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This book is about one of the most fundamental action sequences found across human societies and socio-cultural contexts: polar questions and their responses. Question–answer sequences are among the most basic building blocks for sequences of action in interaction and are ubiquitous among the languages of the world. Among different types of questions polar questions are the most common occurring with greater frequency in all studied languages. This volume presents a collection of conversation analytic studies into responses to polar questions across ten different typologically diverse languages in a range of action environments and social contexts. The studies explore different ways in which speakers can respond to polar questions and the relationships between response design the action implemented by the response and the context in which it occurs. Taken together the studies assembled in the volume present a nuanced view of polar responses as a situated social action.

The range of meanings expressed by derivatives formed by the attachment of the four principal verb-forming suffixes - ate - en - ify and - ize has been the subject of extensive analysis for over two decades. From a descriptive perspective the research reported in this volume constitutes the most comprehensive usage-based analysis of verbal derivatives available to date and provides register-based and diachronic comparisons of usage and distribution patterns across corpora of spoken English. The semantic analysis adopts the seven well-established semantic categories of verbal derivatives and extends the set to twenty by including further meaning classes documented in the morphological literature and additional senses that emerged from the contextualized analysis of complex verbs in the datasets. From a theoretical standpoint the novel approach involves the explicit linking of affix schemas to argument structure constructions and proposes a unified model of verb-forming suffixation that accounts for the multi-functional characteristics of verbal derivatives from a constructional perspective.

This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction) and investigates (ii) the relationships between locative existential and information structure (iii) the quantification of the pivot and (iv) the issue of negative existentials. It brings together different and complementary approaches (functional cognitive pragmatic typological comparative diachronic philosophical) based on a wide variety of data sources. The contributions illustrate how the so-called existential construction can take a variety of forms – more or less grammaticalized – and functions – ranging from the expression of literal existence to that of localization and discursive focus – in a wide range of languages. The book will be valuable for linguists researchers or students interested in the cross-linguistic manifestations of existential constructions at the interface between syntax semantics and information structure.

This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic evidential hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position prosody the semantics of the adverbial its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory the semantics/pragmatics interface the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure as well as for syntacticians semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality syntactic and interpretational.

This collection presents novel insights into the micro- and macro-variation of causal clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. It contains a general introduction to the topic setting the scene and nine chapters based on data from Dutch German English Icelandic Chinese and Japanese. Topics discussed in the individual chapters involve inter alia external internal and linear syntax of adverbial clauses expressing a causal relation their semantic interpretation and information-structural properties verb position volitionality and the development of particular causal conjunctions. The findings gained here are of synchronic and diachronic nature and offer new theoretical perspectives on how causal dependency relationships are expressed by inherent causal morpho-syntactic patterns. They also provide a deeper comprehension of how sentential modifiers work emerge and develop in general. This volume is an asset to grammarians syntacticians theoretical and historical linguists.

This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics semantics discourse analysis psycholinguistics interactional linguistics natural language processing) in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English German different varieties of French Indonesian Belgian sign language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining of names language acquisition second language learning and various genres such as news articles narratives satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust depending on the context.

A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks is devoted to the issue of the relation between language and thought approached from the perspective of spatial relations encoded by four equivalent spatial prepositions – English to German zu Polish do and Russian к. Regarding these prepositions as path-prepositions the authors show that the prepositional semantic structures are conceptually grounded in the PATH and the MOTION-EVENT frames and explain that prepositional senses emerge as a result of the PATH image schema transformations and metaphorical mappings related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor. Based on their findings the authors show how senso-motoric functioning life experience individual knowledge imagery and different ways in which people conceptualize the world influence the relation between language and conceptualization.

The reflexive constructions that are the focus of this book are the constructions broadly described with the term “middle”: i.e. those that can appear in all persons and in which the reflexive marker (RM) cannot be understood as a full referential pronoun. One goal of this study is to provide a corpus-based typology of middle and related uses that allow us to compare the behaviour of the RM in these constructions with previous typological accounts where competing models (based either on changes of diathesis or on the semantics of the verbal event) can be found. A second goal is to shed light on the evolution of the different functions of the RM by exploring the factors that affect its productivity with a specific focus on those verbs where reflexive marking is most variable that is anticausative verbs and verbs with no change of valency. These reflexive constructions show a notable difference in productivity in Spanish and Galician although the languages are closely related and contiguous. The languages are thus good candidates for a contrastive and variationist analysis serving these two goals. The semantic class of the predicate its aspectual properties and the animacy of the subject are some of the most relevant factors that are taken into account to understand the motivations behind the presence (or absence) of the RM. By relying on a corpus of interviews from rural communities across peninsular Spain (except Catalonia) space as a relevant extra-linguistic variable is taken into account helping uncover previously unknown geographical patterns.

Since its foundation in the 1980's Construction Grammar has been crossing the traditionally imposed borders. From superimposed levels of analysis to the lexicon-grammar continuum the constructionist approach to language has been built by quoting Charles Fillmore "the insistence on seeing specific grammatical patterns as serving given semantic (and often pragmatic) purposes and in the effort to construct a uniform theory capable of presenting both the simplest and most general aspects of language and the large world of complex grammatical structures". In this volume five chapters derived from the plenary talks at the 9th International Conference on Construction Grammar provide a sample of the bridges the insistence and effort of construction grammarians have built in the past three decades with other analytical models – namely Cognitive Grammar and Collostructional Analysis – perspectives – Diachronic Construction Grammar – and applications – Language Pedagogy and Natural Language Understanding.

Originally published as special issue of Constructions and Frames 12:1 (2020).

What is it like? – This is often the first question we ask about any object and it is typically answered with adjectives: old smooth pointed narrow etc. Characteristics of things around us is a fundamental aspect of how we conceptualize the physical world regardless of when or where we live – and regardless of our language. Despite this the vocabulary of physical qualities has received comparatively little attention in lexical typology: most research so far has focused on verbs and the actions they express.

This volume presents a lexico-typological study of several domains of physical qualities: ‘sharp’/‘blunt’ ‘wet’ ‘empty’/‘full’ ‘old’ as well as dimensions temperature and surface texture. It discusses several theoretical issues including intragenetic language sampling the possibility of signed vs. spoken language comparison at the lexicon level and the potential of applying computational models of distributional semantics to lexical typology.

The book will be of interest to linguists with a focus on typology general and lexical semantics to lexicographers and to language students and teachers.