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Pompeu Fabra (1868-1948) is renowned as the person who reformed and codified modern Catalan giving it the condition of a normativised language of culture that proved fit to meet all the challenges of the twentieth century. The context in which he worked was defined by the ideology and momentum of a dynamic Catalan nationalism emerging out of the nineteenth-century cultural revival movement energies which have continued to affect politics in the Spanish state through to the present. The imposing corpus of Fabra’s writings —newspaper articles lectures and papers various grammars and the redaction of the official dictionary of Catalan— covered all aspects of the normativisation and the social normalisation of a rejuvenated national language. His work was moreover abreast of the most advanced developments in the newly emerging discipline of modern linguistics.The present volume was conceived in response to expressions of disappointment that the figure and the intellectual contributions of Pompeu Fabra have remained virtually unrecognised internationally. Some rectification of this situation is offered by this first ever translation into English of a representative selection of his writings accompanied by the first substantial study on him in that language. In this way his work should be made much more accessible to the international community of linguists and of specialists in various branches of the social sciences for whom Fabra’s exclusive dedication to Catalan retains great relevance.

The aim of this monograph is to give impetus to research into one of the central questions in discourse studies: what makes a sequence of sentences or utterances a discourse? <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The theoretical framework for describing the possibilities of discourse continuation is delineated by two principles: the discursive and the dialogic principle. The ‘chord’ of discourse is unfolded in a tripartite ‘wire’: Conjunction Adjunction and Interjunction each containing three aspects leading to a Connectivity Model. This new three-by-three taxonomy of discourse relations incorporates findings from several theories and approaches that have evolved over the last three decades including Systemic Functional Linguistics and Rhetorical Structure Theory. In comparing this model to other models this book presents a state-of-the-art of discourse relation analysis combined with detailed accounts of many examples. This monograph furthermore proposes a new way of presenting discourse structures—in ‘connectivity graphs’—followed by eleven commandments for the segmentation and labeling of discourse and three procedures for disambiguation if more labels are applicable. This study can provide a base for corpus linguistic analysis on discourse structures computational approaches to discourse generation and cognitive experimental research of discourse competence.

Metrics is often defined as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of meters. In this volume the term is used in a broader sense that more or less coincides with the traditional notion of “versification”. Understood this way metrics is an eminently complex object that displays variation over time and in space that concerns forms of a great variety and with different statuses (meters rhymes stanzas prescribed forms syllabification rules nursery rhymes slogans musical textsetting ablaut reduplication etc.) and that as a cultural manifestation is performed in a variety of ways (sung chanted spoken read) that can have direct consequences on how it is structured. This profusion of forms is thought to correspond at the level of perception to a limited number of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and to represent regularly iterating forms. This volume proposes a relatively coherent overall vision by distinguishing four main families of metrical forms each clearly independent of the others and amenable to separate typologies.

Against the background of jargon-ridden and often obscure semiotic literature Sadowski’s book offers a reader-friendly yet rigorous account of human communication and its evolution from animal and primate behaviour. What is specifically human about the way we exchange information with other people and to what extent are our facial expressions body language and even emotive elements of speech still indebted to our pre-human ancestors? Why can the chimpanzees smart as they are not interpret animal tracks in the ground; why did religions often ban representational art; why is photography perceptually more powerful than painting; how have human syntactic speech and combinatorial grammar enabled the “explosion” of culture; and why do otherwise rational humans often strongly believe in the objective existence of unempirical virtual entities such as religious and philosophic concepts? These and many other fascinating questions are addressed in the book within the methodological framework of systems theory and evolutionary psychology.

This detailed study challenges the claim that syntax is arbitrary and autonomous as well as the assumption that Spanish clitic clusters constitute grammaticalized units. Diverse--apparently unrelated--restrictions on clitic clustering in both simplex VP's and Accusative cum Infinitive structures are shown to be cognitively motivated given the meaning of the individual clitics and the compositional/interpretative routines those meanings motivate. The analysis accounts in coherent and principled fashion for the absolute non-occurrence of some clusters and the interpretation-dependent acceptability of all remaining clitic combinations: cluster acceptability depends on the ease with which the given clitic combination can be processed to yield a congruent message; there is no point in combining clitics whose meanings preclude speedy processing of the cluster. The monograph goes beyond previous work on Spanish clitics in its wealth of data the range of syntactic phenomena discussed and its analytic scope.

This volume deals with issues on negation patterns in languages of West Africa and the adjacent north and east. The first aim is to provide data on various aspects of negation in African languages. Although the topics addressed here reflect a great diversity of negation patterns the following typological features have been identified to be prominent in our region: conflict or even incompatibility between negation and focus use of other indirect means of negating non-indicative mood (covered under the term ‘Prohibitive’) different negation patterns in different Tense-Aspect-Moods (e.g. Imperfective vs. Perfective) lack of negative indefinites and disjunctive negative marking (often referred to as ‘double negation’). The articles presented here show that areal factors have played a significant role in the development of negation strategies in the languages of West Africa and beyond. On the other hand genetic factors seem to be less prominent.

Within a new model of language acquisition this book discusses verb second (V2) word order in situations where there is variation in the input. While traditional generative accounts consider V2 to be a parameter this study shows that in many languages this word order is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. Thus within a split-CP model of clause structure a number of micro-cues are formulated taking into account the specific context for V2 vs. non-V2 (clause type subcategory of the elements involved etc.). The micro-cues are produced in children’s I-language grammars on exposure to the relevant input. Focusing on a dialect of Norwegian the book shows that children generally produce target-consistent V2 and non-V2 from early on indicating that they are sensitive to the micro-cues. This includes contexts where word order is dependent on information structure. The children’s occasional non-target-consistent behavior is accounted for by economy principles.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical cognitive cultural social variational interactional or discursive points of view this fifth volume looks at the field of linguistic pragmatics from a primarily grammatical angle. That is it asks in which particular sense a variety of older and more recent functional (rather than generative) models of grammar relate to the study of language in use: how this affects their general outlook on language structure whether issues of language use inform the very makeup of these models or are merely included as possible research themes and how far the actual integration of pragmatics ultimately goes (is it a module/layer or is the model truly “usage-based”?). Each of the authors presenting these models has taken systematic care to highlight the relevant problems and focus on the implications of considering pragmatic phenomena from the point of view of grammar. Furthermore a limited number of chapters deal with traditional topics in the grammatical literature and specifically those which are called pragmatic because they either are not strictly concerned with truth (semantics) or receive their (truth) value only from an interaction with context. In the introduction these theories and topics are set up against the historical background of a gradually changing attitude on the part of grammarians towards questions of linguistic knowledge and behavior and the role of learning in their relationship.

The studies in this collection address a topic that has recently become the focus of considerable interest in second language acquisition (SLA) research: the acquisition of articles. Languages appear to vary in whether they have articles (English German Norwegian do but Chinese Japanese Russian do not). Languages that have articles also appear to divide into those that realise definiteness (e.g. English) and those that realise specificity (e.g. Samoan). When speakers of one type of language learn an L2 of a different type issues of central concern to SLA research arise: the nature of L1 influence the time course of development ultimate attainment the relationship between performance and competence and the role of Universal Grammar. These issues are considered in nine studies written by researchers whose work is at the forefront of enquiry that offer new data new perspectives and new insights into the way L2 speakers acquire articles.

Linguistic Cycles are ever present in language change and involve a phrase or word that gradually disappears and is replaced by a new linguistic item. The most well-known cycles involve negatives where an initial single negative such as not is reinforced by another negative such as no thing and subjects where full pronouns are reanalyzed as endings on the verb. This book presents new data and insights on the well-known cyclical changes as well as on less well-known ones such as the preposition auxiliary copula modal and complementation cycles. Part I covers the negative cycle with chapters looking in great detail at the steps that are typical in this cycle. Part II focuses on pronouns auxiliaries and the left periphery. Part III includes work on modals prepositions and complementation. The book ends with a psycholinguistic chapter. This book brings together linguists from a variety of theoretical frameworks and contributes to new directions in work on language change.