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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.

Clitics those “funny little words” like English contracted future tense and pluperfect tense/conditional mood markers (’ll and ’d) or French pronominal objects (le ‘him’ la ‘her’ lui ‘to him/her’ etc.) have long been a source of fascination for linguists. Lacking an inherent stress that characterizes “well-behaved” words clitics prosodically depend on a stressed sentence element called their host which makes them look and in some contexts behave like affixes (parts of words). Some clitics Serbian second-position clitics being the case in point also obey stringent linear ordering rules different from those holding for fully-fledged sentence elements. This monograph offers a comprehensive formalized description of second-position clitics in standard Serbian from the viewpoint of the Meaning-Text theory an approach relying on syntactic dependencies and oriented towards speech production which sets it apart from most contemporary frameworks. It will be of interest for general linguists Slavists and advanced learners of Serbian.

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.

This volume brings together seven eminently original attempts to answer a sorely neglected question: What are adjectives? Although the positioning of adjectives as well as aspects of their semantics have been investigated in depth their actual status as a lexical category has generally been treated superficially in the linguistic literature.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In this volume the different approaches to the categorial identity of adjectives put forward include their position in the inventory of lexical categories the elusive noun-adjective link the functional entourage of adjectives and their relational character the role of concord and possession – and so on. The contributors bring different viewpoints as well as a variety of language data into the discussion from Chinese to Indo-European and on to Niger-Congo languages.

This volume proposes a novel structural analysis for causative constructions offering a solution for the long-standing mono/bi-clausal dualism. Causatives are claimed to instantiate a ‘complex object’ construction insofar as the causee is not only the subject of the lexical verb but also a participant that is related to the whole event. Furthermore the analysis reveals that the realization of causatives implies a crucial interplay with the pseudo-relative construction a much-debated structure as well. Data from Scandinavian languages are highlighted through the results of an experimental test on the scope of negation and adverbs supporting the present analysis. The book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses the relevant constructions in languages including Italian English French Portuguese and Spanish.

Syntactic priming is a naturally-occurring psycholinguistic phenomenon that has been used as an experimental manipulation to great effect: over the last 20 years syntactic priming research with children of different backgrounds has added to our understanding of the mechanisms and stages of syntactic development and priming. This collection of original articles explores the state of the art in that literature. Ten chapters review the findings of syntactic priming research with monolingual and multilingual typically-developing and atypically-developing child populations from a variety of language backgrounds. The expert authors explore what syntactic priming has revealed about children’s development of syntax and propose ways in which methodological innovations and broadening the scope of future research can build on this. The collection will be a useful resource for researchers from diverse areas of the field of child language particularly those with a focus on grammatical development.

English Sentence Constructions departs from a usage-based theoretical perspective in which all language units -- which we refer to as constructions -- have both a meaning and form and context is all-important in determining the function and form of these constructions.

As a starting-level module English Sentence Constructions guides students of English or Language at tertiary level through different levels of analysis at the sentence clause phrase and word level.

The book starts with an explanation of different sentence types and structures (Chapters 1 and 2) zooms in on the verb phrase as the central component of any sentence (in Chapters 3 and 4) before zooming in even closer discussing word classes (Chapter 5) and phrases (Chapter 6). The next two chapters explicate the intricacies of sentence constituents that function as clauses (Chapter 7) and aid students in integrating all chapters by discussing sentence analysis at all levels (Chapter 8). The last chapter (Chapter 9) shows how knowledge about sentence constructions can be applied to effective writing in English.

English Sentence Constructions can be used in teacher-led modules but the many exercises in each chapter the clearly worked out answer keys and a comprehensive glossary of terminology also make it suitable for self-study. For each chapter there is an online test in which students can check their understanding.

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.

This book addresses the question of how in-situ wh-phrases are licensed from a minimalist perspective in which the basic assumptions about narrow syntax need to be reduced to the bare minimum. I propose that in-situ wh-phrases are licensed by way of either minimal Search or covert internal Merge: while in-situ wh-adjuncts are uniformly licensed by covert internal Merge in-situ wh-arguments have a choice between the two options depending on whether the licensing C head is overtly manifested. I also discuss sluicing an ellipsis construction with a remnant wh-phrase and address the question of how the remnant wh-phrase is licensed. I support the in-situ approach to sluicing advocated in my previous book The In-Situ Approach to Sluicing (John Benjamins) according to which the remnant wh-phrase stays in situ. I argue against the more standard analysis endorsing the main claim of this previous book that island repair by ellipsis is a myth.

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).