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The book is a research monograph that reviews and revises the concept of linguistic pejoration and explores the role of 15 suffixes and combining forms such as -ie -o -ard -holic -rrhea -itis -porn -ish in the formation of English pejoratives. The examination of the inner structure of the resulting derivatives is based on an innovative methodology that encompasses the theories and approaches of Construction Morphology Componential Analysis and Morphopragmatics. Following the principles of this methodology pejorative words collected from dictionaries and corpora (a total of approximately 950 words) are abstracted into generalizations (or constructional schemas) where structural and functional similarities are used to cognitively trace the ways in which negative (or derisive) meaning is connected with a specific form. Through this multifaceted methodology my analysis showcases the fact that the universal properties of ‘diminution’ ‘excess’ ‘resemblance’ and ‘metonymization’ are what underlie the making of pejorative meaning. These generalizations along with the schematic representations of formatives can help linguists or linguistics enthusiasts in general to understand the conventions and intricacy of lexical pejoration.

This book addresses the topic of linguistic categorization from a novel perspective. While most of the early research has focused on how linguistic systems reflect some pre-existing ways of categorizing experience the contributions included in this volume seek to understand how linguistic resources of various nature (prosodic cues affixes constructions discourse markers …) can be ‘put to work’ in order to actively build categories in discourse and in interaction to achieve social goals. This question is addressed in different ways by researchers from different subfields of linguistics including psycholinguistics conversation analysis linguistic typology and discourse pragmatics and a major point of innovation is represented in fact by the interdisciplinary nature of the volume and in the systematic search for converging evidence.

This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of modal expressions and their development and to illustrate the processes that are involved in these developments on the basis of data from languages such as English Finnish French Galician German and Japanese. The studies in this volume are organized around three interrelated topics. The first of these concerns the organization of modal constructions in a network. A second focus area of the studies in this volume concerns the developmental pathways that modal constructions follow diachronically. The third topic that ties the contributions of this volume together is the contrast between constructionalization and constructional change.

The relation between pragmatic markers and the peripheries of clauses utterances and/or turns has been a topic of linguistic interest for the last few decades. Many issues continue to be debated however such as “how should the notion of periphery be defined?” “to what extent do pragmatic markers in the left versus the right periphery fulfill different functions?” and “which factors determine the order of multiple pragmatic markers in a periphery?”. This volume brings together a number of studies addressing these and other questions. It presents new data from a diverse range of languages – including less researched ones in this context like Ainu Latvian and Lithuanian – and on a variety of types of pragmatic marker – including emoji. The volume as a whole offers new insights into among other things the subjectivity intersubjectivity peripheries hypothesis the idea of left-to-right movement and the matrix clauses hypothesis.

Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics but also specialists in the philosophy of language and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics cognitive sciences psycholinguistics anthropology).

This book is a cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary exploration of modality within systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Drawing upon the broad SFL notion of modality that refers to the intermediate degrees between the positive and negative poles the individual papers probe into the modality systems in English and Japanese. The papers cover issues such as the conceptual nature of modality in both languages the characterization of modulation in Japanese the trans-grammatical aspects of modality in relation to mood and grammatical metaphor in both languages and the modality uses and pragmatic impairment by individuals with a developmental disorder from a neurocognitive perspective.<br/>The book demonstrates a functional account of Japanese within an SFL model of language with a fresh perspective to Japanese linguistics. It also refers to cross-linguistic issues concerning how the principles and theories of SFL serve to empirically elaborate descriptions of individual languages which will lead to the enrichment of the theory and practice of linguistics and beyond.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the antipassive construction from synchronic diachronic and typological perspectives. The nineteen contributions assembled in this volume address a wide range of aspects pertinent to the antipassive construction such as lexical semantics the properties of the antipassive markers as well as the issue of fuzzy boundaries between the antipassive construction and a range of other formally and functionally similar constructions in genealogically and areally diverse languages. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that shed light on the diachronic development of the antipassive construction and the antipassive markers. The book should be of central interest to many scholars in particular to those working in the field of language typology semantics syntax and historical linguists as well as to specialists of the language families discussed in the individual contributions.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual cognitive or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity identity and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways the topic remains under-researched though across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language with respect to its connection to cognition and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions diagnostics for mass and count the distribution and role of numeral classifiers abstract mass nouns and object mass nouns (furniture police force clothing).The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual cognitive or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity identity and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways the topic remains under-researched though across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language with respect to its connection to cognition and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions diagnostics for mass and count the distribution and role of numeral classifiers abstract mass nouns and object mass nouns (furniture police force clothing).

While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes employing a bottom-up corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics Construction Grammar and Valency Grammar. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>On this approach verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs frame-semantics and constructions and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions.<br/>This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.

This monograph studies stative predicates from a neo-constructionist perspective and integrates them in a comprehensive theory of event and argument structure. It focuses on two sets of stative verbs: govern-type verbs and object experiencer psychological verbs. For govern-verbs it shows how notions such as causativity and resultativity can also be ingredients of stative predicates and be derived syntactically. The consequences of this proposal are further pursued in a crosslinguistic investigation of adjectival passives which are stative predicates of sorts. For object-experiencer psychological verbs it is shown that their Experiencer theta-role can and should be derived as an aspectual entailment mediated by prepositional structure. In defending this view this monograph reveals a syntactic parallelism between location verbs and object-experiencer psychological verbs in many languages that has hitherto gone unnoticed. This book will primarily appeal to researchers interested in lexical aspect and its connection to morphosyntax.