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The papers in this collection share a common interest in the empirical theoretical and meta-theoretical aspects of the ‘internal-external’ (‘formal-functional’) debate in linguistic theory. The primary aim of this volume is to initiate cooperation between internationally renowned generative and variationist linguists with a view to developing an innovative and more cohesive approach to syntactic variation. The present volume contains treatments incorporating the analysis of external factors into accounts focusing on the internal linguistic conditioning of syntactic variation and change cross-linguistically. As such it offers novel approaches to three key areas of current linguistic debate viz. (1) Methodological practices (2) Theoretical applications and (3) Modularity. The volume is therefore an important achievement for the progress of linguistic theory more generally and it is an even more crucial milestone in the coming-of-age of ‘Socio-Syntax’ as a discipline in its own right.

This book belongs to the rapidly growing field of historical pragmatics. More specifically it aims to lend definition to the area of historical sociopragmatics. It seeks to enhance our understanding of the language of the historical courtroom by documenting changes to the discursive roles of the most active participant groups of the English courtroom (e.g. the judges lawyers witnesses and defendants) in the period 1640–1760. Although the primary focus is on questions and answers this book also analyses the use of eliciting and non-eliciting devices (e.g. requests and commands) as a means of demonstrating similarities and differences over time. Particular strengths of this work include the study of different types of trial making the results potentially more representative of the courtroom in general and the innovative discourse analytic approach which blends corpus methodology and sociopragmatic analysis thereby enabling the quantitative analysis of functional phenomena.

Metaphor is a topical issue across a number of disciplines wherever researchers are concerned with how speakers and writers package and process messages. This book is addressed at readers from diverse academic backgrounds who are interested in ways of researching metaphor from different perspectives and especially through corpus linguistics. A number of approaches to and exploitations of metaphor including conceptual metaphor theory and cognitive approaches more generally text and spoken discourse analysis and CDA are discussed explored and critiqued using corpus data. The book also includes corpus linguistic studies of different aspects of metaphor which investigate its linguistic and semantic properties and relate them to current theoretical views. The book demonstrates the need for naturally-occurring language data to be used in the development of metaphor theory and shows the value of corpus data and techniques in this work.

This book uses Conversation Analysis methodology to analyze rhetorical and other questions that are designed to convey assertions rather than seek new information. It shows how these question sequences unfold interactionally in naturally-occurring talk in a variety of settings e.g. friends arguing over the phone parents disciplining children news interviews and second language writing conferences. The questions are used across these widely different contexts to perform a number of related social actions such as accusations challenges to prior turns and complaints. Those used in institution settings such as teacher-student conferences orient to institutional norms and roles and can help accomplish institutional goals e.g. eliciting student error correction. Both the interactional context in which these questions are embedded and the known epistemic authority of the questioner play a role in our understanding of these questions i.e. what social actions the question is accomplishing in a particular interaction.

The chapters in this volume arise from presentations at a unique conference on typical and atypical language development held in Madison USA in 2002. This joint meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language and the Symposium for Research in Child Language Disorders brought together – for the first time in such large numbers – researchers from these two distinct but related fields. The week-long schedule of the conference allowed for an in-depth interrogation of their theoretical positions methodologies and findings. In the contributions to this volume we have put together a carefully selected set of papers which from various perspectives explore the linkage between developmental theory and language impairment and at the same time illustrate the effects of distinct conditions – hearing loss autism Down syndrome Williams syndrome and specific language impairment – on the communication abilities of affected individuals. An introductory chapter and a detailed summary which picks up recurring themes in the chapters complete the volume.

The C-ORAL-ROM book and DVD provide a unique set of comparable corpora of spontaneous speech for the main Romance languages French Italian Portuguese and Spanish. The corpora are accompanied by comparative linguistic studies models and standard linguistic measures of spoken language variability. Each corpus is built to the same design using identical sampling techniques and each corpus is presented in multimedia format allowing simultaneous access to aligned acoustic and textual information. Texts are headed with information about provenance participants etc. and the transcriptions show changes of speaker. Speech acts are tagged according to the evidence of prosodic criteria. Each corpus totals 300000 words and presents formal and informal speech in a variety of contexts of use dialogue structure and text genres semantic domains and speech act typologies. The corpora have great statistical relevance for spoken language structures and can address key issues in human language technology such as speech recognition in unrestricted discourse the suitability of speech synthesis in natural prosody and multilingual applications of the spoken language interface. The work provides new data and innovative theoretical perspectives that are relevant for corpus linguistics romance linguistics syntactic theory speech and prosody research and second language acquisition.

The original C-ORAL-ROM DVD was made to run under Windows XP when Windows 7 and 8 were not yet in existence. A new version of WINPITCH-C-ORAL-ROM makes it possible to run the C-ORAL-ROM DVD under Windows 7 and 8. It can be downloaded from www.winpitch.com/

This book proposes that the two “independent” conditions on argumenthood namely case and referentiality are strongly correlated and have to be associated with each other in syntax as syntactic features. It shows that languages exhibit variation in the way this association is implemented in their syntax which presents an explanation for the differences observed in their phrase structure in terms of (non-)configurationality. Thus this book not only presents an innovative overarching theory for case and referentiality but also aims to bring a new look at the issues of (non-)configurationality. It specifically argues for parameterization of functional categories associated with case and referentiality which has certain implications not only for the acquisition but also for the diachronic development of functional categories. Providing rich comparative data from typologically different languages such as Turkish Chinese Hungarian English and Japanese this book is of particular interest to typologists as well.

This book explores the interaction of the grammar with the external systems conceptual-intentional and sensori-motor. The papers in the Language section include configurational analyses of the interface properties of depictives clitic clusters imperatives conditionals clefts as well as asymmetries in the structure of syllables and feet. The Brain section discusses questions related to human learning and comprehension of language: the acquisition of compounds the acquisition of the definite article the subject/object asymmetry in the comprehension of D-Linked vs. non D-linked questions the evidence for syntactic asymmetries in American Sign Language the acquisition of syllable types and the role of stress shift in the determination of phrase ending. The papers in the Computation section present different perspectives on how the properties of UG can be implemented in a parser; implementations of different theories including configurational selection incorporation and minimalism; and the role of statistical and quantitative approaches in natural language processing.

This is the second volume of the series "Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics" a product of the 21st century COE program held at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). The project has an objective to realize an integration of theoretical and applied linguistics on the basis of computer sciences. With a view to practically applying the results of linguistic analysis to language education the promotion of individual language research has become a high-priority issue. A new field of linguistic research is intended to be developed by elucidating the state of linguistic usage based on the analysis of large amounts of linguistic data. The volume thus consists mainly of language-specific corpus-based analyses on sentence structures in ten different languages such as Nuuchahnulth Korean Chinese Malay Turkish Arabic Russian French English and Spanish. It also includes papers that deal with various theoretical issues in contrastive linguistics and typology.

This volume presents a variety of pragmatic and discourse analytical approaches to a wide range of linguistic data and historical texts including data from English French Irish Latin and Spanish. This diversity of research questions and methods is a feature of the field of historical pragmatics which by its very nature has to take into account the multiplicity of historical contexts and the infinite variety of human interaction. This is highlighted in the book’s introduction by means of the metaphor of "opening windows". Each chapter is a window affording a different view of the linguistic and textual landscape. Some of these windows were opened by historical linguists who have acquired discourse perspectives some by pragmaticians with historical interests and others by literary scholars drawing from linguistic pragmatics. Contributors include L. J. Brinton A. H. Jucker F. Salager-Meyer I. Taavitsainen B. Wehr L. Wright and sixteen others.