Browse Books

This volume places topicality at the very heart of grammatical explanation drawing on richly annotated discourse corpora from lesser-studied languages across the Americas and beyond. Through nine original studies it demonstrates how aspects of discourse relevance (rather than just abstract syntactic relations) shape word order argument encoding case marking and voice systems in natural speech. Several chapters revisit and critically reassess Givón's seminal work on topic continuity and discourse motivation and re-examine classic frameworks such as “Preferred Argument Structure” through contemporary corpus-based work. The volume spans a remarkable typological range of linguistic systems combining methodological innovation with fine-grained empirical analysis. Essential reading for linguists working on information structure typology and language documentation this book demonstrates why topicality remains a powerful engine of grammatical design diversity and change.

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.

Root syntax with roots as primitive lexical units is an influential theme in building the lexicon in linguistic theory typically in Distributed Morphology and the generative model of minimal computation. Implementing important fragments of the Arabic lexicon the book presents a comprehensive view of word formation and argument structure providing robust evidence that favors root-based rather than stem-based derivations of words. Tested on Arabic a language wearing DM ‘on its sleeve’ the DM model gains substantial support and refinement. Significant templatic affixes turn out to be roots. Valency changing causatives anti-causatives reflexives or nominalizations implicate root complexity not category change. Psych perception and cognition eventuality classes are born as root subtypes not ‘verb’ classes. Category changing deverbalizations deadjectivations or denominalizations are supplemented by complex root derivations. Melodic templates operate ‘templatization’ (e.g. with adjectives) or act as functional templates for Voice and Aspect (e.g. with passives) or gradation (with synthetic comparatives) after category typing. The book is of interest to generative and comparative linguists cognitivists typologists lexicographers and students teachers and researchers of Arabic or Semitic

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 book brings together some of the most prominent linguists working in the field of East and Southeast Asian syntax to create a special collection of papers which highlight new developments in the analysis of the syntax of Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian languages. Generative syntactic theory has regularly been influenced by discoveries made in Asian languages and the present volume connects a broad range of striking patterns found in Asian languages with Minimalist syntactic theory and provides arguments for fresh approaches to a variety of fundamental problems and puzzles within formal syntax. The volume has also been created as a tribute to Professor C.-T. James Huang one of the most influential of generative linguists active in the study of Chinese and other Asian languages.

Harmonic Serialism is a derivational version of Optimality Theory that has widely been pursued for phonology and syntax but so far much less for morphology. The harmonic serialist approach to inflectional morphology underlying the contributions to the present volume is virtually unique in that it combines from the perspective of the minimalist program a cyclic approach to morphological structure-building with an optimality-theoretic approach to optimization; in a general taxonomy of morphological theories it qualifies as lexical realizational Merge-based and pre-syntactic.<br/>Following a comprehensive introduction to the new theory the book brings together eight case studies from typologically different languages (like Potawatomi Itelmen Acoma Modern Greek Lithuanian Urarina Irarutu and Hill Mari) that address a number of morphological phenomena which can all be shown to empirically support a cyclic optimality-theoretic approach (among them extended exponence disjunctive blocking impoverishment deponency portmanteau marking and morphological movement). The book will be of use to all scholars and students interested in morphological theory.

Word classes of a language are usually not homogeneous groups of lexemes that share the same morphological and syntactic properties completely. Rather lexemes are usually grouped together that have some basic commonalities but may differ in detail e.g. regarding their inflectional behaviour. In many cases one can identify within a word class a large number of lexemes that conform to a certain morphological or syntactic pattern (often referred to as “core members”) whilst there is only a comparatively small number of deviants (“peripheral members”). Examples abound: borrowings (in several word classes) may differ grammatically from native words some complex verbs evade certain syntactic slots (such as verb-second position in German) mass and proper nouns differ grammatically from (other) nouns and so on. In this volume we focus on the diachrony of such phenomena. We consider that the study of change and stability can be particularly helpful in furthering our understanding of the diversity within word classes concerning for example the motivation for divergent grammatical properties.

This ebook is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

The Making of Multi-Unit Turns is the first book-length treatment to comprehensively describe extended turns produced by a single speaker. It draws on multiparty everyday conversations in English using the methods of Conversation Analysis. It brings together the currently scattered literature on MUTs and goes on to expand our understanding of the ‘natural history’ of MUTs by showing how speakers and recipients deploy linguistic and embodied behaviours in intricate ways from the launch of an extended turn of talk to beyond the end of the MUT. The chapters report on the diverse ways in which speakers secure a second turn-constructional unit and show how grammatical prosodic gestural and postural resources as well as gaze direction are deployed to extend the speaker’s floor in a long MUT. Further investigating how speakers and their recipients transition out of the MUT and return to turn-by-turn talk and how recipients sometimes disrupt an extended MUT this book aims to provide a fresh understanding of the orderliness which underlies our everyday interactions.

Over the last decade Construction Grammar has become increasingly popular in the study of language contact and multilingualism. Indeed constructional approaches including Diasystematic Construction Grammar not only offer a useful theoretical framework for empirical studies but also provide a fresh look at fundamental questions in contact linguistics. This volume continues the series of works on Constructions in Contact (the first two volumes were published in 2018 and 2021). It presents new research on the constructionist modelling of language contact phenomena the impact of multilingualism on argument structure constructions and the role of phonological units in language contact. The volume thus combines classical areas of constructional research with innovative ones demonstrating the broad applicability of Construction Grammar for contact linguistics.

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 Null Objects from a Cross-Linguistic and Developmental Perspective brings together theoretical and empirical contributions on missing object constructions revealing a nuanced and multifaceted phenomenon that poses challenges to current theories of null objects. The selected papers highlight the significance of the interplay between formal constraints and semantic properties (namely definiteness and animacy) in the licensing of null objects cross-linguistically. The formally oriented papers contribute to ongoing discussions on the mechanisms underlying the derivation of null objects. The differences between null objects that are licensed by rich agreement and those that are agreement independent are also addressed. From a developmental perspective the papers on null objects in language acquisition including second language learning further provide valuable insights into the intricate processes underlying the acquisition of referential expressions. The role of animacy emerges as a central question particularly in the context of Portuguese varieties where differences in pronominal systems contribute to variation in null object distribution.

The book investigates the development of ‘speaker-oriented adverbs’ (SOAs) such as frankly surprisingly and apparently in standard written English. SOAs take propositional scope i.e. they modify clauses or sentences. It is generally assumed that they have developed from historically prior narrow-scope adverbs e.g. adverbs modifying VPs. There is however disagreement about the mechanisms that brought the change about. Based on quantitative data the book tests various hypotheses involving reanalysis of potentially ambiguous narrow-scope adverbs (often referred to as grammaticalization) ellipsis lexicalization and analogy. The data provide no clear evidence in favour of any of the hypotheses tested but suggest that different mechanisms may have been at work for different lexemes and subsets of SOAs. The book should appeal to researchers interested in the development and licensing of SOAs but also to those with an interest in diachronic and syntactic change in general or in grammaticalization reanalysis or subjectification in particular.

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 volume comprises studies and keynote addresses presented at the 16th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference hosted by The Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU in Trondheim in 2022. The selection of cutting-edge studies presented covers a wide array of topics within generative linguistics including the acquisition of grammatical features challenges of functional morphology the impact of the native language on subsequently acquired languages and interfaces between linguistic domains. Other chapters address how non-native language processing differs from native processing while the volume also highlights internal and external factors affecting bi- and multilingual development and points to important avenues for further generative research on second language acquisition.

The investigation of phraseology through corpus-based and computational approaches holds significant relevance for various professionals including translators interpreters terminologists lexicographers language instructors and learners. Computational Phraseology and in particular the computational analysis of multiword expressions (also known as multiword units) has gained prominence in recent years and is essential for a number of Natural Language Processing and Translation Technology applications. The failure to detect these units automatically could result in incorrect and problematic automatic translations and could hinder the performance of applications such as text summarisation and web search. Against this background the volume offers 13 articles carefully selected and organised into two parts: ‘Computational treatment of multiword units’ and ‘Corpus-based and linguistic studies in phraseology‘. The contributions not only highlight the latest advancements in computational and corpus-based phraseology but also reiterate its vital role in all areas of language technologies including basic and applied research.

This collection of original papers illustrates recent trends and new perspectives for future research in Interactional Linguistics (IL). Since the research program was started around the turn of the century it has prospered internationally. Recently however new developments have opened up new perspectives for interactional linguistic research.

IL continues to study the details of talk in social interaction with a focus on linguistic resources and structures of verbal and vocal interaction in bodily-visible interactional settings. Increasingly though it embraces methods supported by new technology and broadens its data and research questions to applications in teaching therapy etc.

The volume comprises three parts with 14 contributions: (1) Studying linguistic resources in social interaction; (2) Studying linguistic resources in embodied social interaction; and (3) Studying social interaction in institutional contexts and involving speakers with specific proficiencies.

This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This book discusses patterns of predication and their grammatical and semantic implications in a variety of African languages. It covers several prominent topics about predication in the languages including locative predication expressions of tense aspect and mood in relation to verbal complexes and verb serialisation verb semantics and nominalization of predicates. The chapters take inspiration from Felix Ameka’s approach to the study of language according to which the main task of a linguist is to collaborate with language users to understand communicative practices in different contexts and to uncover how these practices impact grammatical and semantic aspects of the language. Accordingly the descriptions and analyses in this book serve to understand language variation in different ecologies rather than to impose pre-established descriptive frames on less described languages. Together the chapters in the book represent a bird’s eye view of predication strategies in various African languages and can therefore serve as readings for both introductory and advanced level courses on predication from a typological or comparative perspective.

This volume focuses on a number of interrelated issues in the theorizing and interpretation of morphological rivalry including the differences between a semasiological and an onomasiological approach to competition phenomena in word-formation the scope of such phenomena (micro-level rivalry between individual affixes as well as macro-level competition between different processes) the different sources of competition and the possible resolutions of competitive situations. An overview of existing research in the field is provided as well as new cutting-edge findings and proposals for analytical innovation. Linguistic data are drawn from European and Asian languages and morphologists semanticists and anyone interested in the dynamics of language will be stimulated by the analytical models and explanations offered in the 11 chapters.

This book presents the first in-depth investigation of modality in Galician linguistics offering a theoretical discussion of modal categories and a fine-grained description of epistemic adverbs. The first half of the monograph deconstructs the most relevant approaches to modal categories and shows how the traditional concept of modality is a problematic notion how it relates to other concepts such as evidentiality and mitigation and how it ought to be conceived of in order to become a more useful instrument for linguistic analysis. A new way of understanding modality is explored and illustrated through Galician examples. The second half of the book zooms in on six epistemic adverbs which are exhaustively studied from both a formal and a functional perspective. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative perspective the book shows that adverbs make up a rich semantic scale and establishes several factors that condition their occurrence in discourse challenging previous conceptions of this grammatical domain.

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.

This volume presents eight studies of linguistic phenomena in Nordic languages (notably Danish Norwegian and Swedish) from a construction grammar perspective. The contributions both deepen and widen the focus of construction grammar applied to Nordic languages by dealing with a variety of topics such as the constructional network pseudo-coordination additional language learning and emerging multilingualism prototypical semantics in argument structure constructions and domain-specific discourse and language behavior. The volume showcases the vibrant research activity within part of the construction grammar community dealing with Nordic languages contributing to the knowledge about the structure use and learning of these languages as well as to the field of construction grammar as a whole.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic Romance Uralic and Mayan.

This e-book is made available as Open Access under the CC BY 4.0 license.

This book brings together research in cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology to construct a psychologically plausible account of grammar as a mental network. To explore the organisation of this network the author examines evidence from structural priming which occurs when speakers’ processing of a grammatical construction is affected by prior exposure to the same or a similar construction. Previous experimental findings are innovatively reinterpreted to shed light on various aspects of the grammatical network including the strength of the similarities between constructions the level of abstraction at which they are represented and the ways in which similar constructions can either boost or inhibit each other. Moreover new experiments are reported that extend structural priming to phenomena like the resultative the depictive and the caused-motion construction. The book is directed at theoretical linguists psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists alike showcasing how recent work in these areas can be integrated and extended.

The study departs from the observation that in expressing ideas some languages encode more details than others. It investigates whether languages encode events and/or objects at a coarse-grained (e.g. put glass) as opposed to a fine-grained (e.g. lay wine glass) level systematically. The level of detail is termed granularity which is viewed as a cline from fine-grained (semantic specificity) to coarse-grained meaning (semantic generality). Four languages are investigated: German English Greek and Turkish. The study draws on elicited data from a naming task. The verbalization of events is based on event and object descriptions in selected semantic domains. The results reveal significant granularity effects between languages and language types (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed). The study is relevant for scholars interested in linguistic typology lexical and semantic typology contrastive linguistics event representation psycholinguistics and cognitive semantics.

Constructions in Spanish is the first book-length English-language volume in the field of usage-based and Cognitive Construction Grammar dedicated exclusively to Spanish. The contributions investigate a wide range of constructions from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective cutting across morphology syntax semantics and pragmatics. The constructionist perspective is also linked to comparative and typological research to language learning and teaching and to multi-modal discourse analysis.

The volume aims both at increasing the visibility of constructionist approaches to Spanish and at offering data and analyses of Spanish for scholars working on constructional analyses of other languages. The volume thus addresses both scholars in Spanish and Romance linguistics as it builds connections between more traditional approaches and constructionist approaches and construction grammarians generally especially scholars interested in comparative work.

English Complex Words is a lively essential companion for multilingual explorations of word-formation processes both in English and across 40 other languages. It offers today’s broadest available coverage of English prefixation suffixation and compounding. Comprising a treasury of real language items this book offers students a unique chance to conduct their own research and analyses using a goldmine of carefully-selected authentic examples and corpus data. Readers will become familiar with 96 affixes and 13 compound types by working through thought-provoking morphological cases and their construction patterns. Through these challenging and hands-on activities junior researchers identify morphological nuances among multiple languages. Instructors in multilingual classrooms can find satisfying activities to address the needs of international students. This academically stimulating coursebook can serve as a core text for Word Formation and Morphology courses. As a supplemental source it may suit a range of Linguistics courses directed at both graduate and undergraduate students.

The ditransitive (or “dative”) alternation is a much-studied phenomenon in contemporary linguistics. This monograph is the first to address the alternation in present-day written German from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. As well as providing a corpus-based analysis of extensively annotated data and detailed statistical information the book also contributes to the theory of language by developing an alternative framework to existing investigations of the alternation. It is shown that the alternation can be accounted for in a comprehensive way by adopting a three-layer approach to meaning and sense based on the work of E. Coseriu and S. Levinson. In this approach a construction’s language-specific encoded meaning is distinguished both from its conventional (“normal”) uses and its discourse-specific interpretations in particular contexts. The monograph is likely to attract attention from researchers in the fields of German and English linguistics general and contrastive linguistics as well as linguistic theory.

This book presents a 100% novel approach to phraseology: A language-universal deductive calculus of all theoretically possible phraseological expressions (= phrasemes) is proposed implemented in 51 rigorously defined notions. Nine major classes of phrasemes are established and illustrated: lexemic idioms (shoot the breeze) lexemic collocations (pay a visit; helicopter parents) lexemic nominemes (the Northern Palmyra) and lexemic clichés (What’s your name?; to put it differently); morphemic idioms (forget) morphemic collocations (Londoner ~ Muscovite) morphemic nominemes (Greenland) and morphemic clichés (antidepressant); and syntactic idioms (Her be late?!?). An additional class of pragmatically constrained lexemic expressions is described: pragmatemes (No parking; At attention!; Roger.). Each phraseme class is supplied with precise methodology for a lexicographic description; a number of lexical entries for representatives of all classes are given. The language data come from English and Russian. General Phraseology: Theory and Practice is meant as a contribution towards the elaboration of a unified notional system for linguistics.

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).

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.