Subject collection: Linguistics (2,773 titles, 1967–2015)

This is the first edited volume that tackles the acquisition of the present (tense, aspect, temporality), an under-researched area, particularly compared to the acquisition of past temporality. The first two chapters focus on the L1 acquisition of English from the perspective of the Aspect hypothesis and the Verb-Island hypothesis Wang & Shirai) and the L1 acquisition of French from the perspective of the zero-tense hypothesis (Demirdache & Lungu). The remaining chapters tackle the L2 acquisition of English (Liszka, Al-Thubaiti, Vraciu), French (Ayoun, Saillard), Spanish (Gabriele et al.), Russian (Martelle) and Japanese (Shirai & Li) by learners of different L1s (French, English, Arabic, Chinese and Korean), testing various semantic and syntactic hypotheses. The last chapter presents a summary of the findings, and offers a few conclusions as well as broad directions for future research.

Most studies on the acquisition of verbal inflection have examined languages with a single verb suffix. This book offers a study on the acquisition of verb inflections in Q’anjob’al Maya. Q’anjob’al has separate inflections for aspect, subject and object agreement, and status suffixes. The subject and object inflections display a split ergative pattern. The subjects of intransitive verbs with aspect markers take absolutive markers, whereas the subjects of aspectless intransitive verbs take ergative markers. The acquisition of three types of clauses is explored in detail (imperatives, indicatives, and aspectless complements). The data come from longitudinal spontaneous speech of three monolingual Q’anjob’al children aged 1;8–3;5. This book contributes unique data to the debate on the acquisition of finite and non-finite verbs as well as adding to our understanding of the acquisition of split ergative patterns. The book is of interest to researchers and students working on linguistics and language acquisition.

The goal of this volume is to further the examination of the role, shape, and quality of argumentation in political deliberation. The chapters collected in the volume employ the concepts and methods developed within argumentation theory to investigate the specifics of political discourse across various deliberative arenas: from debates in the European Parliament, consensus conferences and public hearings in France, discussions in Dutch online forums, to exchanges of comments in online versions of British newspapers. In this way, the studies reveal the inner workings of argumentative interactions that constitute deliberative discourse – and thus importantly contribute to the study of public deliberation. This should be of interest to the students of argumentation, deliberation, and political discourse. In addition, the volume problematizes and theorizes some vital issues related to the study of situated argumentation, thus advancing the study of argumentation in context.

Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context, Vol. 2:1 (2013).

The argument structure of verbs, defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses, is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective, taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use, and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used. On the basis of several case studies combining quantitative corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments, it is shown how a usage-based approach sheds new light on a number of issues in argument realization and offers frequency-based explanations for its organizing principles at three levels of generality: verbs, constructions, and argument structure alternations.

Above and Beyond the Segments presents a unique collection of experimental linguistic and phonetic research. Mainly, it deals with the experimental approach to prosodic, and more specifically melodic, aspects of speech. But it also treats segmental phonetics and phonology, second language learning, semantics and related topics.

Apart from European languages and dialects (including Dutch, English, Greek, Danish, and dialects from Italy and The Netherlands) there also are chapters on regions as widespread as China, Russia, South Africa, South Sudan, and Surinam. These all testify the enormous diversity of language and speech in the world.

This book is of special interest to linguists working on prosodic aspects of speech in general and to those studying non-Western languages in particular.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the role of argumentation in the health care domain. Argumentation and Health is a collection of essays by argumentation theorists reflecting on the way in which the institutional context of health care shapes the argumentative interaction. The volume provides for the first time an overview of the most important recent developments and achievements of the study of argumentation in medical and public oriented health communication. In Argumentation and Health , attention is paid to argumentation in different forms of health communication, such as the medical consultation, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, health brochures and health risk communication.

This book is of interest to argumentation theorists, (health) communication scholars, healthcare practitioners, students of medicine and health-related fields, and all other researchers and practitioners interested in the function and characteristics of argumentation in health communication. Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context, Vol. 1:1 (2012).

Within the field of second language acquisition, interest in the acquisition of French as a second language has a long-standing tradition, especially in the European context. The aim of this book is to offer a synthesis of current research within this area. It contains contributions from different researchers in the field, including studies on the acquisition of grammar, formulaic language, lexis and pragmatic devices, and covering interlanguage development from beginner level up to very advanced, presumably near-native levels of proficiency. The learners in the studies reported in the volume represent different L1 backgrounds and age groups. The chapters shed light on current issues in research on second language acquisition from different theoretical perspectives, and contribute to a better understanding of L2 French and SLA in general. The volume should be of interest for students, teachers and researchers of L2 French and SLA.

Originally published in Language, Interaction and Acquisition 3:1 (2012).

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?

Ergativity is one of the main challenges both for linguistic and acquisition theories. This book is unique, taking a cross-linguistic approach to the acquisition of ergativity in a large variety of typologically distinct languages. The chapters cover languages from different families and from different geographic areas with different expressions of ergativity. Each chapter includes a description of ergativity in the language(s), the nature of the input, the social context of acquisition and developmental patterns. Comparisons of the acquisition process across closely related languages are made, change in progress of the ergative systems is discussed and, for one language, acquisition by bilingual and monolingual children is compared. The volume will be of particular interest to language acquisition researchers, linguists, psycholinguists and cognitive scientists.

Alignment in Communication is a novel direction in communication research, which focuses on interactive adaptation processes assumed to be more or less automatic in humans. It offers an alternative to established theories of human communication and also has important implications for human-machine interaction. A collection of articles by international researchers in linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, and social robotics, this book provides evidence on why such alignment occurs and the role it plays in communication. Complemented by a discussion of methodologies and explanatory frameworks from dialogue theory, it presents cornerstones of an emerging new theory of communication. The ultimate purpose is to extend our knowledge about human communication, as well as creating a foundation for natural multimodal dialogue in human-machine interaction. Its cross-disciplinary nature makes the book a useful reference for cognitive scientists, linguists, psychologists, and language philosophers, as well as engineers developing conversational agents and social robots.

Le présent recueil rassemble douze études consacrées à des problèmes de syntaxe verbale et à certains faits fondamentaux de lexique et de grammaire. Au-delà de la diversité des approches, l'originalité de l'ouvrage tient au fait que les contributions concernent plusieurs phénomènes peu ou pas décrits auparavant. On y trouvera des études générales portant sur la classification des constructions verbales et sur la notion de prédicat, et d'autres approches plus particulières décrivant : des constructions causatives irrégulières, ou transitives et causative attributive, du verbe faire, les constructions impersonnelles, les attributs de devenir et l'objet indirect en de de changer. A la frontière de la construction et de l’interprétation verbales sont présentées deux études portant sur la diathèse : verbes pronominaux passifs en français et en italien. Enfin, une étude contrastive entre français et japonais sur les déterminations temporelles dans les récits au passé.

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This collection assembles twelve studies devoted to problems of verbal syntax and certain fundamental facts of lexicon and grammar. Beyond the diversity of approaches, the originality of the work is due to the fact that the contributions relate to several phenomena little or not described before. One will find general studies relating on the classification of verbal constructions and the concept of predicate, and other approaches more particular describing : irregular causative constructions, or transitive and causative complements of the verb faire, complements of devenir, impersonal constructions and complements and indirect object with de of the verb changer. On the border of verbal construction and interpretation, two studies are presented relating to the diathesis : passive reflexive verbs in French and in Italian. And also a contrastive study between French and Japanese on the temporal determinations in past tense.

This is the first book on the acquisition of the German case system by foreign language learners. It explores how learners in their interlanguage progress from the total absence to the presence of a case system. This development is characterized by an evolvement from marking the argument’s position to marking the argument’s actual function. Theoretically couched within Processability Theory, the book deals with the feature unification and the mapping processes involved in case marking, and critically examines previous findings on German case acquisition. Empirically, the book consists of longitudinal data of 11 foreign language learners of German, which was collected over a period of 2 years. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the acquisition of German and in the acquisition of case systems in general.

Featuring contributions by leading specialists in the field, the volume is a survey of cutting edge research in genres in political discourse. Since, as is demonstrated, “political genres” reveal many of the problems pertaining to the analysis of communicative genres in general, it is also a state-of-the-art addition to contemporary genre theory. The book offers new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights in both the long-established genres (speeches, interviews, policy documents, etc.), and the modern, rapidly-evolving generic forms, such as online political ads or weblogs. The chapters, which engage in timely issues of genre mediatization, hybridity, multimodality, and the mixing of discursive styles, come from a broad range of perspectives spanning Critical Discourse Studies, pragmatics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and media studies. As such, they constitute essential reading for anyone seeking an interdisciplinary yet coherent research agenda within the vast and complex territory of today’s forms of political communication.

This selection of the verse of Valencian poet Vicent Andres Estelles (1924-1993) is accompanied by a translation into English from the original Catalan. The format of an innovative dialogue with classical authors — a cornerstone of Estellesian expression — constitutes an ingenious invocation and parodic commentary on the output and ethos of the Latin poets Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Catullus, the medieval patriarch of Valencian letters Ausiàs March and the Renaissance Castilian poet, Garcilaso de la Vega. For Estellés, Octavian Rome provides a parallel to the Franco dictatorship and the historical framework surrounding these writers affords the neophyte an opportunity for ideological denunciation, creative wit and lyrical grace as well as righteous anger at the oppressive pettiness of life under autocracy. The translators have attempted to bring to an Anglophone readership the wealth of achievement of this writer who, despite the severity of fascist repression, sang and celebrated the experience of his own community through its own oppressed language.

By taking an interdisciplinary approach — with methods drawn from narratology, aesthetics, social psychology, education, and the empirical study of literature — The Art of Sympathy in Fiction will interest scholars in a variety of fields. Its focus is the sympathetic effects of stories, and the possible ways these feelings can contribute to what has been called the “moral imagination.” Part I examines the dynamics of readers’ beliefs regarding fictional characters and the influence of those impressions on the emotions that readers experience. The book then turns its attention to sympathy, providing a comprehensive definition and considering the ways in which it operates in life and in literature. Part I concludes with a discussion of the narratological and rhetorical features of fictional narratives that theoretically elicit sympathy in readers. Part II applies these theories to four stories that persuade readers to sympathize with characters who seem unsympathetic. Finally, based on empirical findings from the responses of adolescent readers, Part III considers pedagogical approaches that can help students reflect on emotional experiences that result from reading fiction.

This volume explores the lexical influence of English on European languages, a topical theme with linguistic and cultural implications. It provides an extensive introductory background to a cross-national view of English-induced lexical borrowing, posing crucial analytical questions such as what counts as an Anglicism. It also offers a typology of borrowings with examples from the languages represented: Armenian, Danish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish. The articles in this volume address general and language-specific issues related to the analysis and collection of Anglicisms, extending the scope to the largely unexplored area of phraseology and bringing new insights into corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies. This volume fits into a well-established and constantly developing research field and will appeal to scholars interested in the spread of English as an international language, contact and contrastive linguistics, lexicology and lexicography, and computer corpus lexicography.

This volume includes methodological considerations and descriptions of some of the texts compiled in The Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA), together with a number of pilot studies using these texts showing how the corpus can be used to investigate English Astronomy writing between 1700 and 1900, from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.CETA is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). Since the CC was designed in 2003 with a sampling method by which extracts of 10,000 words were selected, this method has been followed in CETA, with samples from 42 different authors both from Europe and North America. Some extralinguistic parameters, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres have been considered for text selection. According to late Modern English text typology, the samples in CETA can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as some other metadata information, can be used to search the corpus.

CETA, together with the Coruña Corpus Tool purpose-designed software by IrLab, was originally made available with the volume on CD-rom. As of early 2019, these are also accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña: CCT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21850 and CETA at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21848

This multi-faceted collection of research papers on Advice in Discourse focuses on advisory practices in different contexts. Data is drawn from academic, educational and training settings, health-related practices, and computer-mediated communication. The languages involved are Cantonese, English, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. The chapters treat professional and institutional practices, practices that contain peer interaction within an institutional framework, and non-institutional peer interaction, as well as solicited and non-solicited advice in written and spoken form. The work reported on clearly demonstrates the complexity of the advisory activity, which needs to be studied in its cultural framework and interactional context. The richness and diversity of this practice is studied from different methodological angles, covering qualitative and quantitative as well as theoretical and empirical analyses. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the research field, thought-provoking theoretical discussions and extensive references for future research. It is essential for linguists, advice-practitioners and for those who want to learn more about the discourse of advice.

Author Representations in Literary Reading investigates the role of the author in the mind of the reader. It is the first book-length empirical study on generated author inferences by readers of literature. It bridges the gap between theories which hold that the author is irrelevant and those that give him prominence. By combining insights and methods from both cognitive psychology and literary theory, this book contributes to a better understanding of how readers process literary texts and what role their assumptions about an author play. A series of experiments demonstrate that readers generate author inferences during the process of reading, which they use to create an image of the text’s author. The findings suggest that interpretations about the author play a pivotal role in the literary reading process. This book is relevant to scholars and students in all areas of the cognitive sciences, including literary studies and psychology.

Explaining the acquisition and processing of relative clauses has long challenged psycholinguistics researchers. The current volume presents a collection of chapters that consider the acquisition of relative clauses with a particular focus on function, typology, and language processing. A diverse range of theoretical approaches and languages are bought to bear on the acquisition of this construction type, making the volume unique in its coverage. The volume will appeal to students and scholars whose interest lies in the acquisition and processing of syntax with a particular focus on complex sentences in crosslinguistic and functionalist perspective.

This monograph addresses two issues, phases and adverbials. It proposes that there is a correlation between the phase structure, the tripartite quantificational structure and the information structure of the sentence. This correlation plays an important role not only in referential and information-structural properties of arguments and the verb but also in adverbial properties. For instance, the study shows that certain sentence adverbials can occur in the sentence-final position in the vP phase when they represent the extreme value with respect to the set of focus alternatives. The proposed correlation also becomes important in anaphoric relations with respect to adjuncts. Only an R-expression spelled out and interpreted in the CP phase of an adjunct clause can corefer with the coindexed pronoun. The study also discusses adverbial ordering and shows that the relative order of certain adverbials can be reversed if they occur in different phases. The monograph will appeal to syntacticians and linguists interested in the relationship between syntax and its interfaces.

The Arabic verbal system is, for most grammarians, the keystone of the language. Notable for the regularity of its patterns, it presents the linguist with an unparalleled opportunity to explore the Saussurean notion of the indivisible sign: form and meaning. Whilst Arabic forms are well-documented, the elucidation of the corresponding meanings has proved more challenging. Beginning with an examination of the verbal morphology of Modern Standard Arabic, including an evaluation of the significance of the consonantal root, this volume then concentrates on establishing the function of the vowel-lengthening verbal patterns (III and VI). It explores issues of mutuality and reciprocity, valency and transitivity, ultimately focusing on atelic lexical aspect as the unified meaning of these patterns. This study is rich in data and relies extensively upon contemporary examples (with transliteration and translation) to illustrate its arguments, adopting an empirical structuralist approach which is aimed both at general linguists and at specialist Arabists.

The context of mediation immediately highlights the importance of argumentation as a means to reasonably handle conflict. Argumentation in dispute mediation tackles this topic providing both theoretical insights and detailed empirical argumentative analysis. Its goal is twofold: to explore mediation as a real-life context of argumentation and to show how an increased argumentative awareness could improve conflict resolution.

Particular emphasis is accorded to mapping mediation through an interdisciplinary reasoned review of existing accounts. The outline of a conceptual framework of mediation constitutes a solid basis for the study of argumentation in mediation. The argumentative analysis of a corpus of mediation cases, based on the pragma-dialectical account and the Argumentum Model of Topics, shows the mediator’s moves which actually help conflicting parties discuss reasonably. The mediator’s topical potential plays a crucial role in this relation at the levels of issue selection, evoking of cultural-contextual premises and choice of argument schemes.

The articles in this edited volume represent a range of approaches to studying the role of verbal aspect in grammatical variation. Issues addressed include: defining the variable context; operationalizing aspectual distinctions as factors conditioning linguistic variation; and the appropriate number of aspectual distinctions and levels. Apart from bringing to light various methodological and analytical issues, this volume gathers together a unique collection of original research, based on spoken- and written-language corpora, of an array of languages and linguistic varieties: African American Vernacular English, Caribbean English and English-based creole, Indian English, Newfoundland English, Canadian French, Brazilian Portuguese, Ecuadorian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, and Peninsular Spanish. This volume should not only benefit research on grammatical variation but also be of interest more generally to the study of verbal aspect.

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary perspective on key socio-cultural aspects of second language learning. Building on Bakhtin’s philosophy of language and the self, it examines the complex intersections among gender, culture, and agency in the everyday discursive practices of immigrants. Bakhtin’s dialogic framework still remains on the periphery of second language acquisition research. The book embraces not only Bakhtin’s well-known notion of dialogue but also his core concepts of responsibility and ethics in the analysis of immigrants’ narrative samples. The significance of narratives is underscored throughout the book, and a dialogic, discourse-centered approach to narrative as a genre is suggested.

Authoring the Dialogical Self targets a range of disciplines. Scholars in applied linguistics, narrative studies, cultural psychology, and communication studies will find the discussed concepts relevant. The rich data samples and detailed analysis make the book appropriate for graduate courses in TESOL, language and identity, or language and gender.

What happens when people communicate or dialogue with each other? This is the daunting question that this book proposes to address by starting from a controversial hypothesis: What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin (1962), as “doing things with words”? That is, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of agents in a dialogical situation? Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism proposes to explore this unique hypothesis by mobilizing metaphorically the notion of ventriloquism. According to this ventriloqual perspective, interactions are never purely local, but dislocal, that is, they constantly mobilize figures (collectives, principles, values, emotions, etc.) that incarnate themselves in people’s discussions. This highly original book, which develops the analytical, practical and ethical dimensions of such a theoretical positioning, may be of interest to communication scholars, linguists, sociologists, conversation analysts, management and organizational scholars, as well as philosophers interested in language, action and ethics.



This book won the prestigious NCA LSI 'Old Chestnut' Award 2019!

Adjectives are comparatively less well studied than the lexical categories of nouns and verbs. The present volume brings together studies in the syntax and semantics of adjectives. Four of the contributions investigate the syntax of adjectives in a variety of languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Serbocroatian). The theoretical issues explored include: the syntax of attributive and predicative adjectives, the syntax of nominalized adjectives and the identification of adjectives as a distinct lexical category in Mandarin Chinese. A further four contributions examine different aspects in the semantics of adjectives in English, French, and Spanish, dealing with superlatives, comparatives, and aspect in adjectives. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language typology.

This grammar of Modern Eastern Armenian gives a precise and explicit description of the Eastern Armenian language of the Republic of Armenia. It covers not only the normative tradition but, more importantly, also describes the colloquial language as it is used in Armenia today. With regard to methodological approach and terminology it fully meets the demands of modern general linguistics and typology. This grammar will be of interest not only to the specialised readership of descriptive and comparative linguists, of typologists and of armenologists, but to all those who would like to acquaint themselves with linguistic data from living Armenian. It will also be of use to students wishing to learn Modern Eastern Armenian and to lecturers in Modern Eastern Armenian language courses.

This volume brings together ten papers, all presented at the 8th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (New York City, 2007), addressing a wide range of topics in the morphology, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of Hungarian, with discussion of related facts in other languages as well. The volume includes an analysis of the morphophonology of the infinitival suffix in Optimality Theory, a plea for a phonetically-grounded theory of phonology based on partial neutralization of the v/f contrast, a Government Phonology account of vowel/zero alternations, a discussion of the recursive nature of speech prosody, a context-structure perspective on the pragmatics of polarity particles, a novel outlook on the prosody, semantics, and syntax of negative quantifiers, a structural approach to the difference between factive and non-factive complements and the distribution of the clausal expletive azt, a pioneering study of the licensing and position of overt nominative subjects of infinitival complement clauses, a lexicalist perspective on the distribution of ablative cause-PPs in anti-causative constructions, and an analysis of the complicated morphosyntax of adpositional preverbs and their doubling in terms of partial chain reduction in a phase-based cyclic mapping of syntax to phonology. The volume will be of interest not just to scholars working on Hungarian, but to a general audience of generative linguists.

The Arab-Israeli struggle is not only a struggle over land, but a struggle over language representations. Arab reporters as well as politicians believe that their political discourses about the Middle East conflict are objective, accurate, and credible. Arab News and Conflict critically examines the role of language in the representations of events and ideologies found in news media.

Drawing on socio-political-linguistic approaches combined with real-case studies, the author offers a unique discourse analysis model for analysing politically sensitive language in the media. The focus in this study is on the Arab media discourse in times of conflict with Israel and the US, spanning the years 2001 to 2009. Using rich examples from outspoken Arab media outlets, the study explores ideological and language facts about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This book is compelling reading for students and researchers of media and cultural studies, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, and translation. It is of equal interest to political analysts, political speakers, journalists, and news editors who need to understand more about the ideological function of the language they use or the political-journalistic-linguistic nexus of power.

Within a new model of language acquisition, this book discusses verb second (V2) word order in situations where there is variation in the input. While traditional generative accounts consider V2 to be a parameter, this study shows that, in many languages, this word order is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. Thus, within a split-CP model of clause structure, a number of micro-cues are formulated, taking into account the specific context for V2 vs. non-V2 (clause type, subcategory of the elements involved, etc.). The micro-cues are produced in children’s I-language grammars on exposure to the relevant input. Focusing on a dialect of Norwegian, the book shows that children generally produce target-consistent V2 and non-V2 from early on, indicating that they are sensitive to the micro-cues. This includes contexts where word order is dependent on information structure. The children’s occasional non-target-consistent behavior is accounted for by economy principles.

The question of what constitutes effective health communication has been addressed mainly by scholars working in American and European cultural contexts. Many people who could benefit most from effective health communication, however, come from different cultures. A prime example is the threat posed by HIV/AIDS to the people of South Africa. Although it is generally acknowledged that health communication needs to be tailored to the target audience’s characteristics with cultural background being one of the most salient ones, little research has been done on how to achieve this. In this book, we bring together leading scholars in the field of health communication as well as communication scholars from South Africa. As such, it can serve as an example of the promises and the limitations of general health communication theories to local praxis as well as provide guidelines for the development of better health communication in South Africa.

This book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation – prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian. Adpositions are treated by some authors from a semantic perspective, by others as syntactic units, and a third group of authors distinguishes adpositions from the point of view of their pragmatic function. This work is of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as to those who have a special interest in any of the languages treated.

This book explores the thesis that in the Kwa languages of West Africa, aspect and modality are more central to the grammar of the verb than tense. Where tense marking has emerged it is invariably in the expression of the future, and therefore concerned with the impending actualization or potentiality of an event, hence with modality, rather than the purely temporal sequencing associated with tense. The primary grammatical contrasts are perfective versus imperfective. The main languages discussed are Akan, Dangme, Ewe, Ga and Tuwuli while Nzema-Ahanta, Likpe and Eastern Gbe are also mentioned. Knowledge about these languages has deepened considerably during the past decade or so and ideas about their structure have changed. The volume therefore presents novel analyses of grammatical forms like the so-called S-Aux-O-V-Other or “future” constructions, and provides empirical data for theorizing about aspect and modality. It should be of considerable interest to Africanist linguists, typologists, and creolists interested in substrate issues.

Recent developments in the generative tradition have created new interest in matters of argument structure and argument projection, giving prominence to the discussion on the role of lexical entries. Particularly, the more traditional lexicalist view that encodes argument structure information on lexical entries is now challenged by a syntactic view under which all properties of argument structure are taken up by syntactic structure. In the light of these new developments, the contributions in this volume provide detailed empirical investigations of argument structure phenomena in a wide range of languages. The contributions vary in their response to the theoretical questions and address issues that range from the role of specific functional heads and the relation of argument projection with syntactic processes, to the position of argument structure within a broader clausal architecture and the argument structure properties of less studied categories.

This volume contains a careful selection of papers concerned with actual research questions on anaphoric reference, a subject of current interest with various linguistic subdisciplines. This is reflected in this book as it methodically covers broadly invested approaches from cognitive, neurolinguistic, formal and computational perspectives, each contribution representing the respective ‘state of the art’ on a high theoretical and empirical level. The volume contains three thematic parts: Anaphors in Cognitive, Text- and Discourse Linguistics; The Syntax and Semantics of Anaphors; and Neurolinguistic Studies on the reception of anaphoric reference. The contributions investigate several Indo-European languages.

Meaning does not reside in linguistic units but is constructed in the minds of the language users. Meaning construction is an on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings on the basis of underspecified linguistic units. The construction of meaning is guided by cognitive principles. The contributions collected in the volume focus on two types of cognitive principles guiding meaning construction: meaning construction by means of metonymy and metaphor, and meaning construction by means of mental spaces and conceptual blending. The papers in the former group survey experiential evidence of figurative meaning construction and discuss high-level metaphor and metonymy, the role of metonymy in discourse, the chaining of metonymies, metonymy as an alternative to coercion, and metaphtonymic meanings of proper names. The papers in the latter group address the issues of meaning construction prompted by personal pronouns, relative clauses, inferential constructions, “sort-of” expressions, questions, and the into-causative construction.

This monograph provides an in-depth investigation of the structural integration and the licensing of adverbs in relation to clause structure, with special emphasis on the structural implementation of the relation between the position and interpretation of adverbs. The book substantiates the hypothesis that the licensing of adverbs within and across the three layers of the clause is contingent on specifier-head agreement and that variation in the linear order of adverbs and other elements of the clause follows from the interplay of a small number of factors. The central claims made are: functional projections hosting adverbs are not confined to the inflectional and complementizer layer of the clause, but also play a central role in the shaping of the lexical layer; postverbal adverbs are realized within a semantically empty verbal projection and licensed under specifier head agreement by proxy; and adverbs that occur within the complementizer layer of the clause do so by either move or merge.

This cross-linguistic volume innovates research of the acquisition of diminutives in the inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, the agglutinating languages Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish and in the introflecting Hebrew. These languages differ in various aspects relevant for the acquisition of diminutives and the development of pragmatics in early child language. Diminutive formation often tends to be the first pattern of word formation to emerge. The main reason for this seems to lie in the pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centred communication. A main topic of this book is the relation of emergence and early development between diminutives and other categories of word formation and inflection. The greater degree of morphological productivity and transparency, as well as phonological saliency, favors the use of diminutives. In this case diminutives may facilitate the acquisition of inflection.

In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.

Agreement plays a central role in modern generative grammar. The present collection brings together contributions from experts on various aspects of agreement systems in the world’s languages in an attempt to formulate formal and substantive universals in this domain. All the papers contained here focus on the formalization of the mechanisms of agreement and on the relationship between case and agreement. All the papers propose solutions by seriously examining cross-linguistic data from the usual Germanic and Romance languages to Lummi, Greek, Hindi, Turkish and other Turkic languages, Japanese, Tsez, Masaai, Russian, Arabic, Basque, Warlpiri, Kaltakungu, and Bantu.

Advice Online presents a comprehensive study of advice-giving in one particular American Internet advice column, referred to as ‘Lucy Answers’. The discursive practice investigated is part of a professional and educational health program managed by an American university. The study provides insights into the linguistic realization of both asking for and giving advice in a written form and thus adds to the literature on advice columns as a specific text genre, on advice in health care contexts, and on Internet communication. The book offers a comprehensive literature review of advice in health encounters and other contexts, and uses this knowledge as a basis for comparison. Advice Online demonstrates how qualitative and quantitative research methods can be successfully combined to arrive at a comprehensive analysis of a discursive practice. It provides essential information on advice-giving for researchers, academics and students in the fields of (Internet) communication, media studies, pragmatics, social psychology and counseling. Health educators who work for advice columns or use similar forms of communication will also benefit from the insights gained in this study.

The concept of analogy is of central concern to modern cognitive scientists, whereas it has been largely neglected in linguistics in the past four decades. The goal of this thought-provoking book is (1) to introduce a cognitively and linguistically viable notion of analogy; and (2) to re-establish and build on traditional linguistic analogy-based research.

As a starting point, a general definition of analogy is offered that makes the distinction between analogy-as-structure and analogy-as-process.

Chapter 2 deals with analogy as used in traditional linguistics. It demonstrates how phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and diachronic linguistics make use of analogy and discusses linguistic domains in which analogy does or did not work. The appendix gives a description of a computer program, which performs such instances of analogy-based syntactic analysis as have long been claimed impossible.

Chapter 3 supports the ultimate (non-modular) ‘unity of the mind’ and discusses the existence of pervasive analogies between language and such cognitive domains as vision, music, and logic.

The final chapter presents evidence for the view that the cosmology of every culture is based on analogy.

At a more abstract level, the role of analogy in scientific change is scrutinized, resulting in a meta-analogy between myth and science.

This monograph is the first study of the acquisition of Swahili as a first language. It focuses on the acquisition of inflectional affixes, with a particular emphasis on subject agreement and tense. Other inflectional affixes are also investigated, including object agreement and mood. The study surveys the adult dialect in question, Nairobi Swahili, discussing social, phonological, morphological and syntactic properties. Data, analyses and copious examples are presented of the naturalistic speech of four Swahili speaking children. The data are tested against six influential theories of child language, and the results show that processing and metrical theories of telegraphic speech fail to account for the observed patterns, while grammatical theories of child language fair significantly better. The data and analyses presented in this book are indispensable for linguists and psychologists interested in the acquisition of inflectional material and other cross-linguistic properties of child language.

Since the late 1950s the study of argumentation has developed from a marginal part of logic and rhetoric into a genuine interdisciplinary academic discipline. After having first been primarily concerned with creating an adequate philosophical perspective on argumentation, argumentation theorists have gradually shifted their focus of attention to a more immediate concern with the ins and outs of argumentative praxis. What exactly are the characteristics of situated argumentative discourse in different argumentative ‘action types’? How is the discourse influenced by institutional and contextual constraints? In what way can prominent cases of argumentative discourse be fruitfully analysed? Argumentation in Practice aims to provide insight into some important facets of argumentative praxis and the different ways in which it can be approached. The first part of this volume, ‘Conceptions of problems in argumentative practice’, introduces useful theoretical perspectives. The second part, ‘Empirical studies of argumentative practice’, contains both empirical studies of a general kind and several types of specific case studies.

Anaphora processing is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines. The correct interpretation of anaphora has also become increasingly important for real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering.

This volume provides a unique overview of the processing of anaphora from a multi- and inter-disciplinary angle. It will be of interest and practical use to readers from fields as diverse as theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human language technology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and translation studies.

The readership includes but is not limited to university lecturers, researchers, postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.

Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.

This book provides a number of studies of different aspects of Swedish child language. Some of the thematic chapters present original, unpublished data: on the acquisition of tense, on the range and frequency of different word order patterns in early child Swedish, related to the input, meaning the language of adults talking to the children or in the presence of the children. The remaining chapters present overviews of previous research: on the acquisition of word formation rules, the noun phrase, and wh-questions. The introduction to this volume contains a concise overview of the basic features of Swedish grammar and a comprehensive overview of different Swedish child language corpora. The main body of research proceeds within a generative framework, but the text is designed to be accessible to researchers of different theoretical paradigms.

This volume is a collection of studies by some of the foremost researchers of French acquisition in the generative framework. It provides a unique perspective on cross-learner comparative research in that each chapter examines the development of one component of the grammar (functional categories) across different contexts in French learners: i.e. first language acquisition, second language acquisition, bilingual first language acquisition and specifically-language impaired acquisition. This permits readers to see how similar issues and morphosyntactic properties can be investigated in a range of various acquisition situations, and in turn, how each context can contribute to our general understanding of how these morphosyntactic properties are acquired in all learners of the same language. This state-of-the-art collection is enhanced by an introductory chapter that provides background on current formal generative theory, as well as a summary and synthesis of the major trends emerging from the individual studies regarding the acquisition of different functional categories across different learner contexts in French.