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The growing interest in prepositions is reflected by this impressive collection of papers from leading scholars of various fields. The selected contributions of Prepositions in their Syntactic Semantic and Pragmatic Context focus on the local and temporal semantics of prepositions in relation to their context too. Following an introduction which puts this new approach into a thematical and historical perspective the volume presents fifteen studies in the following areas: The semantics of space dynamics (mainly on French prepositions); Language acquisition (aphasia and code-switching); Artificial intelligence (mainly of English prepositions); Specific languages: Hebrew (from a number of perspectives — syntax semiotics and sociolinguistic impact on morphology) Maltese the Melanesian English-based Creole Bislama and Biblical translations into Judeo-Greek.

The present volume has its origin in the GLOW conference on Universals hosted in Berlin in March 1999. The papers in this volume are concerned both with formal as well as with substantive universals. All the contributions attempt to identify universal properties of the language faculty as well as the source of cross-linguistic variation. They cover a wide range of empirical phenomena across languages such as locality deletion verb classes XP-split constructions Quantifier Raising the EPP the Person Case Constraint etc. Some of the articles pay particular attention to the organization of the grammar the type of operations that are effective the role of features in determining variation and primitive notions of phrase-structure (c-command Agree etc.). Others show how structural differences capture semantic and morphological differences within a language and across languages and how these are the ultimate source of linguistic variation. The book is of primary interest to researchers and students in syntactic theory comparative syntax and linguistic variation.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

This volume presents a collection of papers of recent generative research into the properties of phrasal and feature movement which explore these key syntactic phenomena from different angles and across languages. The papers advance or build on models of movement which capitalize either on generalized feature movement or on generalized remnant movement. Both these approaches attempt to develop a restrictive theory of movement aiming at a simplification of the operations of the computational system. Despite the fact that they are so different technically generalized feature movement and generalized remnant movement both push the theory of movement to the same direction in two important respects: (a) Elimination of head movement. (b) Elimination of covert movement. The book is of primary interest to researchers and students in theoretical linguistics and syntactic theory.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis demonstrates the application of pragmatic theory (including speech act theory deixis politeness implicature and relevance theory) to the study of historical literary and fictional letters from extended correspondences producing an historically informed richly situated account of the meanings and interpretations of those letters that a close reading affords. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language historical pragmatics discourse analysis as well as to social and cultural historians and literary critics.

This is the second volume of papers on sign-based linguistics to emerge from Columbia School linguistics conferences. One set of articles offers semantic analyses of grammatical features of specific languages: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary do; Italian pronouns egli and lui; the Celtic-influenced use of on (e.g. ‘he played a trick on me’); a monosemic analysis of the English verb break. A second set deals with general theoretical issues: a solution to the problem that noun class markers (e.g. Swahili) pose for sign-based linguistics; the appropriateness of statistical tests of significance in text-based analysis; the word or the morpheme as the locus of paradigmatic inflectional change; the radical consequences of Saussure’s anti-nomenclaturism for syntactic analysis; the future of ‘minimalist linguistics’ in a maximalist world. A third set explains phonotactic patterning in terms of ease of articulation: aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants in Urdu; initial consonant clusters in more than two dozen languages. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical points of each article and their relation to the Columbia School framework. The collection is relevant to cognitive semanticists and functionalists as well as those working in the sign-based Jakobsonian and Guillaumist frameworks.

This book explores factors relevant in the choices speakers and writers make in regard to explicitness of reference to the subjects and objects in their utterances. Bulgarian is a particularly felicitous target language for this type of study since it possesses a rich inventory of available packaging techniques ranging from zero reference to various stressed and unstressed single forms to actual doubled (“reduplicated”) constructions. The study systematically addresses the need to avoid referential and grammatical ambiguity and the crucial influence of emphasis. Another and perhaps most interesting central factor is the status of what the communication is about which is assessed on two different levels. The book makes use of data from both published Bulgarian fiction and naturally occurring oral conversations. The fundamental similarities between these modes of communication with respect to noun phrase selection is demonstrated but explanations are also proposed for the observable differences.

Given widespread media attention to issues of crime and its prevention police heroism and new modes of police-community involvements this international collection is timely. It is unique in examining ways in which police and citizens communicate across a range of contexts and problem areas. While much attention is afforded the critical roles of communication by police agencies there has been little recourse to communication science and its theories. Likewise the latter has not until recently concerned itself with analyzing police-citizen interactions. This volume examines the character of such encounters forging new theoretical frameworks having implications for practice in many instances. Topics include media portrayals of law enforcement communication and new technologies within police culture domestic violence hate crimes stalking sexual abuse and hostage negotiations. This book should be relevant not only to a range of social sciences besides Communication scholars and students but also to practitioners working in the field.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

This volume and its companion one (English Historical Syntax and Morphology CILT 223) offer a selection of papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held at the University of Santiago de Compostela. From the rich programme (over 130 papers were given during the conference) the present thirteen papers were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in the field of English historical linguistics. The areas represented in the volume are lexis and semantics text-types historical sociolinguistics and dialectology and phonology. Many of the articles tackle questions of change and linguistic periodization through the use of methodological tools like corpora linguistic atlases thesauri and historical dictionaries. The theoretical frameworks adopted include among others multi-dimensional analysis systemic-functional grammar Communication Accommodation Theory historical discourse analysis and Optimality Theory.

This book covers different aspects of speech and language pathology and it offers a fairly comprehensive overview of the complexity and the emerging importance of the field by identifying and re-examining from different perspectives a number of standard assumptions in clinical linguistics and in cognitive sciences. The papers encompass different issues in phonetics phonology syntax semantics and pragmatics discussed with respect to deafness stuttering child acquisition and impairments SLI William’s Syndrome deficit fluent aphasia and agrammatism. The interdisciplinary complexity of the language/cognition interface is also explored by focusing on empirical data from different languages: Bantu Catalan Dutch English German Greek Hebrew Italian Japanese and Spanish. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The aim of this volume is to stress the growing importance of the theoretical and methodological linguistic tools developed in this area; to bring under scrutiny assumptions taken for granted in recent analyses which may not be so obvious as they may seem; to investigate how even apparently minimal choices in the description of phenomena may affect the form and complexity of the language/cognition interface.

Lexical effects on language processing are currently a major focus of attention in studies of sentence comprehension. This thematic collection provides a uniquely multi-faceted and integrated viewpoint on key aspects of lexicalist theories drawing from the fields of theoretical linguistics computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. The focus of this stimulating volume is on a number of central topics: The discussion of foundational issues concerning the nature of the lexicon and its relationship to sentence understanding; the exploration of the relationship between syntactic and lexical processing; and the investigation of the specific content of lexical entries especially for verbs. The authors draw on a range of methodologies from computational modeling to corpus studies to behavioral and neuro-imaging experimental techniques. The breadth of topics and methodologies is brought together by the articulated critical analysis of the field provided in the introduction. The research reported here elaborates both the structure and the probabilistic content of lexical representations and meets up with work in computer science linguistics psychology and philosophy on the relation between conceptual grammatical and statistical knowledge.