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This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of syntactic structure. With hindsight the author now finds the de-emphasis of the formal properties a somewhat regrettable choice since it creates the false impression that one could somehow be a functionalist without being at the same time a structuralist. To redress the balance explicit treatment is given to the core formal properties of syntactic constructions such as constituency and hierarchy (phrase structure) grammatical relations and relational control clause union finiteness and governed constructions.

At the same time the cognitive and communicative underpinning of grammatical universals are further elucidated and underscored and the interplay between grammar cognition and neurology is outlined. Also the relevant typological database is expanded now exploring in greater precision the bounds of syntactic diversity. Lastly Syntax treats synchronic-typological diversity more explicitly as the dynamic by-product of diachronic development or grammaticalization. In so doing a parallel is drawn between linguistic diversity and diachrony on the one hand and biological diversity and evolution on the other. It is then suggested that — as in biology — synchronic universals of grammar are exercised and instantiated primarily as constraints on development and are thus merely the apparent by-products of universal constraints on grammaticalization.

The eleven selected contributions making up this volume deal with grammatical relations their coding and behavioral properties and the change that these properties have undergone in different languages. The focus of this collection is on the changing properties of subjects and objects although the scope of the volume goes beyond the central problems pertaining to case marking and word order. The diachrony of syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena are approached from different theoretical perspectives generative grammar valency grammar and functionalism. The languages dealt with include Old English Mainland Scandinavian Icelandic German and other Germanic languages Latin French and other Romance languages Northeast Caucasian Eskimo and Popolocan. This book provides an opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches to similar phenomena in different languages and language families.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

The author combines a syntax-theoretical treatment of telicity marking and an empirical study of the second language acquisition of English telicity marking by native speakers of Bulgarian a Slavic language. It is argued that Vendler’s lexical classes of verbs (states activities accomplishments and achievements) can be represented in four phrase structure templates where lexical properties of the verb and of the object compositionally determine telicity. A parameterized distinction between English and Slavic aspect is proposed. The book addresses two major acquisition issues: (1) what is the nature of the initial hypothesis Bulgarian learners of English entertain regarding telicity marking (i.e. is there native language transfer)? (2) are adult learners capable of resetting the telicity marking parameter? Both L1 transfer and parameter resetting are experimentally supported. In addition the study investigates the L2 acquisition of a cluster of complex predicate constructions purportedly related to the telicity parameter in the grammatical competence and in child language acquisition of English.

Professor Ferenc Kiefer of the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was instrumental in bringing early transformational grammar to Europe. His extensive work contributes substantially to making a connection between the grammatical theory and other areas of linguistics. The 17 essays in this book celebrate his career by continuing to explore inter-area research in linguistics: pragmatics in grammar (de Groot van Riemsdijk Dressler & Barbaresi Comrie) semantic compositionality and pragmatics (Wunderlich Partee Borschev Szabo Bach) logical structures and universals in semantics and pragmatics (van der Auwera Bultinck Burton-Roberts Harnish Wierzbicka) dialogue and thematic structure (Jonasson Doherty Hajicova Panevova Sgall Allwood Fraser).

This first collection of selected articles from researchers in automatic analysis storage and use of terminology and specialists in applied linguistics computational linguistics information retrieval and artificial intelligence offers new insights on computational terminology. The recent needs for intelligent information access automatic query translation cross-lingual information retrieval knowledge management and document handling have led practitioners and engineers to focus on automated term handling. This book offers new perspectives on their expectations. It will be of interest to terminologists translators language or knowledge engineers librarians and all others dependent on the automation of terminology processing in professional practices. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The articles cover themes such as automatic thesaurus construction automatic term acquisition automatic term translation automatic indexing and abstracting and computer-aided knowledge acquisition.<br/>The high academic standing of the contributors together with their experience in terminology management results in a set of contributions that tackle original and unique scientific issues in correlation with genuine applications of terminology processing.<br/>

Many of the assumptions of Labovian sociolinguistics are based on results drawn from US and UK English Latin American Spanish and Canadian French. Sociolinguistic variation in the French of France has been rather little studied compared to these languages. This volume is the first examination and exploration of variation in French that studies in a unified way the levels of phonology grammar and lexis using quantitative methods. One of its aims is to establish whether the patterns of variation that have been reported in French conform to those reported in other languages. A second important theme of this volume is the study of variation across speech styles in French through a comparison with some of the best-known English results. The book is therefore also the first to examine current theories of social-stylistic variation by using fresh quantitative data. These data throw new light on the influence of methodology on results on why certain linguistic variables have more stylistic value and on how the strong normative tradition in France moulds interactions between social and stylistic variation.

With the explosion in the quantity of on-line text and multimedia information in recent years there has been a renewed interest in automatic summarization. This book provides a systematic introduction to the field explaining basic definitions the strategies used by human summarizers and automatic methods that leverage linguistic and statistical knowledge to produce extracts and abstracts. Drawing from a wealth of research in artificial intelligence natural language processing and information retrieval the book also includes detailed assessments of evaluation methods and new topics such as multi-document and multimedia summarization. Previous automatic summarization books have been either collections of specialized papers or else authored books with only a chapter or two devoted to the field as a whole. This is the first textbook on the subject developed based on teaching materials used in two one-semester courses. To further help the student reader the book includes detailed case studies accompanied by end-of-chapter reviews and an extensive glossary.Audience: students and researchers as well as information technology managers librarians and anyone else interested in the subject.

Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items contains a selection of papers on the semantics acquisition and licensing behavior of negation. Negation being one of the prevalent features of any human language has many facets of interest to linguists psychologists and philosophers alike. In recent years much attention has been paid to the complicated distributional patterns of polarity items. Many of the contributions in this volume are devoted to the study of one or more of these items in langages such as English (Laurence Horn Anita Mittwoch Chris Kennedy) Dutch (Jack Hoeksema and Hotze Rullmann Henny Klein Gertjan Postma) German (Gabriel Falkenberg) Hindi (Utpal Lahiri) and Greek (Anastasia Giannakidou). In addition some general issues surrounding negation are addressed such as the characterization of the notion “strength of negation” (Jay Atlas) the problem of NEG-raising (Lucia Tovena) the interaction of negation and modality (Johan van der Auwera) and the acquisition of negation (Kenneth Drozd).

The relationship between language and conceptualization remains one of the major puzzles in language research. This monograph addresses this issue by means of an in depth corpus based and experimental investigation of the major types of expressions of epistemic modality in Dutch German and English. By adopting a systematic functional orientation the book explains a whole range of peculiarities of epistemic expression forms (synchronically and diachronically) and it offers a clear perspective on which cognitive systems are needed to get from the concept of epistemic modality to its linguistic expression. On that basis the author postulates a sophisticated layered view of human conceptualization. This book is of interest both to scholars working on modality and related semantic dimensions and to the interdisciplinary field of researchers concerned with the cognitive systems involved in language use.

No single theoretician provoked a greater tradition of the reception of his thought throughout changing times and across diverse cultures than did Aristotle and so Hegel who calls him the ‘teacher of the human race’ well describes the man known for ages simply as ‘the philosopher’. The present volume examines from a philosophical-historical standpoint the intellect-theory of De Anima III 4-5 which stands in the center of the Aristotelian system and composes one of the most provocative Aristotelian theories. It concentrates on the critical engagement with Aristotle’s conception of nous in Theophrastus and his colleagues (Dicaearchus Aristoxenus) and students (Demetrius of Phaleron Menander Erasistratus) in the Peripatos as well as in the Academic Socratic Epicurean and Stoic schools. The analysis of the relevant texts leads to a new assessment of Theophrastus’s philosophical-historical significance in the Aristotelian tradition and documents that in early Hellenism the Aristotelian theory itself played a surprisingly limited role so that the loss of the original Aristotelian manuscripts as reported by Strabo and Plutarch — a matter hotly debated in recent studies — was of only marginal importance.Kein Theoretiker provozierte über eine ähnlich lange Zeitspanne eine so intensive kontinuierliche und multikulturelle Rezeption wie Aristoteles. Die Geschichte der Philosophie verlangt es daher geradezu unter der Perspektive der ebenso konstanten wie vielgestaltigen Auseinandersetzung mit “dem Philosophen” analysiert zu werden. Den geeignetsten Kristallisationspunkt hierfür stellt die in “De Anima” G 4-5 präsentierte Nous-Theorie dar denn zum einen stand sie im Zentrum des aristotelischen “Systems” zum anderen handelt es sich bei ihr um die mit gröîter Kontinuität höchster Intensität und unterschiedlichsten Resultaten rezipierte philosophische Theorie überhaupt.

Der vorliegende Band thematisiert im Anschluî am die “Topographie” der aristotelischen Noetik die frühhellenistische Resonanz. Den ersten Schwerpunkt bildet Theophrasts philosophisch-kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Nous-Konzeption seines Lehrers den zweiten die “De Anima”-Rezeption in der damaligen Philosophie-Szene die im wesentlichen durch drie Gruppen konstituiert wurde: Theophrasts Kollegen im “Peripatos” (Dikaiarch Aristoxenos); Theophrasts eingene Hörerschaft (Demetrios v. Phaleron Menander Erasistratos); und die zahlreichte philosophische Konkurrenz: die “Akademiker” “Sokratiker” und die Schulen Epikurs bzw. Zenons. Die Analyse der relevanten Texte führt erstens zu einder grundsätzlichen Neubewertung der philosophiehistorischen Position Theophrasts. Zweitens dokumentiert sie daî die aristotelische Theorie entgegen der heutigen opinio communis gerade im Frühhellenismus eine erstaunlich bescheidene Rolle spielte. Rezeptionsgeschichtlich kommt dem von Strabon/Plutarch berichteten und in der neueren Forschung heiîdiskutierten Verlust der aristotelischen Originalmanuscripte deshalb allenfalls eine sekondäre Bedeutung zu.