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Discourse particles have often been treated as a phenomenon restricted to Germanic languages (Abraham 2020) and they still raise questions about their nature as an independent category. This book reveals that this phenomenon exists in other languages as well and provides evidence for their nature as a separate category. The volume brings together a collection of nine papers that focus on three research topics: a) the diachronic development of discourse particles; b) their syntactic analysis; and c) the study of their semantic-pragmatics. Furthermore it also discusses other issues less often dealt with in the literature but of great interest for linguistic theory such as the acquisition of discourse particles by children or the analysis of elements not usually considered discourse particles but whose historical path or microvariation indicates otherwise. Additionally the book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses various languages including Basque Catalan German Italian Laz Mandarin Chinese Old English Portuguese and Spanish.

This volume brings together 19 cutting edge studies written by some of the most prominent linguists working on Chinese formal syntax as a Festschrift volume dedicated to Yen-Hui Audrey Li. The contributions to the volume address a wide range of issues currently developing in the field of Chinese syntax grouped into five thematic sections on the structure of lexical and functional projections modal verb syntax syntax-semantics interactions the syntax and interpretation of particles and the acquisition of syntactic structures. With its rich descriptive content sourced from different varieties of Chinese and its theoretical orientation and analyses the book provides an important new resource both for researchers with a primary interest in Chinese and other linguists interested in discovering how properties of Chinese can inform the analysis of other languages.

This book is a contribution to the growing field of diachronic construction grammar. Focus is on corpus evidence for the importance of including conventionalized pragmatics within construction grammar and suggestions for how to do so. The empirical domain is the development of Discourse Structuring Markers in English such as after all also all the same by the way further and moreover (also known as Discourse Markers). The term Discourse Structuring Markers highlights their use not only to connect discourse segments but also to shape discourse coherence and understanding. Monofunctional Discourse Structuring Markers like further instead moreover are distinguished from multifunctional ones like after all and by the way. Drawing on usage-based work on constructionalization and constructional changes the book is in three parts: foundational concepts case studies and currently open issues in diachronic construction grammar. These open issues are how to incorporate the concepts subjectification and intersubjectification into a constructional account of change whether position in a clause is a construction and the nature of constructional networks and how they change.

Since the early years of generative grammar (Chomsky 1977 inter alia) the phenomenology of dislocation has proved to be a fertile area of research. This however has not been the case for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and hence this thorough monograph intends to fill this lacuna. Three aspects of this linguistic phenomenon stand out: the taxonomy of possible dislocated configurations syntax and interpretation. Though the structure in itself has been extensively studied in various languages including varieties of spoken Arabic this monograph shows that MSA presents properties that set it apart from known varieties and cannot be captured by an extension or modification of existing analyses. Moreover existing analyses are not fully satisfactory as there are open analytical questions regarding the interpretation and syntactic analysis of dislocation structures crosslinguistically. Particularly the optimal path to follow concerning dislocation structures in MSA is to argue for the claim that contrast as an information-structural notion underlies the interpretation of dislocated elements and these elements are best syntactically analyzed as being involved in a bisentential configuration contra monoclausal approaches to dislocation. This monograph should be relevant to anyone with an interest in the Arabic language and also to syntacticians and typologists with an interest in sentence structure.

This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories such as Focus and Topic to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. <br/> This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.<br/>

Despite a significant increase in interest over the last two decades in the English Noun Phrase there are still many open questions and unexplored issues. The papers collected in this volume contribute to this ongoing research by addressing a range of topics concerning the internal structure use and development of English Noun Phrases. The eleven chapters represent three main themes: 1. Determination modification and complementation; 2. Shell nouns and the X-is construction; 3. Binominal constructions. These topics are approached in different ways: some chapters are synchronic in nature others diachronic; and while most subscribe to functional-cognitive modelling some take a more formal approach. In addition different methodologies are employed varying from qualitative and quantitative corpus analyses to experimental methods. As a result the contributions to this volume represent both the main topics currently discussed in research on the English Noun Phrase and the diversity in the way these topics are investigated.

The completely redesigned Grammar of Spoken and Written English is a comprehensive corpus-based reference grammar. GSWE describes the structural characteristics of grammatical constructions in English as do other reference grammars. But GSWE is unique in that it gives equal attention to describing the patterns of language use for each grammatical feature based on empirical analyses of grammatical patterns in a 40-million-word corpus of spoken and written registers.

Grammar-in-use is characterized by three inter-related kinds of information: frequency of grammatical features in spoken and written registers frequencies of the most common lexico-grammatical patterns and analysis of the discourse factors influencing choices among related grammatical features. GSWE includes over 350 tables and figures highlighting the results of corpus-based investigations. Throughout the book authentic examples illustrate all research findings.

The empirical descriptions document the lexico-grammatical features that are especially common in face-to-face-conversation compared to those that are especially common in academic writing. Analyses of fiction and newspaper articles are included as further benchmarks of language use. GSWE contains over 6000 authentic examples from these four registers illustrating the range of lexico-grammatical features in real-world speech and writing. In addition comparisons between British and American English reveal specific regional differences.

Now completely redesigned and available in an electronic edition the Grammar of Spoken and Written English remains a unique and indispensable reference work for researchers language teachers and students alike.

This volume brings together studies that combine both traditional and contemporary tools in the study of syntactic geolectal variation with a special focus on a subset of Iberian varieties. There is an increasing body of research on syntactic micro-variation but the interaction between dialectology (which makes use of atlases corpora databases questionnaires interviews etc.) and formal syntactic studies has traditionally been weak (or even nonexistent) which is precisely the gap the contributions in this book aim at filling in. From a broader perspective this collection is meant as a contribution to the subfield of linguistic variation and to the more general field of Romance linguistics with special interest in Spanish and in other Iberian languages. The volume is meant for both researchers and students interested in linguistic variation or dialectology and specifically in syntactic variation in Iberian languages.

This book illustrates recent developments in cartographic studies seen from a comparative perspective. The different chapters explore various aspects of theoretical and descriptive syntax bearing on such topics as selection causativity binding light verb constructions the structure of the high and low peripheral zones. Syntactic issues in the study of dialects and ancient languages are also addressed. The languages investigated include French Hebrew Standard Dutch and the Ghent dialect Etruscan Japanese English Arabic Mandarin Chinese and the Teochew dialect. The intended readers of this book include researchers and students working on natural language syntax the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics and comparative and typological linguistics as well as scholars interested in particular languages such as East Asian and Romance languages.

Control typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC) Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control split control or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.