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This volume explores new frontiers in the linguistic study of iconic lexemes known as ideophones mimetics and expressives. A large part of the literature on this long-neglected word class has been dedicated to the description of its sound symbolism marked morphophonology and grammatical status in individual languages. Drawing on data from Asian (especially Japanese) African American and European languages the twelve chapters in this volume aim to establish common grounds for theoretical and crosslinguistic discussions of the phonology morphology syntax semantics pragmatics acquisition and variation of iconic lexemes. Not only researchers who are interested in linguistic iconicity but also theoretical linguists and typologists will benefit from the updated insights presented in each study.

This volume is a collection of articles dealing with the linguistic category of possession and its expression in languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia (Uralic Turkic Indo-European and Caucasian) with a few excursions into other parts of the world. Some papers engage in typological comparisons both within and beyond the borders of individual language families focusing on issues of motivation; meaning and forms used in expressing possession; typology of belong constructions; marking possession in possessor chains; non-canonical possessives and their relation to the category of familiarity; metaphoric shifts of possessive semantics. Others focus on possession in individual languages offering new precious pieces of information on the linguistic expression of possession in lesser known languages some of which are endangered and even unwritten. The volume will be of interest to both general linguists and typologists as well as to experts/students of the individual languages or language families analyzed in the papers.

Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings?

To account for these and related empirical questions this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.

Metaphor allows us to think and talk about one thing in terms of another ratcheting up our cognitive and expressive capacity. It gives us concrete terms for abstract phenomena for example ideas become things we can grasp or let go of. Perceptual experience—characterised as physical and relatively concrete—should be an ideal source domain in metaphor and a less likely target. But is this the case across diverse languages? And are some sensory modalities perhaps more concrete than others? This volume presents critical new data on perception metaphors from over 40 languages including many which are under-studied. Aside from the wealth of data from diverse languages—modern and historical; spoken and signed—a variety of methods (e.g. natural language corpora experimental) and theoretical approaches are brought together. This collection highlights how perception metaphor can offer both a bedrock of common experience and a source of continuing innovation in human communication.

Personal pronouns in Japanese form a heterogeneous category. This book investigates their historical development from a functional perspective. It shows that while nouns give rise to personal pronouns through semanticization of pragmatic inferences the use of non-nominal forms such as demonstratives and reflexives for person referents can be resolved within their original functions offering little reason to treat them as personal pronouns. The cross-linguistic investigation into the common sources of personal pronouns reveals that the development of personal pronouns from nouns is largely consistent with grammaticalization but that of forms of non-nominal origins requires separate mechanisms such as spatial/empathetic perspectives and displacement of semantic features for politeness showing that a one-size-fits-all approach to diachrony of personal pronouns is not sufficient. This book will be of special interest to researchers and students in historical linguistics pragmatics and Japanese linguistics who take a functional view of language.

While universally present in languages negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages however negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language generally exhibit negative concord a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’ where several expressions each negative on its own come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

In all languages humans frequently use linguistic combinations called phraseological units (PUs) in communicative acts. These PUs are characterized by their institutionalized fixation and in many cases by their opacity. Traditionally the work on phraseology has placed the emphasis on the total fixing of components and structures of verbal expressions. Variation in PUs is currently an uncontested fact and has been extensively studied and analyzed. In addition in the case of languages like Spanish English French spoken in many countries new creations or diatopic variants arise. While these diatopic expressions have been collected or analyzed in their territory of influence no comprehensive collection showing all the expressions and contrastive analysis to observe the similarities and differences between these diatopic creations with all their idiosyncratic and cultural references have been made so far.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The content of this volume deals with numerous linguistic lexicographic and translational problems in the context of language variation in general as well as specifically related to diatopic variation. The aim is to make progress in these challenging and highly interesting areas which still pose many comprehension and translation problems.

Interest in non-canonically case-marked subjects has been unceasing since the groundbreaking work of Andrews and Masica in the late 70’s who were the first to document the existence of syntactic subjects in another morphological case than the nominative. Their research was focused on Icelandic and South-Asian languages respectively and since then oblique subjects have been reported for language after language throughout the world. This newfangled recognition of the concept of oblique subjects at the time was followed by discussions of the role and validity of subject tests discussions of the verbal semantics involved as well as discussions of the theoretical implications of this case marking strategy of syntactic subjects. This volume contributes to all these debates making available research articles on different languages and language families additionally highlighting issues like language contact differential subject marking and the origin of oblique subjects.

In this book the micro-modular approach known as Tiernet within Conceptual Semantics is introduced. Constructions make up an important part in the approach but in this approach constructions are considered to be exceptions licensed links between micro-modules one of the kinds of symbolic modules in the approach. Similar to construction grammar approaches the micro-modular approach takes a solid interest in the ‘periphery’ and thus also studies irregular linking principles like constructions.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book details particulars in the development of generative grammar and the relation of Conceptual Semantics to this development and then introduces the micro-modular approach and shows its usefulness for the description of language generally by not only using examples from English but also and in particular by applying the micro-modular approach of Conceptual Semantics to data from Finnish.

This volume explores typological variation within nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages. Using abundant data generally from original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages it presents a far more detailed picture of nonverbal predication constructions than previously published grammatical descriptions. On the one hand it addresses the fact that current typologies of nonverbal predication are less developed than those of verbal predication; on the other it provides a wealth of new data and analyses of Amazonian languages which are still poorly represented in existing typologies. Several contributions offer historical insights either reconstructing the sources of innovative nonverbal predicate constructions or describing diachronic pathways by which constructions used for nonverbal predication spread to other functions in the grammar. The introduction provides a modern typological overview and also proposes a new diachronic typology to explain how distinct types of nonverbal predication arise.