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In chapters encompassing phonology reading and writing the lexicon morphology syntax and semantics Acquisition of Korean: The state of the art offers a comprehensive overview of research in each area along with cutting-edge original studies. Designed to document support and inspire research in these areas and beyond the volume also includes dedicated chapters on emerging areas such as discourse pragmatics and the impact of socio-environmental factors. Chapters on second-language and heritage learners of Korean provide timely information about multicultural families in Korea while atypical development is addressed in chapters on children with dyslexia autism spectrum disorder and Deaf children acquiring Korean sign language. With reviews of existing research and studies showcasing current trends and methodological advances Acquisition of Korean is an invaluable reference for students scholars and practitioners in linguistics language acquisition developmental psychology education and speech-language pathology; it can also serve as a textbook and data source for cross-linguistic research.

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

Zero elements are used by several theories in morphology and syntax as analytical tool but the question of whether phonologically empty elements should be structurally present or not has been a controversial issue from the very beginning. In addition to analyses that work with zero there are also a whole series of works that explicitly reject a description with zero or allow them only under restricted circumstances. This volume aims at getting a more complete picture of zero elements as a theoretic construct its empirical necessity and its nature in different components of grammar by focusing on Romance languages. The volume presents multi-facetted viewpoints and methodologies such as formal theoretic and data-based ones addressing researchers advanced students and everyone interested in linguistics. Furthermore this volume deals with various Romance languages and varieties such as Catalan (Old and Modern) French Italian and Sicilian (Brazilian and European) Portuguese and Spanish.

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.

The last two decades have seen a series of publications focused on time. So why another book? It now appears that a kairos moment has arrived to reconsider from a more holistic point of view the manifold ways in which we think about time and talk about it. The book is divided into four major parts: Fundamental issues; Conceptualization of temporality across languages and cultures; Metaphor metonymy and time conceptualization; and Time and grammar. Following the two chapters that prefigure the main topics of the volume we move from chapters dealing with the cultural embeddedness of our conceptualizations of time to those discussing the instrumental role of figurativity in the conceptualization of time finishing with a series of chapters focusing on a range of phenomena revolving around the grammatical reflexes of temporality.

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.

Habitual constructions such as those based on English used to and Spanish soler are linguistic expressions denoting situations that typically occur. This volume proposes a novel approach to such expressions arguing that habituality is not a unified semantic category but rather a family of related meanings which differ in their scopal position within the clause. The volume contains a detailed account of habitual meaning from the perspective of Functional Discourse Grammar as well as in-depth empirical studies of habitual constructions in ten languages: Coptic Plains Cree Dolgan Ancient Greek Kwaza Mandarin Portuguese Russian Slovak and Spanish. It will be of interest not just to specialists of these languages but to anyone working on habituality and other aspectual categories in the languages of the world.

Emancipatory Pragmatics represents a unique contribution to the field of pragmatics. Most research in the field has focused on English and other Western languages but the study of Japanese and other non-Western languages as is done in this volume has led to a broader understanding of language use. Here thirteen articles each break new ground by discussing the application of ba theory to pragmatics research. Ba and basho which are Japanese terms often translated as “field” or “context” are central to expanding the theory of pragmatics to explain features not only of non-Western languages but of all languages. By presenting an introduction to the perspective of Emancipatory Pragmatics and discussing ba theory in detail it becomes obvious that this is an innovative approach to questions relevant for the study of all languages. Thus it is useful both for students new to the field as well as for seasoned researchers.

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

This volume pays homage to the legacy of William D. Keel and the significant impact of his research on German in contact settings from myriad perspectives and traditions. It includes structural and sociolinguistic studies focusing on varieties of German spoken throughout the world including Midwestern varieties of Low German Pennsylvania Dutch Texas German Zarzer German in Slove-nia and the use of different varieties of Standard German in the second language classroom. The contributions span multiple domains of linguistic inquiry such as phonology morphosyntax syntax and second language acquisition. Collectively they contribute to ongoing research on contact varie-ties of Germanic language and how they impact sociolinguistic and generative/theoretical theory as well as pedagogical choices involving varieties of German in instructed second language acquisition. The contributions thus are a fitting tribute to William D. Keel’s far-reaching legacy in research on bilingualism and in particular German-Sprachinseln throughout the world.

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.

Researchers in the fields of logic philosophy and linguistics have for many years been pondering over the elusive nature of modality and grappled with ways of capturing it. This book provides a broad overview of issues relevant to the study of modality and reflects the diversity of theoretical frameworks and the heterogeneity of linguistic phenomena included under the general heading of modality a concept which in one of its most frequent definitions corresponds to the fields of possibility and necessity. The key concepts dealt with are the structure of the semantic notion of modality and of modal subcategories force dynamics evidentiality mirativity modal auxiliaries and verbs modal uses of verbs and constructions (hedged performatives capacitive structures conditional constructions) and modal polyfunctionality across languages. Articles deal with observations taken from a variety of languages including Danish English French Italian Latin and Slovak. The wealth of data and the critical evaluation of existing analyses of modality will be of interest for researchers and graduate students alike.

This volume deals with the relations between grammar and interaction from different perspectives with the aim of unraveling the way in which a language — through the different forms of discourse from which it emerges — reflects certain social and community-based schemas; that is how language originates within the space shared by the speaker and the addressee(s). The first part (“Grammar and Interaction”) concerns how interaction may intervene in grammar; the second part (“The Grammar of Interaction”) approaches both notions and linguistic structures which are anchored in interaction while revolving around epistemicity evidentiality and modality. The third part (“Interaction as a Model for Discourse”) concerns how certain constructions emerge from interaction and are further used to model discourse. Finally the fourth and last part of the book (“Interaction as a Driver for Change”) focuses on how interaction may help to delimit linguistic categories.

This book is the first comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of the first language acquisition of four Finno-Ugric languages: Estonian Finnish Hungarian and North Saami. Ten chapters review research on phonological lexical and grammatical development bringing the research within the language family into one source enabling easy access to topics touching upon acquisition of the key linguistic domains cross-linguistic comparisons between the languages and discussion of the ways in which Finno-Ugric languages contribute to theory in the field of first language acquisition. The volume will appeal to students and scholars of language acquisition linguists psychologists clinicians and educational professionals.

The COVID-19 pandemic set off a maelstrom of social cultural and political changes—as well as some surprising linguistic ones. This volume explores these dramatic changes through the lens of Cognitive Linguistics analysing noteworthy examples of pandemic discourse to reveal correspondences and contrasts between different cultures’ conceptions of the illness and its aftermath. The contributions examine a variety of genres including newspaper articles storefront signs artistic creations personal interviews social media comments and political speeches. They look at communication in various domains—business media politics economics art and psychiatry. And they compare past and present showing how the modern pandemic both continued and interrupted previous patterns of discourse around illness and disease. These diverse analyses show how Cognitive Linguistics on the cutting edge of quantitative sociocultural and interdisciplinary turns in linguistics can be a powerful theoretical tool in uncovering parallels and variations in how different cultures communicate in times of crisis.

The study presented in this book explores the cultural models of GENDER and HOMOSEXUALITY in Indian and Nigerian English drawing on the research fields of Cultural Linguistics Cognitive Sociolinguistics and World Englishes. With the help of different methodologies and empirical data in the form of sociolinguistic interviews multimodal film material and an online survey the study scrutinises cultural conceptualisations such as culture-specific conceptual metaphors or schemas and shows how they combine to larger interconnected cultural models which provide speakers with a conceptual logic for understanding and interpreting gender and homosexuality. The book further provides visualizations of these cultural models in the form of complex network representations. This scholarly work caters to readers interested in the culturally oriented strands of Cognitive Linguistics in sociolinguistics in World Englishes research and in questions on language gender and homosexuality. It offers valuable insights into the intricate connections between language culture and cognition.

This volume brings together research on Italian and Italo-Romance varieties spoken as heritage languages across the world with contributions from different fields of linguistics and from diverse regions (the Americas Australia Europe). It offers a timely update on the state of the art combining studies on relatively well-documented communities with investigations of lesser-known groups and linguistic phenomena. A distinctive feature of the book is its search for a shared framework for studying Italo-Romance heritage language communities namely one that takes into account the wide range of linguistic resources present in these settings. The chapters include in-depth studies of Italian and Italo-Romance heritage languages as well as analyses of more complex repertoires such as communities where both Italian and dialect are spoken and onward migrant communities in Berlin and London.

The study of Romance linguistics has long been a vibrant and dynamic field enriched by diverse theoretical perspectives and a range of methodological innovations. This volume gathers contributions from leading scholars and emerging voices in the field to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of key issues in contemporary Romance linguistics. It offers a rich cross-section of the field’s current landscape with a particular focus on Spanish and French and explores how recent advancements in linguistic theory and methodology intersect with real-world language use in diverse social and cultural contexts.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/> At the heart of this volume is a tribute to the distinguished careers of Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio two scholars whose work has had a profound impact on the interdisciplinary study of Romance languages. Their groundbreaking research has not only shaped our understanding of key issues in syntax phonology and sociolinguistics but also set the stage for future innovations in the discipline. This collection brings together the legacy of their scholarship honoring their contributions while simultaneously advancing the field they have so profoundly influenced.<br/>

Whilst the Dutch language cannot be considered a world language in the manner of English Spanish Portuguese or French the fact that speakers of Dutch have sailed to the four corners of the earth means that it cannot be overlooked in language-contact studies. This volume brings together scholars from across the globe to showcase the many varied outcomes of contact between Dutch and other languages in Europe Africa Asia and the Americas. These outcomes include language learning translation multilingualism codeswitching lexical borrowing grammatical interference the emergence of contact varieties such as creoles and language shift or ‘first-language attrition’. Other subjects that the volume covers include the circulation of Dutch loanwords translanguaging sprachbund studies taboo words animal names call names language beliefs Dutch as a heritage language and Dutch in online spaces. In short the contributions in this volume tell the story of the many outcomes of contact between Dutch and other languages across the centuries and across the world.

This volume honors the scholarly legacy of Kimberly L. Geeslin. Geeslin’s pioneering work on variation in the Spanish copula system united and extended research in the fields of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics. Geeslin laid the foundation for a growing subfield of investigation that explores how interlanguages vary in systematic and socially meaningful ways across various modules of language; how variation in learner language relates to the speakers contexts and experiences learners are in contact with; and how variable features develop over learning trajectories. This volume connects established and up-and-coming scholars conducting research on second language sociolinguistic variation and exemplifies the present and future of this line of inquiry. Together these chapters reconsider important questions pose and test new methods and challenge long-standing practices to advance both second language acquisition and sociolinguistics. The volume’s collaborative format also pays homage to Kim Geeslin’s unparalleled mentorship and field-wide influence.

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.

This volume features the latest advancements in Spanish sociolinguistics drawing from the 10th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS10). Organized into three sections its nine chapters explore crucial issues in bilingualism and sociolinguistic variation (morpho-syntactic phonetic phonological and lexical/pragmatic) within the Spanish-speaking world across diverse geographical areas such as Arizona New York City Puerto Rico Galicia Melilla Catalonia Philadelphia Colombia and Argentina. The collection highlights the dynamic evolution of 21st-century sociolinguistic methodologies from traditional sociolinguistic interviews and oral corpora to innovative approaches like social media analysis cutting-edge computational methods and natural language processing. The volume not only commemorates the achievements in the field since the inaugural 2002 Workshop but also provides accessible insights into the most current developments and techniques making it an essential resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students linguists social scientists and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the evolving landscape of Spanish sociolinguistics today.

World Englishes coexist and interact with local languages in multilingual ecologies. Multilingual speakers use the languages in their ecologies for different functions with different interlocutors and at different proficiency levels. Attitudinal responses to the languages vary. Speaker groups are heterogenous manifesting only partial overlap regarding language repertoires use proficiencies and attitudes. The languages in multilingual ecologies may shift in status over time. Some languages may be lost while new languages appear. Strong regional languages and English typically persist. The volume explores multilingual ecologies around the globe and the position of English within them. Case studies are drawn from Africa East South and Southeast Asia the Middle East and Europe all written by distinguished scholars in the field who consider both standardized and non-standardized forms of English. The volume argues for a more inclusive study of World Englishes incorporating speakers’ social backgrounds as well as the other languages in their repertoires.

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

In the South-West Indian Ocean Mauritius and Reunion are part of a group of islands where French-based Creoles are spoken. In spite of their geographical proximity Mauritian Creole and Reunion Creole are strikingly different in their morphosyntax. The first part of this volume describes some structural properties of their grammars. Both languages also differ in the degree to which they are standardized and used in education and in public spaces. One of the goals of this volume is to examine their social status and their use in writing especially after the introduction of Mauritian Creole as a subject in schools as one of the ancestral languages. French and Bhojpuri are also part of the multilingual Mauritian context. One chapter in this volume analyses the role of Bhojpuri in the formation of Mauritian Creole while another studies the pronunciation of Mauritian French.

This volume contains nine chapters that cover a wide range of topics in Arabic linguistic research. The papers are organized into four parts; these are phonetics and phonology morphology syntax and semantics and decolonizing linguistics. Drawing on a wide range of Arabic varieties articles in this volume bring cross-dialectal data that shed light on critical issues in linguistic theory. This volume also includes a non-traditional paper that critiques the methodology and practices of Arabic linguistic research. Scholars and graduate students of Arabic and general linguistics will benefit from the cutting-edge research in this volume.

All linguists recognize that competence in a natural language involves knowledge of a lexicon or dictionary; most assume that it also involves knowledge of a grammatical system. Just where the boundary between the lexicon and the grammar lies however is a question on which there is little consensus. This problem arises in particular with regard to the field of morphology with many morphologists taking all morpheme combinations to result from the operation of the syntactic computational system and many others assuming that morphological units like stems and words are either lexically listed or created by nonsyntactic means. The present study using Japanese and Ryukyuan verbal morphology as its primary database argues that evidence from the syntactic branch of the grammar and evidence from the phonological branch of the grammar converge on the conclusion that while inflectional morphology is fully syntactic derivational morphology has properties that militate against a syntactic treatment. The boundary between grammar and lexicon then falls at the boundary between inflection and derivation rendering morphology “split” between syntactic and nonsyntactic subparts. The book should be of interest not only to morphologists but to all concerned with the distinction between grammatical and lexical competence.

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 book pioneers the study of Lánnang-uè deeply embedded in Manila’s Lannang community’s culture. It approaches Lánnang-uè not just as a language but as a vibrant social practice highlighting its variability and complex social meanings (e.g. identity-marking). Over six years and with more than 150 participants the monograph integrates contemporary community-focused and critical sociolinguistic frameworks to explore and document linguistic variation as well as change signaling attrition challenging reductive academic views. Employing diverse methodologies—surveys elicitation interviews computational modeling and ethnography— the work offers a nuanced depiction of Lánnang-uè’s diversity. A decolonial stance is advocated emphasizing the complex practices that define the language and its speakers’ identity. It critiques the idea of a uniform linguistic standard presenting Lánnang-uè as shaped by local diverse and inclusive practices urging a reevaluation of language ownership and authenticity. This monograph is crucial for scholars in sociolinguistics language variation and contact linguistics informing language revitalization efforts and enriching global discussions on linguistic diversity and discrimination.

This book investigates the interaction between new English lexis and metaphor/metonymy – figures meticulously defined and contrasted in terms of similarity/contiguity. It advances three main hypotheses: (i) derived lexis is more likely to be figurative in meaning and usage than the bases from which it is derived; (ii) derivation obscures the figurative origins of this lexis to varying degrees depending on differing processing strategies; (iii) lexicalisation is determined by Relevance (in Sperber and Wilson’s sense) to the needs of a culture or its powerful interest groups where culture following Norman Fairclough is characterised as an ensemble of recognised action/discourse genres. This volume is distinctive in exploring the relations between grammar and metonymy and providing numerous examples of metaphorical and metonymic lexis as it reflects society's changing needs and (contested) ideologies.

This volume comprises a selection of papers that were presented at the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL24) which took place at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra from 1-5 July 2019. The volume’s aim is to reflect the breadth of research presented at the conference with each chapter representative of a workshop or themed session. A striking aspect of ICHL24 was the three-day workshop on computational and quantitative approaches to historical linguistics and two of the chapters represent different aspects of this workshop. A number of chapters present research that explores mechanisms and processes of change within specific domains of language while others explore interactions of change across linguistic domains. Two chapters represent a common theme at the conference and consider the role of historical linguistics in explaining non-linguistic histories of language diversification.

Discover the intricate dynamics of L2 prosody with this pioneering study which examines how advanced learners from Czech German and Spanish backgrounds engage with British and American English intonation. By employing a multidimensional approach - spanning phonetic phonological discourse-pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives - this book provides a comprehensive overview of L2 prosodic features highlighting patterns of intonational phrasing f0 range and the use of tones and uptalk. Building on foundational works by Pierrehumbert Mennen and Gut this work bridges significant gaps in the field by comparing different L1 and L2 varieties integrating diverse linguistic variables and proposing a multifactorial model of L2 prosody. Relevant for linguists language educators and researchers in SLA the findings offer valuable insights for reducing foreign accents and enhancing intelligibility making it an essential resource for improving language teaching methodologies and learner outcomes. Dive into this essential guide and elevate your understanding of L2 prosody and its impact on effective communication.

The intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels but its effect on the prosody of these languages has received little attention to date. Based on semi-spontaneous and read speech data from 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intonation of Spanish and Catalan as spoken in Girona with a focus on the speakers’ bilingualism. These contact varieties share numerous intonational properties with differences mainly in the frequency of specific tunes in certain contexts. However they also exhibit significant variation often linked to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall the intonation of these contact varieties results from substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book is particularly relevant to scholars researching prosody language contact variation and multilingualism.<br/>

This book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity as well as on their differences and similarities both in synchrony and diachrony and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages including English French German Italian Medieval Latin and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines including pragmatics spoken discourse conversation analysis discourse genres (political commercial notarial discourse) corpus studies language change pragmaticalization and language typology.

Focusing on the growing trend of employing the present tense in storytelling this book explores present-tense narrative in contemporary fiction. Using a corpus approach speech writing and thought presentation in 21st-century present-tense narrative is compared with 20th-century past-tense narrative. An in-depth comparative analysis reveals previously undiscovered innovative features specific to how character discourse is presented in modern narratives. Notably narrative tenses have an impact on thought presentation; in present-tense narrative Free Direct Thought (FDT) emerges as frequently as Free Indirect Thought (FIT) a departure from the dominance of FIT in modern past-tense narrative. This book will be of interest to stylisticians narratologists corpus linguists and those who have found themselves absorbed in a 21st-century work of present-tense fiction.

Speakers and learners based on memory and experience implicitly know that certain language elements naturally pair together. However they also understand through abstract and frequency-independent categories why some combinations are possible and others are not. The frequency-grammar interface (FGI) bridges these two types of information in human cognition. Due to this interface the sediment of statistical calculations over the order distribution and associations of items (the regularities) and the computation over the abstract principles that allow these items to join together (the rules) are brought together in a speaker’s competence feeding into one another and eventually becoming superposed. In this volume it is argued that a specific subset of both first and second language grammar (termed ‘combinatorial grammar’) is both innate and learned. While not derived from language usage combinatorial grammar is continuously recalibrated by usage throughout a speaker’s life. In the domain of combinatorial grammar both generative and usage-based theories are correct each shedding light on just one component of the two that are necessary for any language to function: rules and regularities.

This volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms from written to spoken to visual in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis to the macro-level structure of online interaction all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research.

Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics discourse analysis media studies and digitally mediated communication.

This book challenges several assumptions commonly encountered in Japanese dialectology: that the pitch-accent analysis of modern Tōkyō Japanese is an appropriate basis for describing the suprasegmental phonology of other dialects and earlier stages of Japanese; that the Kyōto-type dialects have been more conservative than dialects to their east and west; that the first split in proto-Japanese was the separation of proto-Ryūkyūan; and so on. De Boer brings together evidence from recent fieldwork premodern texts and other sources to establish a theory of dialect divergence that avoids the problems these assumptions entail. Building on De Boer 2010 this book brings the author’s theory up to date with research published in the interim explains why Japanese is best understood as a restricted tone language and why mergers in the large tone classes of nouns and verbs are especially reliable markers of dialect divergence.

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

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 offers a fresh perspective on how natural languages encode grammatical relations by delving into the interplay between oblique cases adpositions serial verbs and applicatives. This book reveals through a series of case studies the pervasive role of the 'inclusion' relator across diverse linguistic contexts. Departing from traditional views that obliques lack interpretive content this work presents a unified conceptual framework of relations in grammar. Drawing on minimalist principles the book posits a preeminence of the lexicon in syntactic projection shedding light on the underlying ontology of language. By exploring cross-categorial variation and syncretism it outlines an inventory of primitives shaping morpho-syntactic derivations.

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings explores an innovative proposal: that linguistic similarities identified in different forms of contact-influenced varieties of language use (including translation native and non-native varieties of English and language use of bilinguals more generally) can be accounted for in a coherent framework grounded in the notion of ‘constrained communication’. These varieties have hitherto been studied in independent scholarly traditions especially translation studies and world Englishes leaving the potential underlying unity underexplored both conceptually and empirically.

The chapters collected in this volume aim to develop such a unified perspective by drawing on corpus data across a range of languages and language varieties with a focus on written language a neglected data source in research on multilingual contact settings. The findings point to shared general characteristics across individual contact settings which result from (probabilistically conditioned) manifestations of the same deeper regularities – constraints – present in diverse language-contact settings.

The volume espouses an ecosystemic standpoint on multilingual acquisition and learning viewing language development and use as both ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Multilingualism is inclusively used to refer to sociolinguistic diversity and pluralism. Whether speech writing gesture or body movement language is a conduit that carries meaning within a complex fluid and context-dependent framework that engages different aspects of the individual the communicative interaction communicative acts and social parameters. Continually modified over the years to better represent its multidisciplinary scope the sociobiological notion of language has found steady and productive ground within major theoretical frameworks which individually or holistically contribute to a rounded understanding of language acquisition learning and use by exploring both system-internal and system-external factors and their interaction. Summoning the work of leading academics the volume outlines the changing dynamics of multilingualism in children and adults internationally with the latest advances and under-represented coverage that highlight the ecosystemic nature of multilingual acquisition learning and use.

This book presents three major hypotheses concerning the development of fricatives in Gothic. First Gothic introduced aspiration or a phonological feature [spread glottis] to the fricative system. Second this acquisition of aspirated fricatives should be explained as a contact-induced change. Specifically a Gothic/Greek bilingual community may be held responsible for initiating and diffusing the contact change. Third I claim that this contact-driven featural enrichment prompted an array of radical restructurings of fricatives in their phonological and morphological organizations in Gothic notably the occurrence of Final Devoicing in contrast to the nonoccurrence of medial voicing the elimination of Verner’s Law effects in strong verbs the operation of Thurneysen’s Law and the apparently irregular split of PGmc. */fl-/ to Go. /fl-/ and /þl-/. Thus privileged by a Lower Danube community largely composed of Greek/Gothic bilinguals this cluster of mid-fourth-century innovations came to define the phonological and morphological identities of Biblical Gothic.

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 volume connects the latest research on language acquisition across the lifespan with the explanation of language change in specific sociohistorical settings. This conversation benefits from recent advances in two areas: on the one hand the study of how learners of various ages and in various sociolinguistic contexts acquire language variation; on the other historical sociolinguistics as the field that focuses on the study of historical patterns of language variation and change. The overarching rationale for this interdisciplinary dialogue is that all forms of language change start and spread as the result of individual acts of acquisition throughout the speakers’ lives. The thirteen chapters in this book are authored by an international group of both established and emerging scholars. They encompass theoretical overviews of specific research areas within the broader realm of the acquisition of language variation as well as case studies applying these theoretical advances to the exploration of language change in a wide range of sociohistorical contexts in the Americas Oceania and Asia. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers in the area of language acquisition language variation and language change especially those working on interdisciplinary and crosslinguistic connections among these areas.

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 volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL Leiden 2021). The chapters deal with aspects of language use throughout the history of English including efforts to prescribe and regulate language in texts that share specific forms functions and audiences. They feature both quantitative and qualitative analyses of changing language use often in relation to trends of language advice in such metalinguistic works as grammars spelling books and usage guides. The authors showcase work on pragmatics and prescriptivism (understatement between Middle and Late Modern English capitalization of common nouns from Early to Late Modern English and the use of stigmatized grammatical variants in eighteenth-century plays) specific text types (case studies of political legal and medical English) and the language of late modern letters (diachronic stylistic changes letter-copying practices the role of letter-writing manuals and changing spelling practices). This volume will be of interest to those working on pragmatics prescriptivism and sociolinguistics of English historical linguistics language change computational historical linguistics and related sub-disciplines.

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields including formal semantics historical linguistics linguistic typology and variationist sociolinguistics.

The Continuity of Linguistic Change presents a collection of selected papers in honour of Professor Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. The essays revolve around the study of linguistic variation and the mechanisms and processes associated with linguistic change a field to which Villena-Ponsoda has dedicated so many years of research. The authors are researchers of renowned international prestige who have made significant contributions in this field. The chapters cover a range of related topics and provide modern theoretical and methodological perspectives addressing the structural cognitive historical and social factors that underlie and promote linguistic change in varieties of Dutch German Greek Italian Spanish and Swedish. The reader will find contributions that explore topics such as phonology acoustic phonetics and processes deriving from the contact between languages or linguistic varieties specifically levelling koineisation standardisation and the emergence of ethnolects.

Although major cognitively based studies of SPACE and TIME in language have appeared in terms of “Frames of Reference” these do not extend to a wide selection of the world’s languages nor do they combine SPACE and TIME in the overarching concept of WORLD which has its own corresponding frames of reference. The aim of relating and unifying these concepts and their expression across languages constitutes the unique thrust of the present book which will represent a significant extension of earlier approaches. Among its main conclusions will be that the complete separation of terms for SPACE and TIME is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon rather than just a metaphorical extension of the latter from the former. The book will be of interest to all students and practitioners of Linguistics in particular Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic typology but also to a more general readership interested in the historical evolution of concepts of SPACE and TIME.