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Combining the fields of phraseology and contrastive analysis this book describes how patterns defined as recurrent word-combinations with semantic unity behave cross-linguistically. As the contrastive approach adopted in the book relies on translations and a bidirectional corpus model the first part offers an in-depth discussion of contrastive linguistics with special emphasis on using translations as tertium comparationis and a parallel corpus as the main source of material. Central to the contrastive analysis is the use of corpus-linguistic methods in the identification of patterns while a deeper understanding of the phraseological nature of the patterns is closely related to the concept of extended units of meaning. The second part of the book presents five case studies using an easy-to-follow step-by-step method to illustrate the phraseological-contrastive approach at work. The studies show that patterns weave an intricate web of meanings across languages and demonstrate the potential of exploring patterns in contrast.

Le présent recueil rassemble douze études consacrées à des problèmes de syntaxe verbale et à certains faits fondamentaux de lexique et de grammaire. Au-delà de la diversité des approches l'originalité de l'ouvrage tient au fait que les contributions concernent plusieurs phénomènes peu ou pas décrits auparavant. On y trouvera des études générales portant sur la classification des constructions verbales et sur la notion de prédicat et d'autres approches plus particulières décrivant : des constructions causatives irrégulières ou transitives et causative attributive du verbe faire les constructions impersonnelles les attributs de devenir et l'objet indirect en de de changer. A la frontière de la construction et de l’interprétation verbales sont présentées deux études portant sur la diathèse : verbes pronominaux passifs en français et en italien. Enfin une étude contrastive entre français et japonais sur les déterminations temporelles dans les récits au passé.

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This collection assembles twelve studies devoted to problems of verbal syntax and certain fundamental facts of lexicon and grammar. Beyond the diversity of approaches the originality of the work is due to the fact that the contributions relate to several phenomena little or not described before. One will find general studies relating on the classification of verbal constructions and the concept of predicate and other approaches more particular describing : irregular causative constructions or transitive and causative complements of the verb faire complements of devenir impersonal constructions and complements and indirect object with de of the verb changer. On the border of verbal construction and interpretation two studies are presented relating to the diathesis : passive reflexive verbs in French and in Italian. And also a contrastive study between French and Japanese on the temporal determinations in past tense.

This book presents an experimental and theoretical investigation of the interplay between information structure word order alternations and prosody in Italian. Left/right dislocations focus fronting and other reordering phenomena are analyzed taking into account their morphosyntactic and prosodic properties. It is argued that a restricted set of discourse-related properties are inserted in the numeration as formal features. These discourse-related features drive the syntactic derivation and the formation of the prosodic representation in compliance with the T-model of grammar. Based on the cartographic approach this study proposes a model of the syntax–prosody interface in which the phonological computation of prosody is fed by syntactically encoded properties of information structure. However this computation is also governed by structural requirements intrinsic to the phonological domain and thus a bijective relation between information structure and prosodic representation is not guaranteed. The monograph will be of interest to any linguist concerned with syntax information structure and prosody.

This volume the fifth in the series Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages is devoted to genitive constructions in a range of Indo-European languages (Russian French Romanian German and Swedish) as well as Finnish Bantu languages and Northern Akhvakh (Northeast Caucasian). Definitions of genitives typically start out from the notion of an inflectional marker often suffixal that marks dependency relations of a noun phrase with respect to another noun phrase and conveys possessive meaning. The contributions in this volume demonstrate a huge range of variation in genitives semantically (from possessive meaning to generalized dependency) morphologically (from affixes to different types of clitics) and syntactically (from adnominal uses to argument relations and adjunct uses). The volume contains both general surveys of genitives and case studies of the semantics pragmatics and historical development of specific genitive constructions. It will be of interest to scholars and students in syntax semantics morphology typology and historical linguistics.

This second volume of our Ute trilogy contains a collection of Ute oral texts. Ute oral literature reflects the life experience of a small-scale hunting-and-gathering Society of Intimates and its tight connection to the local terrain flora and fauna that supported the hunter-gatherer life. Ute story-telling tradition is the people's literary heritage with the narrative style allowing considerable artistic freedom and diversity in contents and style. Stories were not memorized verbatim and story-tellers took creative liberty in elaborating and re-inventing the 'same' tale. The core cultural contents of each story are nevertheless preserved across tellers. Ute stories were most likely told at night around the fire in front of or inside the lodge to a mixed audience of children and adults who had heard the tale many time before. The stories aimed to both instruct and entertain. Their underlying themes are stoic and oft-cynical reflections on the vagaries of human behavior and harsh existence. They are the foundational literary tradition of The People--Núuchi-u.

This book presents an innovative approach to linguistic semantics starting from the idea that language is a mechanism for the expression of linguistic meanings as particular surface forms (texts). Semantics is that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in terms of Meaning-Text linguistics this volume discusses the Deep-Syntactic Representation and the transition from Semantics to Deep-Syntax via Semantic paraphrasing (the equivalence amongst Semantic Representations) Deep-Syntactic paraphrasing (the equivalence amongst Deep-Syntactic Representations) and the passage between the two. A chapter is dedicated to the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary a semantically based and co-occurrence-centered lexicon. Reflecting the author’s life-long dedication to semantics and syntax this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to language studies whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists anthropologists semioticians and computational linguists.

Challenging Clitics deals with multiple sides of cliticisation from different theoretical frameworks and with data from a number of different languages. Unlike many other books on clitics where clitics are considered from a mere syntactical point of view this book also discusses the acquisition of clitics; the role of the PF in cliticisation; the morphophonological aspects of cliticisation; and historical change – to name but a few of the approaches presented. As such this collection presents cutting edge theoretical considerations as well as new data on clitics. Taken together the contributions in this volume not only provide insight into the extremely complex nature of clitics but also into derivations and structures in language that go beyond the study of clitics themselves.

This monograph conducts a syntactic study of Tuki a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon from a cartographic perspective. The following domains are meticulously explored: The Complementizer Domain the Inflectional Domain and the Verbal Domain. This study reveals that there is a relative phrase (RelP) located between ForceP and FocP. Moreover a detailed analysis of an articulated IP provides the order of clausal functional heads that manifest aspectual morphology which is theoretically closely related to issues in adverbial syntax. Additionally the language under study unveils a very rich structural make up of DP and the surface word orders attested in this phrase can be accounted for in terms of snowballing movement operations along the lines previously sketched in the format of the Split DP Hypothesis. Overall this cartographic analysis is bound to enrich our morphosyntactic knowledge of UG clausal architecture by demonstrating that its rich underlying structural skeleton is correlated by a wealthy surface structural and functional map.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><br/>Edmond Biloa is professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon (Africa).

Grammaticalization and lexicalization are at the heart of first language acquisition. Understanding how these processes begin and evolve is a major challenge for current theories and has implications for applications in teaching or clinical contexts. This volume examines the relative weight of cognitive and linguistic determinants of acquisition with particular attention to two questions. The first one concerns the origins of grammar and the processes underlying its development. Is grammatical knowledge innate or constructed by the child? Is it modular or does it interact with other capacities? How can we account for continuity and discontinuity in development? What is the role of input? Second considerable variation is observed in lexical and grammatical development across child languages. Is the process of acquisition similar in all children or do language-specific factors impact its rhythm and course? Do typological factors determine children’s reliance on lexical or grammatical means of expression in some domains? Originally published in Language Interaction and Acquisition - Langage Interaction et Acquisition 2:1 (2011).

The articles of this collection cover a wide range of formal syntactic and semantic phenomena. The focus is on a broad array of developmental syntactic phenomena including topics in Argument Structure and Clause-Internal Syntax the DP Domain and Learning Theory. In total the contents of the volume illustrate ways in which theoretically informed linguistic research can explain language behavior in terms that are motivated on independent grounds and point towards new research opportunities to test theoretical claims about the adult model of grammar. The contributions of this volume are inspired by or related to the scholarship of Nina Hyams whose dedication to rigorous theoretically-informed research on language is well represented here.

This volume contains a selection of papers dealing with constructions that have a passive-like interpretation but do not seem to share all the properties with canonical passives. The fifteen chapters of this volume raise important questions concerning the proper characterization of the universal properties of passivization and reflect the current discussion in this area covering syntactic semantic psycho-linguistic and typological aspects of the phenomenon from different theoretical perspectives and in different language families and backed up in most cases by extensive corpora and experimental studies.

The analysis of constructions denoting possession (particularly but not exclusively in English) has long presented a challenge to morpho-syntactic theory and has been a topic of debate for some time. The papers presented here afford thought-provoking insights into the morphosyntactic nature of possessive markers under a variety of theoretical frameworks. The distribution of phrases expressing possession is explored in a range of languages (including English Swedish Urdu and West Flemish) with rigorous exploitation of corpus data and careful statistical analysis. Descriptions and analyses represent the state of the art in research into possessive constructions. Particular attention is paid to the English possessive ’s both synchronically and diachronically. This volume is essential for scholars interested in theoretical and corpus-based linguistics morphosyntactic constructions and the expression of possession.

This volume investigates the clausal syntax of Wolof an understudied Atlantic language of Senegal. The goals of the work are descriptive analytical and comparative with a focus on the structure of the left periphery and left peripheral phenomena. The book includes detailed examination of the morpho‑syntax of wh‑questions successive cyclicity subject marking relative clauses topic/focus articulation and complementizer agreement. Novel data from Wolof is used to evaluate and extend theoretical proposals concerning the structure of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Tense Phrase (TP). It is argued that Wolof provides evidence for the promotion analysis of relative clauses an “exploded” CP and TP and for analyses that treat relative clauses as composed of a determiner with a CP complement. It is further argued that Wolof has a set of silent wh‑expressions and these are compared to superficially similar constructions in colloquial German Bavarian Dutch and Norwegian. The book also presents a comparison of complementizer agreement across a number of related and unrelated languages. Data from Indo‑European (Germanic varieties French Irish) Niger‑Congo (Atlantic Bantu Gur) and Semitic (Arabic) languages put the Wolof phenomena in a larger typological context by showing the range of variation in complementizer agreement systems.

The book Constructions in French is the first collected volume to focus on French syntax from a constructionist perspective. It has been written with two kinds of readers in mind: for readers interested in the relationship between the French linguistic tradition and cognitive linguistics and for readers who would like to examine how constructional analysis can be applied to a variety of French language phenomena. The eleven papers illustrate the insights generated by combining lexicalist and constructionist approaches focusing on syntax as a dynamic system and using corpus data from a variety of speech genres. The contributions provide new findings about French usage trends (in linguistics and in psycholinguistics) including insights into new nonstandard and little studied constructions.

Sentence Patterns in English and Hebrew offers an innovative perspective on sentential syntax in which sentence patterns are introduced as constructions within the general framework of Construction Grammar. Drawing on naturally occurring data collected from the Internet the study challenges the prevailing view of predication as the sole mechanism of sentence formation and introduces the idea of patterning as a complementary sometimes even alternative mechanism. Major sentence patterns of English and Hebrew are systematically presented targeting both their form and their function. A contrastive analysis of the sentence patterns in these two languages results in postulating a typological group in which cognitive motivations are shown to account for both similarities and differences within the typology.

Sentence Patterns in English and Hebrew will appeal to scholars of constructional approaches cognitive linguistics typology syntax as well as anyone interested in English and Hebrew.

Multiple interrogatives questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?) have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects subject-auxiliary inversion and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis) presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. The author also reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English Russian and Malayalam. The results suggest a correlation between the acquisition of multiple interrogatives and the acquisition of contrastive focus which has been independently motivated in the syntactic literature. The monograph will be of interest to linguists concerned with syntax semantics and language acquisition as well as readers who are interested in a comprehensive theory of language in general.

This book describes and analyzes the passive voice system in Japanese within the framework of generative grammar. By unifying different types of passives conventionally distinguished within the literature the book advances a simple minimalist account where various passive characteristics emerge from the lexical properties of a single passive morpheme interacting with independently-supported syntactic principles and general properties of Japanese. The book both reevaluates numerous properties previously discussed within the literature and introduces interesting new data collected through experiments. This novel analysis also benefits from considering the important issue of interspeaker variability in terms of grammaticality judgments and context requirements and its implications for individual grammar. The book will be of interest not only to students and scholars working on passive constructions but more generally to scholars working on generative grammar experimental syntax language acquisition and sentence processing.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 23rd and 24th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of Edinburgh and the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussels. The contributions provide new perspectives on several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wide range of Germanic languages. Among the theoretical and empirical issues explored are various ellipsis phenomena the internal structure of the DP the syntax-morphology interface the syntax-semantics interface Binding Theory various diachronic developments and ‘do-support’-type phenomena. This book is of interest to syntacticians with an interest in theoretical comparative and/or diachronic work as well as to morphologists and semanticists interested in the connections their fields have with syntax. It will also be of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in linguistic disciplines.

This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta French Hinuq Italian Japanese Polish Serbian and Spanish among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language.

The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented from a different point of view in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language culture and cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language cognition and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive social and linguistic foundations.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of historically attested relative clause constructions from a diachronic typological perspective. Systematic integration of historical data and a typological approach demonstrates how typology and historical linguistics can each benefit from attention to the other. The diachronic behaviour of relative clauses is mapped across a broad range of genetically and geographically diverse languages. Central to the discussion is the strength of evidence for what have previously been claimed to be ‘natural’ or even ‘universal’ pathways of change. While many features of relative clause constructions are found to be remarkably stable over long periods of time it is shown that language contact seems to be the crucial factor that does trigger change when it occurs. These results point to the importance of incorporating the effects of language contact into models of language change rather than viewing contact situations as exceptional. The findings of this study have implications for the definition of relative clauses their syntactic structures and the relationships between the different ‘subtypes’ of this construction as well as offering new directions for the integration of typological and historical linguistic research.

This monograph explores the tense aspect mood and evidentiality of Korean which has a rich verbal inflectional system and proposes novel treatments within the framework of compositional semantics. One of the major contributions is the demonstration that Korean has two types of deictic tense—simple deictic and spatial deictic tense. Spatial deictic tense refers to the notion of the speaker’s ‘perceptual field’ (or deictic range) as well as to temporality functioning to set up a condition for a systematic evidential distinction. The research in this volume shows that the basic paradigm of evidentiality of Korean derives from the standard TMA system combined with the notion of space. This volume also shows that perfect and past tense utilize different primitives. The intended readership of this volume extends beyond Koreanists to scholars interested specifically in tense mood aspect and evidentiality as well as in general theories of grammar and semantics-pragmatics.

Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons takes the study of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) into the 21st century without neglecting the origins of the topic. It brings together work by both established and up-and-coming scholars who present analyses for a wide range of MCP from a variety of languages with a particular focus on particles and agreement markers complementizers and verb second and the licensing of MCP in different types of clauses. Besides enriching the empirical domain this volume also engages with the theoretical question of how best to capture the distribution of MCP and in particular to what extent they are embeddable and why. The diverse patterns and analyses presented challenge the idea that MCP constitute a homogeneous class. Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons is of interest not just to scholars specializing in the study of MCP but to all linguists interested in the syntax and/or semantics of the clause.

This collective volume on nominal expressions in Basque a language isolate with no known relatives comprises original papers on the syntactic structure and the interpretation of both Noun Phrases and nominalization constructions – a traditionally neglected aspect of Basque linguistics. The minute attention to properties and paradigms previously overlooked and the analyses of them in the light of recent advances in syntactic theory make this book a valuable tool for syntacticians semanticists and morphologists. This work fills a gap in the theoretical study of Basque and the richness of data presented makes it interesting for any researcher from whatever particular theoretical persuasion. This volume is especially useful for researchers graduate students and advanced undergraduate students of comparative grammar typology and theoretical linguistics.

Cleft constructions have long presented an analytical challenge for syntactic theory. This monograph argues that clefts and related constructions cannot be analysed in a straightforwardly compositional manner. Instead it proposes that the locality conditions on modification (for example by a restrictive relative clause) must be reformulated such that they account for the apparent compositionality of DP-internal modification whilst also permitting ‘discontinuous’ modification of the type which is independently needed for constructions such as relative clause extraposition. The empirical focus of the book is on clefts in English and Russian which have a similar interpretation but considerably divergent syntactic structures. The author argues that despite these syntactic differences both types of cleft are mapped to their semantic interpretations in the same manner. This monograph will be essential reading for those working on cleft constructions and copular sentences more generally and will be of interest to those working on the syntax-semantics interface.

Research on quotation has yielded a rich and diverse knowledge-base. Scientific interest has been sparked particularly by the recent emergence of new quotative forms in typologically related and unrelated languages (i.e. English be like Hebrew kazé Japanese mitai-na).The present collection gives a platform to research conducted within different linguistic sub-disciplines and on the basis of a variety of Western and non-Western languages. The introduction presents an overview of forms and functions of old and new quotative constructions. The nine chapters investigate quotation from different perspectives from conversation analysis over grammaticalization and language variation and change to typological and formal approaches. The collection advocates a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon ‘quotation’ seeking a more nuanced knowledge-base as regards the linguistic properties social uses and pragmatic functions than monolingual or single disciplinary approaches deliver. The cross-disciplinary nature and the wealth of data make the findings broadly available and relevant.

This book offers new work by some major figures in the field of linguistics addressing old debates from the perspective of current explanatory grammatical theory. These include paradigmatic relations among words and agreeing adjectives and their grammatical source. Covering a broad range of empirical domains the contributors of this volume examine the role of Economy in syntax and in syntactic interfaces with phonology and semantics and their implications for processing. The evidence is taken from a great variety of languages including Arabic dialects Basque Czech Dutch English French German Latin and Spanish. Two chapters on metrics complete honoring Carlos Piera’s longstanding scholarship in linguistic theory within Spain and abroad.

Within the framework of Chomsky’s Principles and Parameters Theory and the Minimalist Program this work presents a detailed discussion of the different types of wh-question formation and relativization strategies in Cape Verdean Creole (Santiago variety) especially focusing on wh-movement of PPs. The book explores the Copy Theory of Movement discussing a defective copy construction involving wh-movement of PPs which poses interesting theoretical questions as to how the defective copy is to be generated and form a chain with the relevant displaced wh-constituent. It is also shown that the defective copy strategy ([wh_[PL] … el_[3SG]]) is distinct from resumption ([wh_[PL] … es_[3PL]]) due to some properties of PPs in Cape Verdean Creole and to the nature of the pronominal element that occurs at the foot of the wh-chain. This book relates well with those on Cape Verdean Creole and highlights the need to look more closely at deeper syntactic issues in more creole languages inspiring further comparative work amongst creole linguists.

Adverb positions vary within a single language as well as across diverse languages. Based on the study of adverbs in English French and German this monograph shows that the distribution of adverbs is influenced by various factors at distinct levels of linguistic representation – comprising semantics syntax phonology and information structure – which interact in determining adverb positions. The results of the investigation are formulated within the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory which captures the complex interaction of these factors by hierarchically ranked constraints deriving cross-linguistic variation of adverb positions by differences in the language-specific constraint hierarchies. The book is divided into two parts: While Part I examines adverb positions in general Part II investigates under which circumstances an adverb may attach to a phonetically empty constituent in the languages under discussion. The book appeals to a linguistic audience interested in Germanic and Romance languages as well as in theoretical syntax in general.

This corpus-based study examines the use of support verb constructions in Old English and Old Irish. It determines in how far these constructions can be seen as a means to offer semantic specification of existing verbal expressions. The study further investigates whether support verb constructions may be employed to create periphrastic verbal expressions to denote concepts for which no simple verb exists in the language at that stage. This latter situation may particularly arise as a consequence of contact with new cultural concepts. The approach of the study is both qualitative and quantitative. It compares the use of the Old English constructions to corresponding Old Irish structures as well as to other language varieties especially Present Day English which has a considerably more analytic morphological structure than either of the two medieval languages.

The present volume presents cutting-edge research on Arabic linguistics. It features a set of papers which continue a long tradition of seeking new explanations for familiar or previously undiscovered structural patterns. While the papers illustrate a range of approaches from formalist to functionalist each paper combines rigorous analysis of a set of Arabic data within the context of explicit models of some aspect of human language. The volume consists of three sections the first section devoted to phonetics and phonology the second to syntax and the third to language acquisition and language contact.

Bidirectional Optimality Theory (BiOT) emerged at the turn of the millennium as a fusion of Radical Pragmatics and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. It stirred a wealth of new research in the pragmatics‑semantics interface and heavily influenced e.g. the development of evolutionary and game theoretic approaches. Optimality Theory holds that linguistic output can be understood as the optimized products of ranked constraints. At the centre of BiOT is the insight that this optimisation has to take place both in production and interpretation and that the production-interpretation cycle has to lead back to the original input. BiOT is now generally interpreted as a description of diachronically stable and cognitively optimal form–meaning pairs. It found applications beyond the semantics-pragmatics interface in language acquisition historical linguistics phonology syntax and typology. This book provides a state of the art overview of these developments. It collects nine chapters by leading scientists in the field.

<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalism and Formal Semantics this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners which agglutinated to nouns resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation from predicative in French to argumental in MC and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as ‘type shifting operators’ that shift Kinds into predicates and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity and the mapping of their form and function.

When considering the structure of New Englishes which have evolved in – multilingual mostly post-colonial – contexts of Asia (thus Asian Englishes) the significant factors to be considered are: 1) the variety/ies of the English lexifier that entered the local context; 2) the nature of transmission of English to the local population; and 3) the local i.e. substrate languages of the community in which the New English emerges. This third factor is the focus of the five papers in this volume: they investigate the structure of Asian varieties of English by exploring the relationship between the typological profile of substrate languages in the specific linguistic ecology and the grammatical features of the emerging contact variety of English.The contributions to this volume were originally published in English World-Wide 30:2 (2009).

This is really two books in one: a valuable reference resource and a groundbreaking case study that represents a new approach to constructional semantics. It presents a detailed descriptive survey using extensive examples collected from the Internet of German verb constructions in which the expressions durch (‘through’) über (‘over’) unter (‘under’) and um (‘around’) occur either as inseparable verb prefixes or as separable verb particles. Based on that evidence the author argues that the prefixed verb constructions and particle verb constructions themselves have meaning and that this meaning involves subjective construal processes rather than objective information. The constructions prompt us to distribute focal attention according to patterns that can be articulated in terms of Talmy’s notion of “perspectival modes”. Among the other topics that play an important role in the analysis are incremental themes reflexive trajectors fictive motion “multi-directional paths” and “accusative landmarks”.

This book contains the first in-depth corpus-based description of structural nativization at the lexis-grammar interface in Indian English the largest institutionalized second-language variety of English world-wide. For a set of three ditransitive verbs give send and offer –collocational patterns verb-complementational preferences and correlations between collocational and verb-complementational routines are described. The present study is based on the comparison of the Indian and the British components of the International Corpus of English as well as a 100-million-word web-derived corpus of acrolectal Indian newspaper language and corresponding parts of the British National Corpus. The present corpus-based ‘thick description’ of lexicogrammatical routines provides new perspectives on the emergence of new routines and patternings in Indian English and is conceptually and methodologically relevant for research into varieties of English worldwide.

This research monograph is an investigation of wh-movement and wh-expletive constructions in the Indic languages Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu. It advances a novel theory of the periphery or the clausal positions that mediate A-bar movement. In particular a detailed study of wh-expletives and wh-expletive constructions reveals an underlying similarity of design between the A and A-bar systems and indicates that the two can be understood as driven by the same basic set of mechanisms. The monograph offers an account of wh-movement and the clausal periphery in the two languages informed by the latest strands of research on the syntax and semantics of A-bar movement. This micro-comparative analytical method yields an important result: we can understand a set of systematic contrasts between the two languages in terms of the properties of specifically the phase-defining heads C and v. Empirically this work explores the lesser-studied language Kashmiri bringing to the fore linguistic data not yet discussed in formal syntactic literature. The significance of these data for the development of the wider theoretical framework is stressed throughout making the book of substantial interest for general linguistic research.

This volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals) presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals) and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals) i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages but also includes considerations of several African American South-East Asian Australian and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive or from active to passive or participant-to event-centered construction.

The articles in this volume examine the notion of clausal subordination based on English Estonian Finnish French German and Japanese conversational data. Some of the articles approach ‘subordination’ in terms of social action taking into account what participants are doing with their talk considering topics such as the use of clauses as projector phrases and as devices for organizing the participant structure of the conversation. Other articles focus on the emergence of clause combinations diachronically and synchronically taking on topics such as the grammaticalization of clauses and conjunctions into discourse markers and the continuum nature of syntactic subordination. In all of the articles linguistic forms are considered to be emergent from recurrent practices engaged in by participants in conversation. The contributions critically examine central syntactic notions in interclausal relations and their relevance to the description of clause combining in conversational language to the structure of conversation and to the interactional functions of language.

Language structure and use are largely shaped by cognitive processes such as categorizing framing inferencing associative (metonymic) and analogical (metaphorical) thinking and – mediated through cognition – by bodily experience emotion perception action social/communicative interaction culture and the internal ecology of the linguistic system itself. The contributors to the present volume demonstrate how these language-independent factors motivate grammar and the lexicon in a variety of languages such as English German French Italian Hungarian Russian Croatian Japanese and Korean. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in cognitive and functional linguistics.

This volume further elaborates the empirical tradition of Columbia School (CS) Linguistics by offering diverse empirical analyses for a wide variety of languages. These studies open a much needed debate advocating the necessity of the independent validation of linguistic hypotheses. This research exemplifies how such a validation should be conducted by determining which forms underlie the analyses and extracting those observations that are considered to be objective. The volume consists of two parts: a section on synchronic and diachronic grammatical problems and a section on Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB) the Columbia School version of phonology applied to evolutionary developmental and clinical issues and the phonotactics of the selected lexicon of a literary text. It provides a wealth of useful empirical data and in-depth and sophisticated qualitative and quantitative analyses of a broad range of languages from diverse families: French Spanish Afrikaans Dutch English Polish Russian Japanese and Hebrew.

This volume focuses on different aspects of language development. The contributions are concerned with similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition the acquisition of sentence structure and functional categories cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition as well as the relation between language acquisition language contact and diachronic change. The recurrent topic of the volume is the link between linguistic variation and the limitation of structural variability in the framework of a well-defined theory of language. In this respect the volume opens up new perspectives for future research.

This book is the first attempt to provide a unified account of the be-possessive syntax and its extension to the modal and the perfect constructions in Russian/North Russian within a generative framework. Apparently diverse constructions are construed as deriving from the have/be parameter which depends on the utilization of the prepositional complementizer with a Case feature. The be-perfect structure provides an adequate environment where ergativity is encoded via verbal nominalization. The relevance of the be-perfect structure for a split ergative pattern shows that the ergative system is a syntactically conditioned phenomenon rather than a purely morphological diversity. This volume also offers the diachronic study of the be-syntax investigating the evolution of the be-perfect and be-modal constructions which has rarely been explored within a formal framework. Concrete scenarios are proposed for the developmental paths of the be-perfect and the be-modal constructions based on textual evidence in old North Russian.

The Arabic verbal system is for most grammarians the keystone of the language. Notable for the regularity of its patterns it presents the linguist with an unparalleled opportunity to explore the Saussurean notion of the indivisible sign: form and meaning. Whilst Arabic forms are well-documented the elucidation of the corresponding meanings has proved more challenging. Beginning with an examination of the verbal morphology of Modern Standard Arabic including an evaluation of the significance of the consonantal root this volume then concentrates on establishing the function of the vowel-lengthening verbal patterns (III and VI). It explores issues of mutuality and reciprocity valency and transitivity ultimately focusing on atelic lexical aspect as the unified meaning of these patterns. This study is rich in data and relies extensively upon contemporary examples (with transliteration and translation) to illustrate its arguments adopting an empirical structuralist approach which is aimed both at general linguists and at specialist Arabists.

In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking clause chaining nominalization and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity as evidenced in subordination.

Complex predicates present different levels of complexity at the syntactic and morphological levels crosslinguistically. The focus of this book is a subset of these constructions (causative and applicative) in three polysynthetic languages of the South Caucasian language family in which the functional morphology associated with the argument structure of these constructions is unusually rich. Due to such focus the syntax-morphology interface in causative and applicative constructions is subject to scrutiny in two main chapters of the book. The analysis includes the argument structure of causatives and applicatives along with the morpho-phonological instantiation of the functional heads involved in these constructions. The book is written very clearly and is accessible for a wide audience including undergraduate students in the introductory syntax and morphology courses as well as graduate students in basic syntax courses and seminars in linguistics. It naturally appeals to a general linguistic audience interested in theoretical linguistics.

The contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands or Sprachinseln throughout the world. The individual topics of study in this volume focus on various aspects of these German-language islands such as (but not limited to) phonological morphological syntactic semantic and pragmatic aspects of these languages under investigation. Collectively the body of research contained in this volume explores significantly under-researched topics in the fields of language contact and language attrition and illustrates how this on-going research can be enhanced through the application of formal theoretical frameworks and structural analyses.

The complex diachronic and synchronic status of the concepts be and have can be understood only with consideration of their full range of constructions and functions. Data from modern Slavic languages (Russian Czech Polish Bulgarian) provides a window into zero copulas non-verbal have expressions and verbal constructions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics be and have are analyzed in terms of a blended prototype model wherein existence/copula for be and possession/relationship for have are inseparably combined. These concepts are related to each other in their functions and meanings and serve as organizing principles in a conceptual network of semantic neighbors including give take get become make and verbs of position and motion. Renewal and replacement of be and have occur through processes of polysemization and suppletization involving lexical items in this network. Topics include polysemy suppletion tense/mood auxiliaries modality causatives evidentiality function words contact phenomena syntactic calques and idiomatic constructions.

The Austronesian language family is the largest language family in the world yet its members are relatively little studied particularly from a formal perspective. Interestingly because these languages exhibit typologically unusual properties they pose important challenges to linguistic theory. Any theory that postulates a grammar that is common to all languages must take into account the particular characteristics of this language family. The contributions to this volume comprise five chapters on phonology and twelve chapters on syntax all addressing aspects of these Austronesian challenges. The volume presents new data new analyses of old data and comparisons of closely related languages as well as comparisons to languages outside of the language family. Taken together they form a unique picture of Austronesian linguistics. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in phonetics phonology morphology syntax and language typology as well as scholars of Austronesian languages.

This collective volume focuses on the crucial role of formal evidence in recognizing and explaining instances of grammaticalization. It addresses the hitherto neglected issue of system-internal factors steering grammaticalization and also revisits formal recognition criteria such as Lehmann and Hopper’s parameters of grammaticalization. The articles investigate developments of such phenomena as modal auxiliaries attitudinal markers V1-conditionals nominalizers and pronouns using data from a wide range of languages and (in some cases) from diachronic corpora. In the process they explore finer mechanisms of grammaticalization such as modification of coding means structural and semantic analogy changes in frequency and prosody and shifts in collocational and grammatical distribution. The volume is of particular interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and general linguists working on the interface between syntax semantics and pragmatics as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.

This monograph presents an experimental and theoretical inquiry into the role of sentential form and variation in the prosodic structure of Catalan. The empirical section examines intonational phrasing across sentence forms including SVO structures with either nominal or sentential objects and structures involving clitic left- and right-dislocations. The results show variation in phrasing that depends on syntactic factors and non-syntactic factors such as topic-hood and prosodic binarity. The theoretical section uses Stochastic Optimality Theory to model the variation and frequency distributions associated with the observed prosodic patterns. Various syntactic and non-syntactic factors are represented by alignment constraints which play a major role in Catalan and by constraints that limit size and those that limit the overall amount of prosodic structure. This study represents a combined approach to prosody and syntax and is of particular relevance for theoretical and empirical linguists interested in the relationship between these domains both in Catalan and other languages.