted to the grammar of the two copular verbs ser and estar certainly one of the most intriguing features of Spanish grammar. Although the topic has long attracted the interest of scholars it had never given rise to a collection of papers that covers both theoretical issues in syntax and semantics and topics in the acquisition domain. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the central research questions concerning the ser / estar alternation: the syntactic or semantic nature of the distinction its link with aspect and with the Individual-Level / Stage-Level distinction and its connection with interface phenomena. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Hispanic linguistics but can be equally attractive for researchers working on Romance linguistics theoretical linguistics (syntax semantics pragmatics) acquisition theory and historical linguistics.

Head Movement in Syntax argues that verb movement is a narrow syntactic phenomenon that can affect locality constraints. The altered locality domains are detectable from the way certain phrasal elements such as a phrase containing a Wh are forced to undergo movement. The basic idea explored in the book dates back to Chomsky (1986) where the movement of a verb is proposed to be able to affect and alter a barrier. This idea is translated into contemporary minimalist apparatus to capture locality conditions with Wh movement in Malayalam a Dravidian language spoken in Southern India providing the necessary data. The book also points out that analysing Wh movement in Malayalam as a sub-case of Focus movement is untenable and offers a fresh perspective on Wh-in-situ versus Wh-movement. In addition the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the pronominal system in Malayalam a language that violates the canonical binding conditions.

The term ‘syntactocentrism’ has been used to criticize the claim that syntax as regarded in generative linguistics plays the central role in modeling the mental architecture of the human language faculty. This research monograph explores the conjecture that many of the objections to the generative perspective as they are formulated in alternative frameworks such as construction grammar disappear once the consequences of recent minimalist theory are taken seriously. To show this the book applies recent concepts of minimalist grammar to phenomena like the syntactic flexibility of idioms the pragmatics of left-periphery-movement or opacity effects involved in subextraction patterns. The book makes a new contribution to the field as existing monographs on architectural matters in minimalism neither discuss alternative frameworks at length nor place a premium on pragmatic explanations for syntactic facts. The primary audience of this book are researchers and graduate students interested in a state-of-the-art discussion of grammatical architecture.

This volume presents an analysis of Russian case from a sign-oriented perspective. The study was inspired by William Diver’s analysis of Latin case and follows the spirit of the Columbia School of linguistics. The fundamental premise that underlies this volume is that language is a communicative tool shaped by human behavior.In this study case is viewed as a semantic entity. Each case is assigned an invariant meaning within a larger semantic system which is validated through numerous examples from spoken language and literary texts to illustrate that the distribution of cases is semantically motivated and defined by communicative principles that can be associated with human behavior.

This volume contains a selection of nineteen peer-reviewed papers from the 42nd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at Southern Utah University in Cedar City Utah in 2012. The contributions cover a wide range of current topics in the areas of phonetics phonology syntax interfaces and diachronic Romance linguistics with an emphasis on experimental approaches in connection to L1 and L2 acquisition code-switching and psycholinguistics. Among the languages and varieties of Romance analyzed are French (Old Modern and Norman) Portuguese (Brazilian and Classical) and Spanish (Modern and Judeo-Spanish) but also Italo-Romance Latin and Romanian. In a comparative tradition the discussions extend to languages outside Romance such as dialects of Arabic Germanic and Palenquero creole. This collection of papers at the forefront of research contributes to our understanding of Romance languages and to the influence of Romance linguistics and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and general linguistics.

Most studies on the acquisition of verbal inflection have examined languages with a single verb suffix. This book offers a study on the acquisition of verb inflections in Q’anjob’al Maya. Q’anjob’al has separate inflections for aspect subject and object agreement and status suffixes. The subject and object inflections display a split ergative pattern. The subjects of intransitive verbs with aspect markers take absolutive markers whereas the subjects of aspectless intransitive verbs take ergative markers. The acquisition of three types of clauses is explored in detail (imperatives indicatives and aspectless complements). The data come from longitudinal spontaneous speech of three monolingual Q’anjob’al children aged 1;8–3;5. This book contributes unique data to the debate on the acquisition of finite and non-finite verbs as well as adding to our understanding of the acquisition of split ergative patterns. The book is of interest to researchers and students working on linguistics and language acquisition.

Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for how do constructions fall into disuse and how do constructions change in general formally and/or semantically and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.

This book is about the functional categories of three Caribbean creoles: Saramaccan Haitian Creole and Papiamentu with two specific goals. The first one is to evaluate the respective contribution of the source languages to the functional categories of these three creoles. The second is to evaluate the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the functional categories across these creoles. This study is cast within the relabeling-based account of creole genesis. Several lexical items discussed in this book may fulfill more than one grammatical function thus raising the issue of multifuctionality. No such in-depth comparative work of these three creoles with their source languages and of the three creoles among themselves is available elsewhere in the literature. This book is addressed to linguists (including Master and PhD students) interested in syntactic categories and more specifically in functional categories to creolists and to researchers interested in language contact.

The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This volume deals with negation in the Uralic language family in a typological perspective. As in no other major language family before a comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for the chapters documenting negation in 17 languages. Most of them are endangered. The chapters highlight negative auxiliary verbs—the special Uralic feature—and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses as well as negative replies negative indefinites abessives/caritives/privatives scope polarity and emphatic negation. Selected aspects of negation such as negative indefinites negation of non-verbal predicates and information structure are discussed in more detail in five further chapters. The book brings new typologically informed perspectives on negation in the Uralic family and it provides valuable data and insights for any linguist working on negation.

This volume discusses topics of historical syntax from different theoretical perspectives ranging from Indo-European studies to generative grammar functionalism and typology. It examines mechanisms of syntactic change such as reanalysis analogy grammaticalization independent drift and language contact as well as procedures of syntactic reconstruction. More than one factor is considered to explain a syntactic phenomenon since it is maintained that an accurate account of multiple causations of both structural and social nature is to be preferred to considerations of economy. Special attention is given to the relationship between principles of syntactic theory and a search for data reliability through the methods of corpus linguistics. Data are drawn from a variety of languages including Hittite Vedic Ancient Greek Latin Romance Germanic Baltic Slavic Austroasiatic Gulf of Guinea creoles. The book may be therefore of interest for specialists of these languages in addition to scholars and advanced students of syntax and historical linguistics.

The argument structure of verbs defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used. On the basis of several case studies combining quantitative corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments it is shown how a usage-based approach sheds new light on a number of issues in argument realization and offers frequency-based explanations for its organizing principles at three levels of generality: verbs constructions and argument structure alternations.

Linking grammatical analyses with ideas about a shareable reality this book investigates some fascinating ways in which nominal reference is exploited to meet interpersonal and rhetorical goals. It focuses on the use of demonstrative and possessive determiners in Polish discourse and proposes that the phenomenon of deixis be reexamined in the light of linguistic variation. The book illustrates a growing concern with the application of cognitive grammar to the study of situated language use and its social outcomes. What emerges is a new understanding of the role of deictic elements as tools for establishing intersubjective coordination and expressing attitudes.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book is for anyone actively seeking to understand how linguistic systems reflect human socio-cognitive abilities and in what ways reality is mediated through language.

Complementizers offer a window into the architecture of the left-periphery and further our understanding of the demarcation of the boundaries between the C(omplementizer) and T(ense) domains. Using the articulated left-periphery as a laboratory and Spanish constructions featuring more than one complementizer as a point of departure the author delivers new insights into the syntactic positions and behavior of Spanish complementizer que along the left edge. These observations have far-reaching consequences to such fundamental linguistic concepts as the derivation of left dislocations ellipsis and locality of movement. Of great interest to syntax graduate students and researchers in general this volume provides a stepping stone to cracking the code on several current syntactic questions including the widely-contested position of preverbal subjects in null-subject languages like Spanish. In addition it offers the linguist a bountiful toolbox for the cross-linguistic investigation of a number of left-peripheral and clausal phenomena.

The volume is the first comprehensive typological study of the conceptualisation of temperature in languages as reflected in their systems of central temperature terms (hot cold to freeze etc.). The key issues addressed here include questions such as how languages categorize the temperature domain and what other uses the temperature expressions may have e.g. when metaphorically referring to emotions (‘warm words’). The volume contains studies of more than 50 genetically areally and typologically diverse languages and is unique in considering cross-linguistic patterns defined both by lexical and grammatical information. The detailed descriptions of the linguistic and extra-linguistic facts will serve as an important step in teasing apart the role of the different factors in how we speak about temperature – neurophysiology cognition environment social-cultural practices genetic relations among languages and linguistic contact. The book is a significant contribution to semantic typology and will be of interest for linguists psychologists anthropologists and philosophers.

This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of the argument realisation of the concepts of causative purpose permit let/allow and transfer in a broad cross-linguistic typologically diverse mix of languages with GIVE GET TAKE PUT and LET verbs. This volume stands as the first systematic exploration of these verbs and concepts as they occur in complex events and clauses. This book brings together scholars and researchers from a variety of functionally inspired theoretical backgrounds that have worked on these verbs within one language or from a cross-linguistic perspective. The objective is to understand the linguistic behaviour of the verbs and their inter-relationships within a contemporary cognitive-functional linguistic perspective. The languages represented include Irish German Slavic (West Slavic: Polish Czech Slovak and Sorbian and Western South Slavic: Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) Germanic Romance Gan Chinese Yichun dialect Māori Bohairic Coptic Shaowu Chinese Hebrew English Lithuanian Estonian the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Italian and Persian. Topics discussed include argument structure and the encoding of arguments under causation permission and transferverbs their lexical semantics and event structure.

This volume analyzes constructions with non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically drawing on insights from cognitive and discourse-functional linguistics. Prototypical subjects have often been characterized in terms of their semantic syntactic and discourse features such as animacy agentivity topicality referentiality definiteness and autonomy of existence of the subject referent. A non-canonical subject is one that lacks some of these features. This may be reflected in its meaning grammatical coding and/or discourse function. In discussing non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically the chapters in the volume address the following more general topics: What kinds of grammatical semantic and discourse criteria can be used to distinguish subjects from non-subjects? To what extent are subject criteria construction-specific? What kinds of constructions have non-canonical subjects? What are the semantic and discourse functions of constructions with non-canonical subjects? Are subjects which are grammatically non-canonical also atypical in terms of their discourse features?

In contrast with the central arguments of the event structure which have been extensively studied much less attention has been given to non-arguments. To bridge this gap the present volume focuses on prepositional and adverbial phrases expressing instrumental causal spatial temporal roles and the like i.e. semantic roles which have been typically associated with oblique case. The various contributions show that case in general and oblique case in particular is at the intersection between form and meaning: at issue are the nuclear versus non-nuclear status of these phrases and the semantic roles they express. The import of these phrases on the event structure is described in a functional-cognitive perspective for Cora Nyulnyul German Dutch French and Spanish.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The specific analyses of empirical phenomena presented in this volume as well as their implications for linguistic theory in general will be of interest for scholars interested in syntax semantics and pragmatics.<br/>This is the sixth and final volume of the Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages project.<br/>

This volume brings together articles by some major figures in various linguistics domains — phonology morphology and syntax — aiming at explaining the form of linguistic items by exploring the structures that underlie them.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book is divided in 5 parts: vowels syllables templates syntax-morphology interface and Afro-Asiatic languages. Specific topics are the internal structure of vowels and its relation to harmony; the logic of recurrent vocalic patterns; syllabic prominence; the interaction of syllabic and templatic structure and segmental realization; the innateness of templates and paradigms; the limits of phonology; and various morpho-syntactic implications on phonological form.<br/>The volume renders homage to Jean Lowenstamm’s work by underlining the importance of seeking structural and intermodular insight in the study of linguistic form.

The Language of Emotions: The case of Dalabon (Australia) is the first extensive study of the linguistic encoding of emotions in an Australian language and further in an endangered non-European language. Based on first-hand data collected using innovative methods the monograph describes and analyzes how Dalabon speakers express emotions (using interjections prosody evaluative morphology) and the words they use to describe and discuss emotions. Like many languages Dalabon makes broad use of body-part words in descriptions of emotions. The volume analyzes the figurative functions of these body-part words as well as their non-figurative functions. Correlations between linguistic features and cultural patterns are systematically questioned.

Beyond Australianists and linguists working on emotions the book will be of interest to anthropological linguists cognitive linguists or linguists working on discourse and communication for instance. It is accessible also to non-linguists with an interest in language in particular anthropologists and psychologists.

Endocentric Structuring of Projection-free Syntax puts forward a novel theory of syntax that rigidly adheres to the principle of Minimal Computation in which a number of traditional but extraneous stipulations such as referential indices and representational labels/projections are eliminated. It specifically articulates the overarching hypothesis that every syntactic object is composed by recursive phase-by-phase embedding of the endocentric structure {H α} where H is a head lexical item and α is another syntactic object (order irrelevant). The proposed mechanism achieves both theory-internal simplicity and broad empirical coverage at the same time advancing a radically reduced conception of endocentricty/headedness while deriving a number of empirically grounded constraints on human language.

Dialect syntax has proven to be an invaluable data source for theoretical syntax and theoretical syntax has provided useful analytical tools for uncovering fascinating grammatical properties of dialects. In the 1980s the assumption that there must be more than one structural position in the left periphery of the clause was confirmed (among others) by so-called "doubly filled COMPs" in Bavarian (e.g. the co-occurrence of a wh-phrase and a complementizer) and in the 1990s Northern Italian dialects provided the main empirical evidence for Rizzi’s extended theory of the left clausal periphery (the so-called "Split-C-hypothesis"). Among German dialects Bavarian played a prominent role from the beginning: in addition to doubly-filled COMPs we find phenomena such as complementizer agreement partial pro-drop pronominal clitics extractions from finite clauses introduced by complementizers negative concord parasitic gaps or double possessors all of which are fascinating and highly relevant for theoretical syntax. The contributions in this volume investigate and analyze a wide range of topics from Bavarian syntax with the focus on implications for general theoretical questions. This volume is of interest for any linguist interested in syntactic theory and dialect syntax.

The authors of this book share a common interest in the following topics: the importance of corpora compilation for the empirical study of human language; the importance of pragmatic categories such as emotion attitude illocution and information structure in linguistic theory; and a passionate belief in the central role of prosody for the analysis of speech. Four distinct sections (spoken corpora compilation; spoken corpora annotation; prosody; and syntax and information structure) give the book the structure in which the authors present innovative methodologies that focus on the compilation of third generation spoken corpora; multilevel spoken corpora annotation and its functions; and additionally a debate is initiated about the reference unit in the study of spoken language via information structure. The book is accompanied by a web site with a rich array of audio/video files. The web site can be found at the following address: DOI: 10.1075/scl.61.media

This volume gathers together for the first time contributions from the most relevant approaches in discourse segmentation developed in the last fifteen years in Romance languages. All these approaches share the assumption that discourses (either oral or written) can be fully divided into units and subunits: just like sentences are fully analyzed with the help of Syntax discourse can be fully analyzed with the help of Pragmatics. In this sense the approaches in this volume represent a step forward with respect to the issues in segmentation addressed by Conversational Analysis or by Discourse Analysis. The research questions addressed in this volume range from the distribution of foci to the coupling of gestures and discourse units the treatment of discourse markers or the interplay between intonation and discourse organization; all of great interest for General Linguistics as well as for Romance Languages.

This monograph is part of a growing research agenda in which semantics and pragmatics not only complement the grammar but replace it. The analysis is based on the assumption that human language is not primarily about form but about form-meaning pairings. This runs counter to the autonomous-syntax postulate underlying Landau (2013)’s Control in Generative Grammar that form must be hived off from meaning and studied separately. Duffley shows control to depend on meaning in combination with inferences based on the nature of the events expressed by the matrix and complement the matrix subject the semantic relation between matrix and complement and a number of other factors.

The conclusions call for a reconsideration of Ariel (2010)’s distinction in Defining Pragmatics between semantics and pragmatics on the basis of cancelability: many control readings are not cancelable although they are pragmatically inferred. It is proposed that the line be drawn rather between what is linguistically expressed and what is not linguistically expressed but still communicated.

The contributions in this volume are devoted to various aspects of the internal and external syntax of DPs in a wide variety of languages belonging to the Slavic Turkic Finno-Ugric Semitic and Germanic language families. In particular the papers address questions related to the internal and external cartography of various types of simplex and complex DPs: the position of DPs within larger structures agreement in phi-features and/or case between DPs and their predicates as well as between sub-elements of DPs and/or the assignment of case to DPs in specific configurations. The first four chapters of the book focus primarily on the external syntax of DPs and the remaining chapters deal with their internal syntax.

This volume offers the reader a unique possibility to obtain a concise introduction to dependency linguistics and to learn about the current state of the art in the field. It unites the revised and extended versions of the linguistically-oriented papers to the First International Conference on Dependency Linguistics held in Barcelona. The contributions range from the discussion of definitional challenges of dependency at different levels of the linguistic model its role beyond the classical grammatical description and its annotation in dependency treebanks to concrete analyses of various cross-linguistic phenomena of syntax in its interplay with phonetics morphology and semantics including phenomena for which classical simple phrase-structure based models have proven to be unsatisfactory. The volume will be thus of interest to both experts and newcomers to the field of dependency linguistics and its computational applications.

Since the 1980s theories and studies of grammaticalization have provided a major source of inspiration for the description and explanation of language change giving rise to many publications and conferences. This collection presents original empirical studies that explore various facets of grammaticalization research of both formal and functional orientation. The papers of this selection deal with general issues and specific empirical domains such as personal pronouns; indefinite pronouns; final particles; tense and aspect markers; comitative markers and coordinating conjunctions. The languages covered include English German dialects of Italian Japanese Polish and Walman (Papuan). The book will be of great interest to linguists working on language change in a wide variety of languages.

Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive interactional and typological perspectives and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use as an interactional resource available to language users in both written and spoken language. In addition the authors produce typologically relevant information about subordination in the different varieties and genres of the studied languages (English Estonian Finnish and French). These qualities make the book unique in the field of subordination studies.

The chapters in this book show how the different flavors of Construction Grammar provide illuminating insights into the syntax semantics pragmatics and discourse-functional properties of specific phenomena in Romance languages such as (Castilian) Spanish French Romanian and Latin from a synchronic as well as a diachronic viewpoint. The phenomena surveyed include the role of constructional meanings in novel verb-noun compounds in Spanish the relevance of lexicalization for a constructionist analysis of complex prepositions in French the complementariness of fragments patterns and constructions as theoretical and explanatory constructs in verb complementation in French Latin and Spanish non-constituent coordination phenomena (e.g. Right Node Raising Argument Cluster Coordination and Gapping) in Romanian and variable type framing in Spanish constructions of directed motion in the light of Leonard Talmy’s (2000) typological differences of lexicalization between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages.

Since the advent of syntactic cartography left sentence peripheries have begun to take center stage in linguistic research. Following the lead of Rizzi (1997) much work on left peripheries has been focused on Italian whereas other Romance languages have attracted somewhat less attention. This volume offers a well-balanced set of articles investigating left sentence peripheries in Spanish. Some articles explore the historical evolution of left dislocation and fronting operations while others seek to assess the extent – and the limits – of variation found between different geographical varieties and registers of the contemporary language. Moreover the volume comprises several case studies on the interfaces between syntax semantics and information structure and the implications of these for pragmatic interpretation and the organization of discourse. Cross-linguistic and typological perspectives are also provided in due course in order to position the analyses developed for Spanish within a larger research context.

This volume provides both a quantitative statistical and qualitative analysis of Late Northumbrian verbal morphosyntax as recorded in the Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It focuses in particular on the attestation of the subject type and adjacency constraints that characterise the so-called Northern Subject Rule concord system. The study presents new evidence which challenges the traditional Early Middle English dating attributed to the emergence of subject-type concord in the North of England and demonstrates that the syntactic configuration of the Northern Subject Rule was already a feature of Old English. By setting the Northumbrian developments within a broad framework of diachronic and diatopic variation in which manifestations of subject-type concord are explored in a wide range of varieties of English the author argues that a concord system based on subject type rather than person/number features is in fact a far less local and more universal tendency in English than previously believed.

Despite a recent spate of publications the valency of nouns is a topic that still remains in the shadow of the valency of verbs. This volume aims to contribute to the discussion of noun valency not only from a theoretical point of view as is often the case but also from an empirical one by presenting a series of studies focusing on particular questions and based on data-driven research. It explores properties of valency nouns in a variety of languages including Bulgarian Czech German Latin Romanian and Spanish. The specificity of this book consists in the diversity of the methodological approaches used. It includes empirical studies and it explores different theoretical frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) the Minimalist Program within Generative Grammar Functional Generative Description (FGD) and Construction Grammar. Special attention is paid to deverbal nouns but nouns expressing quantity and “compound-like” constructions involving relationship and interactivity are also dealt with.

This volume brings together papers that take usage-based approaches to study the nature of human language with a focus on the grammar of Japanese. The 12 chapters provide a rich array of data and methodologies with topics ranging from phonology modality and grammatical morphemes to sentential construction and discourse-level phenomena such as turn-taking speech register and language change. As a whole they demonstrate that usage-based linguistics illuminates various phenomena in the language that could not have been well accounted for by resorting solely to a formal theory such as the Universal-Grammar-based approach. Reflecting theoretical methodological and technological advancements made in and outside the field of cognitive-functional linguistics in recent years the papers contained in this volume both individually and collectively have significant implications towards linguistics in general and Japanese linguistics in particular as we as Japanese language teaching.

The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages focusing on English German Norwegian French Spanish and Portuguese and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

There is a growing awareness of the significance and value that modelling using information technology can bring to the functionally oriented linguistic enterprise. This encompasses a spectrum of areas as diverse as concept modelling language processing and grammar modelling conversational agents and the visualisation of complex linguistic information in a functional linguistic perspective. This edited volume offers a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of computational modelling of language and grammars within a functional perspective at both the theoretical and application levels. As a result this volume represents the first instance of contemporary functionally oriented computational treatments of a variety of important language and linguistic issues. This book presents current research on functionally oriented computational models of grammar language processing and linguistics concerned with a broadly functional computational linguistics that also contributes to our understanding of languages within a functional and cognitive linguistic computational research agenda.

This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics anthropological linguistics socio-historical studies areal linguistics and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide expressing all kinds of extendedness multiplicity salience size and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.

In this tribute to Knud Lambrecht a pioneer of Information Structure a diverse group of scholars examines the intersection of syntax discourse pragmatics and semantics. The six chapters in the first section of the volume consider issues of grammar with new theoretical and applied insights pertaining to grammatical constructions such as left dislocation unaccusatives null complements and passives. While the first half of the book presents studies involving a range of languages from Russian to Irish to Italian the second section is dedicated to papers focused on French. These five chapters feature the application of Construction Grammar and/or Information Structure frameworks to prosody and second language processing as well as to several distinctive spoken French constructions: clefts left dislocations and interrogatives. Collectively this book offers substantial reading for those interested in the juncture of structure and context notably a critical take on the important legacy of a preeminent linguist.

The problem of form and meaning in morphology has produced an impressive amount of scholarly work over the last hundred years. Nevertheless many issues continue to be in need of clarification. The present volume assembles 18 selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 9–12 February 2012) relating to this vast field of research. The introduction provides a detailed overview of the state of the art in the field. It is followed by three articles derived from the plenaries that are dedicated to fundamental issues such as the relationship between morphological meaning and concepts between word formation and meaning change as well as indirect coding. The section papers tackle a wide array of issues including affixal polysemy pathways of grammaticalization the processing of compounds mismatches between form and meaning synonymy avoidance or the semantics of specific patterns of noun incorporation compounding reduplication and mimetic verbs.

Sharing certain assumptions but differing in theory and practice both Columbia School linguistics (CS) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) have increasingly supported their analyses with quantitative evidence. Citation of individual sentences in isolation or in context has been supplemented with counts of linguistic forms in texts informant questionnaires and perception tests. The present volume continuing a dialogue between CS and CG offers six such qualitative-quantitative studies one on Afrikaans and five on Dutch. Topics include (a) demonstratives (b) pragmatic particles and imperatives (c) a puzzling “dismissive” idiom (d) progressive aspect and (e) indirect objects. While CS is better suited for analyzing relatively closed systems (e.g. tense pronouns) CG provides more insight into the vagaries of the amorphous lexicon. The author also offers personal remarks on “linguistics as a path” and discusses how in one case a wrong prediction reflects his dual role as both linguist and student of Dutch as a foreign language.

The chapters in this volume address current topics in the morphology syntax and semantics of nominalizations drawing on a range of typologically and geographically diverse languages. Nominalizations represent a long-standing puzzle to linguists: How is a noun such as destruction related to the verb destroy? The semantic parallel between the deverbal nominalization and its related verb suggests that there is a close connection between the two. This volume contributes to the ongoing debates on how to capture this connection and how to account for the apparent mixed categorical status of nominalizations. This volume is essential for students and researchers interested in the morphology-syntax and syntax-semantics interfaces.

The volume aims at a universal definition of modality or “illocutionary/speaker’s perspective force” that is strong enough to capture the entire range of different subtypes and varieties of modalities in different languages. The central idea is that modality is all-pervasive in language. This perspective on modality allows for the integration of covert modality as well as peripheral instances of modality in neglected domains such as the modality of insufficieny of attitudinality or neglected domains such as modality and illocutionary force in finite vs. nonfinite and factive vs. non-factive subordinated clauses. In most languages modality encompasses modal verbs both in their root and epistemic meanings at least where these languages have the principled distribution between root and epistemic modality in the first place (which is one fundamentally restricted in its strict qualitative and quantitative sense to the Germanic languages). In addition this volume discusses one other intricate and partially highly mysterious class of modality triggers: modal particles as they are sported in the Germanic languages (except for English). It is argued in the contributions and the languages discussed in this volume how modal verbs and adverbials next to modal particles are expressed how they are interlinked with contextual factors such as aspect definiteness person verbal factivity and assertivity as opposed to other attitudinal types. An essential concept used and argued for is perspectivization (a sub-concept of possible world semantics). Language groups covered in detail and compared are Slavic Germanic and South East Asian. The volume will interest researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics typology the semantics/pragmatics interface and language philosophy as it is part of a larger project developing an alternative approach to Universal Grammar that is compatible with functionalist approaches.

Chinese Grammar at Work adopts a cognitive-functional approach and uses a corpus-based methodology to examine how Chinese syntax emerges from natural discourse context and what the evolving grammar at work looks like. In this volume the author weaves together an array of fresh perspectives on clause structure constructions interactional linguistics cognitive science and complex dynamic systems to construct a grammar of spoken Chinese. The volume contains discussions of a large number of topics: contiguity relation the roles of repair strategies in the shaping of constituent structure non-canonical word order constructions pragmatics of referring expressions classifier constructions noun-modifying constructions verb complementation ethnotheory of the person and constructions specific to the language of emotion sequential sensitivity of linguistic materials meaning potential in interaction the nature of variability and stability in Chinese syntax from the perspective of complexity theory. The result is a volume that highlights the connections between language structure situated and embodied nature of cognition and language use and affords a true entrée to the exciting realm of Chinese grammar.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the study of gender and classifiers throughout the history of Western linguistics. Based on an analysis of over 200 genetically and typologically diverse languages the author shows that these seemingly arbitrary and redundant categories play in fact a central role in the lexicon grammar and the organization of discourse. As a result the often contradictory approaches to their functionality and semantic motivation encapsulate the evolving conceptions of such issues as cognitive and cultural correlates of linguistic structure the diverse functions of grammatical categories linguistic complexity agreement phenomena and the interplay between lexicon and grammar. The combination of a typological and historiographic perspective adopted here allows the reader to appreciate the detail and insight of earlier supposedly ‘prescientific’ accounts in light of the data now available and to examine contemporary discussions in the context of prevailing conceptions in the study of language at different points in its history since antiquity.

There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world’s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar. As a result this volume represents the first instance of cross-linguistic comparison of these important discourse and syntax-related phenomena. The articles cover a variety of typologically different languages including German Irish Spanish French Japanese Yaqui Tepehua (Totonacan) Persian and English and they offer new data on the role of constructions within the RRG theory in these languages. Further this volume contributes towards providing a comprehensive overview of grammatical constructions which are central to our understanding of how human languages function in a functional linguistics perspective. This scholarly work is grounded in a functionally oriented model that makes strong claims of descriptive and typological adequacy. The book will represent a valuable step forward in linguistics research as it applies the RRG theoretical framework to the analyses of constructions.

This volume is an important contribution to the diachrony of non-canonical subjects in a typological perspective. The questions addressed concern the internal mechanisms and triggers for various changes that non-canonical subjects undergo ranging from semantic motivations to purely structural explanations. The discussion encompasses the whole life-cycle of non-canonical subjects: from their emergence out of non-subject arguments to their expansion demise or canonicization focusing primarily on syntactic changes and changes in case-marking. The volume offers a number of different case studies comprising such languages as Italian Spanish Old Norse and Russian as well as languages less studied in this context such as Latin Classical Armenian Baltic languages and some East Caucasian languages. Typological generalizations in the form of recurrent developmental paths are offered on the basis of data presented in this volume and in the literature.

This volume presents results from a corpus-based investigation into the metaphorical production of foreign language learners comparing texts written by Norwegian (L2) learners of English with those written by British (L1) students. Three types of questions are addressed. The first has empirically measured answers: For example do L2 English writers produce more metaphors than L1 novice writers? How frequent are novel metaphors in an L2 as compared with an L1? The second type has more subjective answers: How creatively do L2 English learners employ metaphor? Are they even expected to be able to produce metaphor at all? The third type combines theoretical and methodological perspectives: How is metaphorical creativity identified? What is the potential role of metaphoric competence? Most importantly how are metaphors identified? To this end the newly-developed ‘Metaphor Identification Procedure’ is tested and critiqued. This book is intended for metaphor researchers corpus linguists applied linguists and language educators.

Discourse markers and modal particles are fuzzy linguistic categories that are difficult to describe. The contributions in this volume go beyond this statement. They discuss the intersection between modal particles and discourse markers and examine whether or not it is possible to draw a line between these two types of linguistic expressions. On the basis of new synchronic and diachronic data from speech and writing from European and Asian languages or cross-linguistically the authors answer the question whether discourse markers and modal particles are distinct categories whether they form a cline or whether modal particles are a subcategory of discourse markers. This common question shows up throughout all chapters which makes the book to a coherent whole. By disentangling the complexity of categorizing multifunctional expressions this book also sheds new light on the processes of meaning extension. The traditional discourse and modal functions are complemented by interactional and textual ones. A must read for functional linguists.

The study of person reference stands at the cross-roads of linguistics anthropology and psychology. As one aspect of an ethnography of communication this book deals with a single problem — how one knows who is being talked about in conversation — from a rich and varied ethnographic perspective. Through a combination of grammatical agreement and free pronouns Bininj Gunwok possesses a pronominal system that according to current theoretical accounts in linguistics should facilitate clear cut reference. However the descriptions of Bininj Gunwok conversation in this volume demonstrate that frequently a vast gulf lies between knowing that say an object is '3rd singular' and actually knowing who it refers to. Achieving reference to people in Bininj Gunwok can involve a delicate and refined set of calculations which are part of a deliberate and artful way of speaking. Speakers draw on a diverse set of grammatical and lexical devices all underpinned by shared knowledge about a diverse range of social relationships and cultural practices.

In this volume leading academics in Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis consider the notion of units for the study of language and interaction. Amongst the issues being explored are the role and relevance of traditionally accepted linguistic units for the analysis of naturally occurring talk and the identification of new units of conduct in interaction. While some chapters make suggestions on how existing linguistic units can be adapted to suit the study of conversation others present radically new perspectives on how language in interaction should be described conceptualised and researched. The chapters present empirical investigations into different languages (Danish English Japanese Mandarin Swedish) in a variety of settings (private and institutional) considering both linguistic and embodied resources for talk. In addressing the fundamental question of units the volume pushes at the boundaries of current debates and contributes original new insight into the nature of language in interaction.