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.