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This book offers the first systematic investigation of the instrumental role across syntax semantics and language acquisition. Focusing primarily on Italian within a comparative perspective the book addresses a long-standing puzzle: why Instruments can be syntactically omitted even when they remain semantically present.Combining theoretical analysis with experimental evidence corpus data and innovative methodologies the study redefines the status of Instruments with respect to the argument-adjunct distinction and introduces a new principled account of their syntactic omission based on semantic recoverability. It proposes a refined typology of Instruments grounded in verb meaning and contextual factors and tests its predictions through behavioral experiments and large-scale corpus analyses.The book also breaks new ground in acquisition research presenting the first experimental investigation of how Italian-speaking children acquire Instruments. The results reveal a striking dissociation between early syntactic mastery and the slower development of Instrument semantic recoverability shedding new light on the acquisition of syntactically optional elements.By integrating syntax semantics and acquisition Silent Instruments provides a robust and empirically grounded framework that is readily applicable to cross-linguistic research and to other phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface. It will be of interest to linguists working on argument structure optionality language acquisition and experimental and corpus-based approaches to grammar.

This book explores the development of the Chinese cleft construction through the lens of Diachronic Construction Grammar. Focusing on shi as an invariant copula it examines the VP de cleft the V de O cleft and the bare shi cleft showing how each signals contrastive and specificational meaning. Tracing their origins from the copular construction in Middle Chinese the study reveals distinct developmental paths and semantic-pragmatic uses for each cleft type. Offering the first diachronic constructional analysis of Chinese cleft sentences it sheds light on the evolution of focus structures the expansion of constructional networks and the typology of focus devices across languages making a key contribution to historical linguistics and Chinese grammar research.

This monograph investigates for the first time words like ‘thing’ of maximal semantic generality across languages. Not all languages have exact equivalents of English ‘thing’ – in some for instance the nearest equivalent is an interrogative stem (‘what?’). Few languages extend their ‘thing’ words into indefinite ‘something’ ‘anything’ ‘nothing’ as in English. As regards Indo-European languages Buck (1988) points out that such words typically derive from a more abstract source than that of simple material objects. In the case of ‘thing’ the earliest source usually given is the Germanic word for a ‘judicial assembly’. How does such a word develop the most general sense of ‘thing’ today? Do all languages follow this kind of pattern? These questions lead into an investigation of the concept of ‘thing’ in a wide range of contexts and in a wide variety of languages involving both typological and cognitive aspects. The results have sometimes been unexpected. Buck C. D. 1988. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo -European Languages. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

This volume consists of corpus-based analyses of progressive aspect constructions in Germanic and Romance. By adopting a variety of methodologies and theoretical frameworks these studies provide valuable insights into the development grammaticalization and use of various progressive structures across two subgroups of the Indo-European family. The progressive constructions under scrutiny range from widely studied and seemingly well understood constructions to relatively infrequent and obscure ones. Most chapters investigate a specific function of a particular progressive structure or a change affecting it. Some chapters cast new light on the pragmatic non-aspectual functions fulfilled by the progressive. All the chapters present a substantial amount of new empirical work. This collection thus provides a unique opportunity for linguists working on Romance languages to get an instant insight into similar phenomena in Germanic languages and vice versa. At the same time the volume addresses contemporary theoretical and methodological issues in corpus contact and historical linguistics showing that research on the progressive remains today as relevant and inspiring as ever.

After a comprehensive description of the French and English tense aspect mood/modality (TAM) systems in Chapter 1 an overview of key theoretical perspective and applied perspectives from the morpheme-order studies to examples of internal and external interfaces in monolingual child acquisition is presented in Chapter 2. The literature review of L2 studies illustrates the subtleties of TAM properties in Chapter 3. It is followed by the rigorous methodology of a cross-sectional empirical study designed to test the L2 acquisition of the English TAM system along with pretest results in Chapter 4. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of data obtained from written production tasks cloze tests and completion tasks completed by French EFL and ESL learners and a NS comparison group appear in Chapters 5 6 and 7. The results discussed in Chapter 8 address the explanatory power of the Interface and Feature Reassembly hypotheses while directions for future research are offered in Chapter 9. Scholars will appreciate how new data carefully analyzed in its nuances and complexities bring us closer to better understanding the challenges L2 learners face.

The volume is of direct interest to scholars from senior academics to PhD students interested in linguistically relevant phonetic and gestural information and in the relationship between multimodal communication and grammar. It contains important work in a relatively new dynamic and exploratory field that is receiving a lot of attention namely the relation of multimodal communication with grammatical frameworks notably Construction Grammar. Drawing on case studies in different languages (English Modern Greek Czech Hebrew Italian) the chapters provide both the necessary theoretical discussion and solid empirical evidence (corpus-based or experimental) for integrating multimodal interactional features with grammatical description and analysis. This timely collection of studies highlights the recent marriage of cognitive/constructional and interactional approaches and addresses head-on questions and challenges like: which multimodal features are systematic and conventional enough to be integrated into grammar and what are appropriate ways of achieving the integration.

This book investigates the interaction between new English lexis and metaphor/metonymy – figures meticulously defined and contrasted in terms of similarity/contiguity. It advances three main hypotheses: (i) derived lexis is more likely to be figurative in meaning and usage than the bases from which it is derived; (ii) derivation obscures the figurative origins of this lexis to varying degrees depending on differing processing strategies; (iii) lexicalisation is determined by Relevance (in Sperber and Wilson’s sense) to the needs of a culture or its powerful interest groups where culture following Norman Fairclough is characterised as an ensemble of recognised action/discourse genres. This volume is distinctive in exploring the relations between grammar and metonymy and providing numerous examples of metaphorical and metonymic lexis as it reflects society's changing needs and (contested) ideologies.

The volume presents an innovative set of researches featuring theoretical and practical discussions of the proverb in cognition and culture. To date there seems to be a need for state-of-the-art research into this subject matter. This volume aims at responding to this need. The chapters contribute from a Cognitive Linguistics interdisciplinary perspective to the existing body of literature on the proverb. The book begins with a first part containing three chapters concerned with theoretical discussions of proverbs in cognition and culture. The three chapters in the second part ponder proverbs within a cognitive-cross-cultural perspective. The third part of the volume includes three chapters that deal with the proverbs of individual languages and cultures. The three chapters in the fourth part study proverbs and/or related phenomena from a cognitive and cultural perspective: snowclones idioms and proverbial phrases. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book will be of interest to academics interested in proverbs within a cognitive linguistic framework and to scholars in the areas of language studies applied linguistics language teaching and learning and Cognitive Linguistics in general and to those researchers who wish to refine their knowledge about the cognitive activities featuring proverb use and their interaction with sociocultural contextual variables.<br/>

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields including formal semantics historical linguistics linguistic typology and variationist sociolinguistics.

Although major cognitively based studies of SPACE and TIME in language have appeared in terms of “Frames of Reference” these do not extend to a wide selection of the world’s languages nor do they combine SPACE and TIME in the overarching concept of WORLD which has its own corresponding frames of reference. The aim of relating and unifying these concepts and their expression across languages constitutes the unique thrust of the present book which will represent a significant extension of earlier approaches. Among its main conclusions will be that the complete separation of terms for SPACE and TIME is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon rather than just a metaphorical extension of the latter from the former. The book will be of interest to all students and practitioners of Linguistics in particular Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic typology but also to a more general readership interested in the historical evolution of concepts of SPACE and TIME.

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.

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).