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This is a new contribution to a theory of reiteration in natural languages with a special focus on creoles. Reiteration is meant to denote any situation where the same form occurs (at least) twice within the boundaries of some linguistic domain. By including two case studies bearing on Hebrew and Breton alongside five chapters on creole languages (Surinam creole Haitian Mauritian São Tomé and Pitchi) this volume brings counter-evidence to the claim that reiteration phenomena are particularly typical of creoles. And by exploring the syntax of reiteration alongside its morphology the authors are led to challenge the 'iconic' theory of 'reduplication' proposed in several other studies of similar phenomena. This volume will be relevant for creole studies but also for readers more generally interested in language universals and the architecture of grammars.

Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons takes the study of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) into the 21st century without neglecting the origins of the topic. It brings together work by both established and up-and-coming scholars who present analyses for a wide range of MCP from a variety of languages with a particular focus on particles and agreement markers complementizers and verb second and the licensing of MCP in different types of clauses. Besides enriching the empirical domain this volume also engages with the theoretical question of how best to capture the distribution of MCP and in particular to what extent they are embeddable and why. The diverse patterns and analyses presented challenge the idea that MCP constitute a homogeneous class. Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons is of interest not just to scholars specializing in the study of MCP but to all linguists interested in the syntax and/or semantics of the clause.

Hans den Besten (1948-2010) made numerous contributions to Afrikaans linguistics over a period of nearly three decades. His writings helped shift the perspective on the roots of Afrikaans beyond Dutch to the structure and vocabulary of Khoekhoe to Portuguese Creole and to Malay varieties. This volume contains a selection of Den Besten’s most important papers – some of which originally appeared in less accessible journals – concerning the structure and history of Afrikaans. They cover a wide range of topics including grammatical structure vocabulary the historical development of Afrikaans as well its multiple roots. It is essential reading for any linguist interested in language contact and language change.

Le parole di una lingua non sono mai isolate ma si usano in combinazione e non con qualunque parola ma solo con alcune. Per parlare bene bisogna usare le combinazioni appropriate. In italiano si dice un tozzo di pane per indicare un pezzo di pane ma si dice anche un tozzo di carne? E una discussione si solleva? O si solleva un’obiezione? Una discussione si affronta ma un’obiezione? In italiano non si dice fare un appuntamento con qualcuno ma fissare o prendere un appuntamento. Ogni lingua preferisce combinazioni diverse e quindi è facile sbagliare quando si parla una lingua straniera. A volte però anche il parlante nativo sbaglia o non è sicuro.

Questo dizionario ricostruisce l’ambiente linguistico di circa 3.000 entrate per aiutare ogni parlante a comunicare in italiano. È destinato al parlante straniero che ha una conoscenza avanzata della lingua italiana ma anche al parlante nativo che è in cerca della parola giusta. Un dizionario che si distingue dai normali dizionari monolingui e bilingui perché indica sistematicamente le combinazioni lessicali (circa 90.000) molto spesso spiegandole e/o accompagnandole con esempi per chiarirne l’uso.

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Words are never used in isolation but in combination and not with any word but only with certain specific words. To use a language properly the appropriate combinations must be used. In Italian a piece of bread is a tozzo di pane but is that the case for meat? Is a tozzo di carne an appropriate combination? If you want to make an appointment with somebody you should not say (as in English) fare un appuntamento but fissare un appuntamento. An Italian affronta una discussione (enters or tackles a discussion) but is it possible for him to say affrontare un’obiezione (to enter or tackle an objection)? Yes it is as this dictionary shows. So every language has its own preferences in word combinations misleading a non-native learner into making mistakes influenced by his own language.

This dictionary reconstructs the frame to which 3000 Italian entries belong and aims to help non-Italian speakers with an advanced linguistic competence to find the appropriate word combinations for communicating in Italian. Moreover this dictionary can also be useful for native speakers who want to improve their lexical choices in writing and speaking Italian. The dictionary contrary to ordinary monolingual and bilingual dictionaries systematically lists word combinations (almost 90000) explaining and/or exemplifying them.

Also available: Dizionario Combinatorio Italiano a more extensive 2-volume hardcover edition with 6500 entries listing over 200000 word combinations.

We gesture while we talk and children use gestures prior to words to communicate during the first year. Later as words become the preferred form of communication children continue to gesture to reinforce or extend the spoken messages or even to replace them. This volume originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture 10:2/3 (2010) brings together studies from language acquisition and developmental psychology. It provides a review of common theoretical methodological and empirical themes and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants with a special and new focus on pointing the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically developing and deaf children and even how gesture can help to learn mathematics. All in all it brings additional evidence on how gestures are related to language communication and mind development.

The writing and reading of so-called literary texts can be seen as processes which are genuinely communicational. They lead that is to say to the growth of communities within which individuals acknowledge not only each other’s similarities but differences as well. In this new book Roger D. Sell and his colleagues apply the communicational perspective to the past four centuries of literary activity in English. Paying detailed attention to texts – both canonical and non-canonical – by Amelia Lanyer Thomas Coryate John Boys Pope Coleridge Arnold Kipling William Plomer Auden Walter Macken Robert Kroetsch Rudy Wiebe and Lyn Hejinian the book shows how the communicational issues of addressivity commonality dialogicality and ethics have arisen in widely different historical contexts. At a metascholarly level it suggests that the communicational criticism of literary texts has significant cultural social and political roles to play in the post-postmodern era of rampant globalization.

Cleft constructions have long presented an analytical challenge for syntactic theory. This monograph argues that clefts and related constructions cannot be analysed in a straightforwardly compositional manner. Instead it proposes that the locality conditions on modification (for example by a restrictive relative clause) must be reformulated such that they account for the apparent compositionality of DP-internal modification whilst also permitting ‘discontinuous’ modification of the type which is independently needed for constructions such as relative clause extraposition. The empirical focus of the book is on clefts in English and Russian which have a similar interpretation but considerably divergent syntactic structures. The author argues that despite these syntactic differences both types of cleft are mapped to their semantic interpretations in the same manner. This monograph will be essential reading for those working on cleft constructions and copular sentences more generally and will be of interest to those working on the syntax-semantics interface.

This volume explores the roots of Europe's struggle with multilingualism. It argues that over the centuries the pursuit of linguistic homogeneity has become a central aspect of the mindset of Europeans. In its extreme form it became manifest in the principle of 'one language one state one people'. Consequently multilingualism came to be viewed as an undesirable aberration. The authors of this volume approach the relationship between standard languages and multilingualism from a historical cross-European perspective. They provide a comprehensive overview of the emergence of a standard language ideology and its intricate relationship with matters of ethnicity territorial unity and social mobility. They explain for different European language areas in what ways the emergence of standard languages had an impact on multilingual policies and practices. Its comparative approach makes this volume an important resource for linguists researchers from different philologies and social historians.

The present volume contains selected papers from the 14th International Morphology Meeting held in Budapest 13–16 May 2010 organized under the auspices of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The selection of papers presented here addresses problems of language use in one or another sense covering issues of regularity irregularity and analogy as well as the role of frequency in morphological complexity morphological change and language acquisition. The languages discussed include Dutch German Greek Hungarian Lovari (Romani) and Russian. The contributors are Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis Mario Andreou Márton András Baló Dunstan Brown Gabriela Caballero Anna Maria Di Sciullo Wolfgang U. Dressler Roger Evans Alice C. Harris László Kálmán Katharina Korecky-Kröll Sabine Laaha Laura E. Lettner Maria Mitsiaki Péter Rácz Angela Ralli Péter Rebrus Alan K. Scott and Miklós Törkenczy.

The volume contributes to historical pragmatics an important chapter on what has so far not been paid adequate attention to i.e. historical metapragmatics. More particularly the collected papers apply a meta-communicative approach to historical texts by focusing on lexis that either directly or metaphorically identifies or characterizes entire forms of communication or single acts and act sequences or minor units. Within the context of their use such lexical expressions in fact provide a key for disclosing historical forms of communication; taken out of context they build the meta-communicative lexicon.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The articles follow three principal distinctions in that they investigate the meta-communicative profile of genres meta-communicative lexical sets and meta-communicative ethics and ideologies. They cover a broad spectrum of text types that span the entire history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon chronicles to computer-mediated communication.