Browse Books

What is the extent to which various grammatical levels – from features through subjecthood through cleft layers – reuse and reemploy certain structure-building operations? In this volume organized in terms of successively expanding domains leading contributors report research into the complex edifice of grammatical structure of human language that one might liken to the terraced layers of a ziggurat. Following the heuristics of reverse-engineering the chapters in this collection draw on theoretical and experimental analyses from Taqbaylit Berber to the sign language Cena from the Romance language family to the Semitic family in a kind to ‘reverse-architecture’ effort to understand the modes that compose multiple planes of morphosyntax. The volume presented to honor the work and influence of Ur Shlonsky within linguistics is aimed at a readership accessible to advanced undergraduates as well as specialists placed at distinct vantage points.

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

This volume resulting from the fifth edition of the conference series Variation in Language Acquisition (ViLA) brings together research at the intersection of language acquisition and sociolinguistics. Work within the ViLA tradition explores how learners—from preschoolers to adult second-language users— produce perceive and evaluate socially meaningful language variation. Divided in two main parts the contributions to this volume highlight a rich diversity of linguistic settings methodological approaches and learner profiles. Where Part I focuses on the acquisition of variation in children from age three to adolescence Part II shifts the focus to the role of linguistic input and exposure in the acquisition process. Both parts showcase a broad methodological spectrum from observational and experimental studies to qualitative and mixed-methods research. By deepening our understanding of the interplay between social context and linguistic development the chapters in this volume both consolidate and inspire the growing research field of developmental sociolinguistics.

This volume presents works seeking to re-think the very nature and scope of figurativity calling into attention some of the received tenets in accounts of figurativity both as a holistic category and for individual types and families of figures but also attempting to expand upon the current scope of figurative theorizing. The works presented here investigate a wider array of figures than the typically-studied tropes of metaphor irony and metonymy and they address broad issues such as figurativity writ large (what figurativity actually is and does including how embodied it is) multimodality contiguity of figurative forms and furthering our consideration of the ingredients of irony. It should appeal to any scholar interested in figurativity in all its expansive guises.

This book is a panorama of contemporary quantitative linguistics as developed over decades. It highlights the main topics of QL: statistical laws of language taxonomy of linguistic phenomena authorial attribution quantitative analysis of syntax (e.g. dependency grammar) measurement of text difficulty and other phenomena at the intersection of linguistics literary studies semiotics and information science. It also reflects on the relevance of these time-honoured approaches in our new reality increasingly dominated by AI – both in terms of text material and methodology. Before our very eyes computers are achieving human-level linguistic competence. The era of LLMs and the growing dominance of machine-generated text is becoming reality. The scale of these changes initiated by the replacement of print with the digital universe is enormous. Today linguistics is closer than ever to mathematics and computer science and thus quantitatively-oriented linguists are particularly well-suited to address questions about the boundary between humans and machines in scientific research.

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 presents a collection of state-of-the-art studies that illustrate recent advances in the understanding of human language grammar design and linguistic categories. The title of the volume aims at highlighting the mark that the work of Tim Stowell has had on the field of Linguistics since his dissertation Origins of Phrase Structure defended at the MIT in 1981. Stowell’s work established the principles that replaced individual phrase structure rules from previous generative models with general universal constraints setting off the articulation of formal grammars on a new journey. The papers gathered here demonstrate how that principled approach runs in the field today. The empirical evidence discussed in the papers comes from 15 different languages which makes the volume a point of reference for cross-linguistic analyses and testimony to the wealth of descriptive knowledge brought to the scientific community.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>A wide array of linguistic generations contributed to this volume ranging from legendary ones who established the field as we’ve known it to some who have only recently received their doctorates. This plainly demonstrates the time spanning impact of Stowell’s work and the deep footprint he has left in the field and in our lives.

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.

Eyes on Text presents a contemporary overview of research on eye movements in reading and language processing by spinning around the heptagon of cognitive science which consists of linguistics neuroscience philosophy anthropology artificial intelligence education in its corners. The book consists of four parts: basics methodology perspectives and bridging the gaps. After introducing the basic terminology in the first two chapters the book introduces the methodology of the research on eyes on text focusing on factors that shape experiment designs and data analysis. The book then introduces modeling perspectives (models of human text processing and eye movement control) empirical perspectives (eyes on text at various levels of language processing) and reader-oriented perspectives (children elderly readers reading disorders and nonnative reading processes) to the study of eyes on text. The final chapters of the book discuss the diversity of the current approaches and introduce several frontiers that allow bridging the gaps between the domains that conduct studies on eyes on text. It emphasizes the incorporation of the Human-in-the-Loop (HitL) paradigm into Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications as a promising approach to bridge the gaps between the domains also allowing designing personalized interfaces.

This book brings together corpus linguistics and pragmatics by extending the emerging corpus analytic framework of local grammar to speech act research aiming to enrich the toolkit of corpus-based speech act studies. It outlines four directions in which local grammar can be useful for investigating speech acts namely a local grammar approach to annotating speech acts developing local grammars of speech acts identifying speech act constructions via the lens of local grammars and applying local grammars into contrastive speech act studies. These directions are illustrated with studies on apology in contemporary spoken British English which shows that local grammar can be an innovative approach to advance speech act studies and that such research has significant implications and applications. The book should be of interest to researchers and students in corpus linguistics pragmatics construction grammar and L2 speech act research and teaching.

Despite the increasing interest in diachronic linguistic studies such research remains particularly scarce for creole varieties largely due to the limited availability of historical data on non-standard languages. This book addresses this gap by introducing a soap opera from the early 1970s as a source of historical creole data. It presents the first real-time analysis of selected grammatical and phonological features of Bahamian Creole English. Situated within the framework of comparative sociolinguistics the study provides quantitative variationist analyses of the zero copula BE-levelling verbal negation low vowels (i.e. the lexical sets of BATH PALM START and TRAP) and the closing diphthongs of MOUTH and PRICE. This book will appeal not only to those interested in the analysis of creole and non-standard varieties but also to those studying language variation and change more broadly.