2014 collection (166 titles)

The verb has often been considered the 'center' of the sentence and has hence always attracted the special attention of the linguist. The present volume collects novel approaches to two classical topics within verbal semantics, namely argument structure and the treatment of time and aspect. The linguistic material covered comes from a broad spectrum of languages including English, German, Danish, Ukrainian, and Australian aboriginal languages; and methods from both cognitive and formal semantics are applied in the analyses presented here. Some of the authors use a variety of event semantics in order to analyze argument structure and aspect whereas others employ ideas coming from object-oriented programming in order to achieve new insights into the way how verbs select their arguments and how events are classified into different types. Both kinds of methods are also used to give accounts of dynamical aspects of semantic interpretation such as coercion and type shifting.

This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience, with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, socio-historical studies, areal linguistics, and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts, which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages, but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals, or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide, expressing all kinds of extendedness, multiplicity, salience, size, and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.

This study aims to present a comparative analysis of philosophical theories of universals espoused by the foremost representatives of the three main schools of early modern scholastic thought. The book introduces the doctrines of Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548–1617), the Thomist John of St. Thomas, O.P. (1589–1644), and the Scotists Bartolomeo Mastri da Meldola, O.F.M. Conv. (1602–1673) and Bonaventura Belluto, O.F.M. Conv. (1600–1676). The author examines in detail their mutual doctrinal delineation as well as the conceptualist tenet of the Jesuit Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), whose thought constitutes an important systematic point of comparison especially with Suárez’s doctrine. The book offers the first comparative elaboration of the issue of universals, in both its metaphysical and its epistemological aspects, in the era of second scholasticism.

This volume is dedicated to exploring the crossroads where complex sentences and information management – more specifically information structure and reference tracking – come together. Complex sentences are a highly relevant but understudied domain for studying notions of IS and RT. On the one hand, a complex sentence can be studied as a mini-unit of discourse consisting of two or more elements describing events, situations, or processes, with its own internal information-structural and referential organization. On the other hand, complex sentences can be studied as parts of larger discourse structures, such as narratives or conversations, in terms of how their information-structural characteristics relate to this wider context. The book offers new perspectives for the study of the interaction between complex sentences and information management, and moreover adds typological breadth by focusing on lesser studied languages from several parts of the world.

Biomedical Natural Language Processing is a comprehensive tour through the classic and current work in the field. It discusses all subjects from both a rule-based and a machine learning approach, and also describes each subject from the perspective of both biological science and clinical medicine. The intended audience is readers who already have a background in natural language processing, but a clear introduction makes it accessible to readers from the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology, as well. The book is suitable as a reference, as well as a text for advanced courses in biomedical natural language processing and text mining.

This volume contains a comprehensive corpus-based study of prepositional constructions in written Fiji English. It explores the endo- and exonormative dynamics of norm-giving and norm-developing varieties and contributes to our understanding of structural nativization and variety formation in a multi-ethnic setting. The book provides an account of the sociolinguistic development of English in Fiji against the backdrop of the country's colonial and post-independence history, with special focus on the Indo-Fijian part of the population. Drawing on the written sections of the Indian, Great Britain, New Zealand and preliminary Fiji components of the International Corpus of English, quantitative and qualitative analyses of prepositional phenomena are conducted on the word level (frequency, semantic effects and stylistic variation), phrase level (productivity in verb-particle combinations), and pattern level (prepositions and -ing clauses). The book will be relevant to scholars interested in lexico-grammar, variety and corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics in general.

Sharing certain assumptions but differing in theory and practice, both Columbia School linguistics (CS) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) have increasingly supported their analyses with quantitative evidence. Citation of individual sentences, in isolation or in context, has been supplemented with counts of linguistic forms in texts, informant questionnaires, and perception tests. The present volume, continuing a dialogue between CS and CG, offers six such qualitative-quantitative studies, one on Afrikaans and five on Dutch. Topics include (a) demonstratives, (b) pragmatic particles and imperatives, (c) a puzzling “dismissive” idiom, (d) progressive aspect, and (e) indirect objects. While CS is better suited for analyzing relatively closed systems (e.g. tense, pronouns), CG provides more insight into the vagaries of the amorphous lexicon. The author also offers personal remarks on “linguistics as a path” and discusses how in one case a wrong prediction reflects his dual role as both linguist and student of Dutch as a foreign language.

Although the Germanic and Romance languages are two branches of the same language family and although both have developed the adjective as a separate syntactic and morphological category, the syntax, morphology, and interpretation of adjectives is by no means the same in these two language groups, and there is even variation within each of the language groups. One of the main aims of this volume is to map the differences and similarities in syntactic behavior, morphology, and meaning of the Germanic and Romance adjective and to find an answer to the following question: Are the (dis)similarities the result of autonomous developments in each of the two branches of the Indo-European language family, or are they caused by language contact?

It is now an acknowledged fact in the world of linguistics that the concept of evaluation is crucial, and that there is very little – if any – discourse that cannot be analyzed through the prism of its evaluative content. This book presents some of the latest developments in the study of this phenomenon. Released more than a decade later than Hunston and Thompson’s (2000) Evaluation in Text, Evaluation in Context is designed as its sequel, in an attempt to continue, update and extend the different avenues of research opened by the earlier work. Both theoretical and empirical studies on the topic are presented, with the intention of scrutinizing as many of its dimensions as possible, by not only looking at evaluative texts, but also considering the aspects of the discursive context that affect the final evaluative meaning at both the production and reception stages of the evaluative act. The editors’ main objective has been to gather contributions which investigate the manifold faces and phases of evaluation by presenting a wide variety of perspectives that include different linguistic theories (e.g. Axiological Semantics, Functionalism or Politeness Theory), different levels of linguistic description (e.g. phonological, lexical or semantic), and different text types and contexts (e.g. the evaluation found in ironic discourse, the multimodality of media discourse or the world of politics, just to name a few). The volume can be of use not only for scholars who study the evaluative function of language, but also for students who wish to pursue research in the area.