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This volume presents recent generative research on the nature of grammars of child second language (L2) acquirers -- a learner population whose exposure to an L2 occurs between the ages of 4 to 8. The main goal is to define child L2 acquisition in relation to other types of acquisition such as child monolingual and bilingual acquisition adult L2 acquisition and specific language impairment. This comparative perspective opens up new angles for the discussion of currently debated issues such as the role of Universal Grammar in constraining development developmental sequences in L2 maturational influences on the 'growth' of grammar critical period effects for different linguistic domains initial state and ultimate attainment in relation to length of exposure and L1-transfer in relation to age of onset. These issues are explored using longitudinal cross-sectional and experimental data from L2 children acquiring a range of languages including Dutch English French and Greek.

Taboos are much more than just a synonym of ‘forbidden’. Proof of the concept’s complexity can be found in the way ads often try to hide the taboo inherent to their products or conversely in the way certain taboo readings are foregrounded on purpose in other ads. This volume shows why and how that happens using print and television ads to exemplify (a) the elaborate strategies used by ads for certain products to cleverly hide the taboo inherent to them and (b) the deliberate recourse to taboo references in ads for products that do not present any taboo connotation. The linguistic analysis undertaken takes into account the different modes (verbal language music sound effects moving and static images) that convey meaning in ads. Taboo is very often conveyed or disguised through one of the channels while the others play the opposite role thus achieving a balance that prevents the ad from being too obscure to be understood or too daring for the general public to accept it. For this comprehensive approach concepts are drawn from different disciplines: textual and semiotic analysis from linguistics theories of taboo from anthropology and background to advertising from media studies.

This volume and its companion one Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization offer a selection of papers from the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization held in Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. From the rich programme of the conference (over 120 papers) the twelve contributions included in this volume were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in grammaticalization and suggest possible directions for future investigations in the field. Combining theoretical discussions with the analysis of particular test cases from a wide range of languages from various language families the selected papers focus on such central questions as the need for a broader notion of grammaticalization the distorting effects of grammaticalization on grammar the areal perspective in grammaticalization and the relevance of contact-induced change to grammaticalization. Other topics discussed include the development of markers of textual connectivity and the emergence of cardinal numerals and numeral systems.

This stimulating new book which combines dictionary research and linguistic knowledge analyses the representation of meaning in business dictionaries from a pedagogical perspective. By examining in detail the macrostructure mediostructure access structure and microstructure of eight business dictionaries this book presents interesting findings on how the dictionaries studied represent the ‘noun-term’ and on how they cope with the principles of new lexicography that aims at solving the needs of a specific type of user with specific types of problems related to a specific type of user situation. This exhaustive study which makes simultaneous contributions to the theory of terminology lexicography and LSP teaching defends a methodological confluence between LSP lexicography and terminology and proposes some guiding principles towards the construction of pedagogically-oriented specialised dictionaries that must target students enrolled in LSP courses: Business English Business Spanish Business Translation etc.

The papers comprising this volume focus on a broad range of acquisition phenomena (subject dislocation structural case word order determiners pronouns quantifiers and logical words) from different languages and language combinations. These include languages with large numbers of speakers (French German Spanish) and less frequently spoken ones (Norwegian Russian Swiss-German Hebrew Basque and Serbo-Croatian) within different language acquisition scenarios and a wide range of populations. Most contributions adopt a common theoretical background within the generative approach with the aim to advance discuss and critically analyse other research on first bilingual and language impaired acquisition. The various sections of this stimulating volume reflect different theoretical and methodological perspectives of current research investigating morphology and syntax and offer diverging interpretations.

This monograph presents a morpho-syntactic investigation on modality aspect and negation by concentrating on Persian and is designed to contribute to theoretical linguistics and the study of Iranian languages. The analysis is based on the Minimalist program. This research challenges the idea that the syntactic structure maps on the semantic interpretation or vice versa. The discussion presented in this monograph shows that the syntactic structure of Persian modals is uniform no matter if the modals are interpreted as having root or epistemic readings. Although it is claimed that modals are raising constructions in different languages modals in Persian which does not have subject-raising constructions show a different syntactic behavior. Furthermore the structural analysis of the interaction of Persian modals and negation shows that because of the scope interaction of negation and modals the syntactic structure of modals with respect to negation mostly corresponds to the semantic interpretation of modals.

The main topics pursued in this volume are based on empirical insights derived from Germanic: logical and typological dispositions about aspect-modality links. These are probed in a variety of non-related languages. The logically establishable links are the following: Modal verbs are aspect sensitive in the selection of their infinitival complements – embedded infinitival perfectivity implies root modal reading whereas embedded infinitival imperfectivity triggers epistemic readings. However in marked contexts such as negated ones the aspectual affinities of modal verbs are neutralized or even subject to markedness inversion. All of this suggests that languages that do not or only partially bestow upon full modal verb paradigms seek to express modal variations in terms of their aspect oppositions. This typological tenet is investigated in a variety of languages from Indo-European (German Slavic Armenian) African Asian Amerindian and Creoles. Seeming deviations and idiosyncrasies in the interaction between aspect and modality turn out to be highly rule-based.

The cognitive and language sciences are increasingly oriented towards the social dimension of human cognition and communication. The hitherto dominant approach in modern cognitive science has viewed “social cognition” through the prism of the traditional philosophical puzzle of how individuals solve the problem of understanding Other Minds. The Shared Mind challenges the conventional “theory of mind” approach proposing that the human mind is fundamentally based on intersubjectivity: the sharing of affective conative intentional and cognitive states and processes between a plurality of subjects. The socially shared intersubjective foundation of the human mind is manifest in the structure of early interaction and communication imitation gestural communication and the normative and argumentative nature of language. In this path breaking volume leading researchers from psychology linguistics philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development comparative cognition and evolution and language and linguistic theory.

This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European but also Austronesian Sinitic Mon-Khmer Basque one Papuan language family as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping) reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.

The aim of the present volume is two-fold: to give a coherent account of the locative alternation in English and to develop a constructional theory that overcomes a number of problems in earlier constructional accounts. The lexical-constructional account proposed here is characterized by two main features. On the one hand it emphasizes the need for a detailed examination of verb meanings. On the other it introduces lower-level constructions such as verb-class-specific constructions and verb-specific constructions and makes full use of these lower-level constructions in accounting for alternation phenomena. Rather than being a completely new version of construction grammar the proposed lexical-constructional account is an automatic consequence of the basic tenet of constructional approaches as being usage-based.