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Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad range of data involving different kinds of motion events previously understudied such as caused motion (e.g. kick a ball across) and even visual motion (e.g. look into a hole). Special attention is also paid to deixis a hitherto neglected aspect of motion event descriptions. A wide range of languages is examined including those spoken in Europe Africa and Asia. The results provide new insights into the patterns languages deploy to represent motion events. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in language universals and typology as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with sub­ject inversion subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text begin­nings jokes stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives thus speech acts without com­mu­nicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contribu­tions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which in contrast to German and English sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.

Differential Object marking (DOM) a linguistic phenomenon in which a direct object is morphologically marked for semantic and pragmatic reasons has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics in the past few years. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages whereas it has disappeared from others; it is easily acquired by monolingual children but presents high instability and variability in bilingual acquisition and language contact situations. This edited collection contributes to further our understanding of the nature and development of DOM in the languages of the world in acquisition and in language contact variation and change. The thirteen chapters in this volume present new empirical data from Estonian Spanish Turkish Korean Hindi Romanian and Basque in different acquisition contexts and learner populations. They also bring together multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives to account for the complexity and dynamicity of this widespread linguistic phenomenon.

This book opens with Angelika Kratzer and Luigi Rizzi talking about contemporary issues such as non-recursiveness of focus and the semantics of topics. The chapters climb down the spine from the left periphery to DP: the value of subjunctive across the history of German expressive expressions in Brazilian Portuguese left and right dislocation and the speaker’s perspective in Italian Brazilian double subjects and left dislocated topic long versus short wh-movement in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French low adverbs and the raising of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese ellipsis and null objects in Brazilian and European Portuguese and bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese. The chapters propose original accounts for language variation and historical changes most of them focusing on Brazilian Portuguese a challenge to syntax and semantics. Thus the volume contributes to Brazilian and Portuguese Linguistics as well as to general and contemporary research on syntax and semantics of natural languages.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic diachronic and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological syntactic and semantic literature namely that so-called reciprocal constructions encode symmetric relations. Instead they are analyzed as constructions encoding unspecified relations. In effect it provides a new proposal for the truth-conditional semantics of these constructions. More broadly this book introduces new ways of bringing together historical linguistics and formal semantics demonstrating how on the one hand the inclusion of historical data concerning the sources of reciprocal constructions enriches their synchronic analysis; and how on the other hand an analysis of the syntax and the semantics of these constructions serves as a key for understanding their historical origins.

The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic antitopic contrastive topic focus verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles sentence-final particles and other medial sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk including Basque French German Italian Kazakh Spanish and Turkish with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.

Lexical Semantics for Terminology: An introduction explores the interconnections between lexical semantics and terminology. More specifically it shows how principles borrowed from lexico-semantic frameworks and methodologies derived from them can help understand terms and describe them in resources. It also explains how lexical analysis complements perspectives primarily focused on knowledge. Topics such as term identification meaning polysemy relations between terms and equivalence are discussed thoroughly and illustrated with examples taken from various fields of knowledge.

This book is an indispensable companion for those who are interested in words and work with specialized terms e.g. terminologists translators lexicographers corpus linguists. A background in terminology or lexical semantics is not required since all notions are defined and explained. This book complements other textbooks on terminology that do not focus on lexical semantics per se.

This monograph answers the rarely discussed questions of why complicated grammatical case phenomena exist in Korean and what the connection is between the case forms and their functions. The author argues that the case forms in Korean reflect patterns of the human cognitive process. While this approach may seem rather obvious to non-linguists it is indeed a novel claim in contemporary linguistic theory. In order to provide technical analyses of Korean case phenomena such as multiple nominative/accusative non-nominative subject and adverbial case constructions this book adopts an independently established descriptive construct known as reference point in the framework of Cognitive Grammar. The author demonstrates that the notion of reference point not only explains a substantially wider set of data but also leads to a more reasonable generalization. The intended readership of this book are researchers who are interested in case phenomena irrespective of their theoretical orientation.

Wine culture is a complex phenomenon of increasing importance in modern society and it combines the joys of wine appreciation with the frustrations of trying to verbally communicate sensory impressions. While wine appreciation is traditionally characterized as joyously convivial in its social dimension sensory impressions remain eminently private. This contrast explains why the language used to represent wine or winespeak is the object of increasing crossdisciplinary interest.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book analyzes the many different forms / many of the different forms of representing wine in present-day society with a special emphasis on winespeak starting from the premise that such study demands a genre approach to the many different communities involved in the wine world: producers/ critics/ merchants/ consumers. By combining the methodologies of Cognitive Linguistics and discourse analysis the authors analyze extensive real-life corpora of wine reviews and multimodal artifacts (labels advertisements documentaries) to reflect on the many inherent difficulties but also to highlight the rich and creative figurative strategies employed to compensate for the absence of a proper wine jargon of a more unambiguous nature.

As a distinctive syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) is one of the most interesting but least well-understood structures in the language. This book offers a comprehensive account of the history structure meaning and use of the PSC. Unlike previous descriptions which were framed in terms of pre-existing grammatical notions such as ‘topicalization’ ‘passivization’ and ‘ergativization’ this book offers a fresh look at the PSC in which its syntactic and semantic as well as its discourse functions are examined within the system of major construction-types of the language as a whole. The PSC being low in transitivity serves primarily the function of backgrounding in discourse. Typologically the PSC bears a resemblance to middle constructions in Indo-European and other languages raising interesting questions about ways to understand congruent and divergent syntactic structures across the world’s languages. This book will be of interest to students of Chinese Linguistics as well as Language Typology.