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

The claim that “…pronominals have phonological features only where they must, for some reason”, is strongly supported by the occurrence of the null pronoun PRO as coined and introduced by Noam Chomsky. How reference of PRO is determined is the main subject of control theory, the subsystem of core grammar to which this study is dedicated. Chomsky has not followed up his “natural suggestion that choice of controller is determined by theta roles or other semantic properties of the verb, perhaps pragmatic conditions of some sort.”

But then, a great many students of control have engaged in exploring thematic roles as tools most suitable for investigating control.

Shifting analysis of control to the relationship between thematic features carried by PRO and its potential controller respectively, was a turning point in control theory. Control proved to be a by-product of satisfying matching conditions that exist between thematic properties of PRO and its licit controller. The constraints derived from them are not construction-specific.

If grammar and pragmatics seem to go hand in hand, their complicity in determining control behavior is elucidated by showing that pragmatic factors can be referred to by grammatical constraints. Data of nine languages are used in the study.

The focus in this volume is on grammatical aspects of the clause in English, presenting a fine balance between theoretically- and descriptively-oriented approaches. Some authors investigate the status and properties of ‘minor’ or ‘fringe’ constructions, including ‘deictic-presentationals’; non-restrictive relative clauses with that; ‘isolated if-clauses’, and ‘exceptional clauses’. In some articles the validity of conventional accounts and approaches is questioned: such as traditional constituency trees and labelled bracketings as a means of representing relationships between parenthetical elements and their ‘hosts’; or traditional morphophonemic analyses as explanations for Ross’s ‘doubl-ing’ constraint. While some authors question commonly made assumptions (for example those concerning the relationships of clauses to sentences and propositions; or those concerning the status of post-head dependents in the NP), others appeal to new frameworks (for instance ‘emergence theory’ is used as a source of inspiration in dealing with ‘intransitive prepositions’). This collection also includes articles that adopt a solidly corpus-based approach.

The Clause in English has been prepared by colleagues past and present, friends and admirers of Rodney Huddleston, in order to honour his consistently outstanding contribution to grammatical theory and description.

The focus of this carefully selected volume concerns the existence, frequency, and form of composite/complex predicates (the “take a look” construction) in earlier periods of the English language, an area of scholarship which has been virtually neglected. The various contributions seek to understand the collocational and idiomatic aspects of these structures, as well as of related structures such as complex prepositions (e.g., “on account of”) and phrasal verbs (e.g., “look up”), in their earliest manifestations. Moreover, study of these constructions at the individual stages of English leads to diachronic questions concerning their development, raising issues pertaining to grammaticalization, lexicalization, and idiomaticization-processes which are not always clearly differentiated nor fully understood.

The Cultural Context in Business Communication focuses on differences and similarities in business negotiations and written communication in intercultural settings. To set the scene, Edward T. Hall looks back at “culture” as an evolutionary concept and Charles Campbell explains the value of classical rhetoric in contemporary cultures. Further contributions present case studies of cross-cultural encounters and discourse aspects in various settings. Steven Weiss explores the proper character of six cultures: Chinese, French, Japanese, Mexican, Nigerian, and Saudi. Other chapters contrast English with cultures such as Chinese, German, Dutch, Finnish, and Irish. The book closes with two chapters on training for effective business communication and provide models in participatory training and gaming.

The eleven original papers collected in this volume address themselves to some of the central issues in the relevance theoretic research programme since the 1995 publication of the second edition of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance. Communication and Cognition.

Several papers investigate the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in order to account for the semantics of discourse connectives, for the role of intonation in utterance interpretation, and for focus phenomena. Other papers explore the role of the relevance theoretic notion of metarepresentation in utterance interpretation and prove its usefulness in the study of both linguistic topics such as epistemic modality and conditional clauses, and in the reanalysis of literary issues such as verbal humour.

Some of the central pragmatic issues dealt with are the interpretation of semantically underdetermined linguistic forms, the role and nature of pragmatic inference, the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and the separation between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning. The theory’s application to sociolinguistic topics is assessed and developed in an inspired account of phatic communication; and the theory’s usefulness in accounting for certain types of “grammatical” constraints is explored in relation to certain restrictions in the interpretation of indefinite descriptions.

The present book is a typological study in crucial portions of the grammars of French/Romance and German/Germanic. It starts by asking: What do adverbs, pronouns and full noun phrases have in common? This question is tackled, on the one hand, from an empirical perspective by the description of relevant linguistic facts leading to significant and unexpected generalizations, and, on the other hand, from a theoretical perspective by the formalization of (i) a novel model of the Xbar-schema containing at most two Specifiers (double Spec model) and (ii) a well-defined model of Checking Theory, distinguishing A-feature checking from Abar-feature checking (Criterion). The first part of the book deals with the typology and placement of adverbs, while the second part of the book presents the application of Checking Theory, in interaction with the double Spec model of Xbar-theory, to pronouns in Romance and Germanic. The final part of the book contains a treatment of scrambling in Germanic and shows that word order variations among arguments and adverbs within the German(ic) Mittelfeld can be adequately explained in the light of the version of Checking Theory and Phrase Structure Theory developed so far for adverbs and pronouns. We are led to the conclusion that the well-known issue of word order variations can find promising solutions with the Principles & Parameters framework, on the basis of a well-defined formalization of (i) Xbar-theory, (ii) Checking Theory, (iii) clause structure composition, and (iv) locality constraints on syntactic operations and relations.

Why is a raven like a writing-desk? The concept of similarity lies at the heart of this new book on contrastive analysis. Similarity judgements depend partly on properties of the objects being compared, and partly on what the person judging considers to be relevant to the assessment; similarity thus has both objective and subjective aspects. The author shows how contrastive analysis and translation theory make use of the concept in different ways, and explains how it relates to the problematic notions of equivalence and tertium comparationis. The book then develops a meaning-based contrastive methodology, and outlines one theory of semantic structure which can be used in this methodology. The approach is illustrated with four sample studies covering different kinds of phenomena in some European languages. The final part of the book proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to cover contrastive rhetoric: the aim is to suggest a unified approach linking aspects of semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric.

Keywords: similarity, contrastive analysis, functional grammar, semantics, rhetoric, translation.

The contributions to the book “Communicating Gender in Context” deal not only with grammatical gender, but also with discursive procedures for constructing gender as a relevant social category in text and context. Attention is directed to European cultures which till now have come up short in linguistic and discourse analytic gender studies, e.g., Austria, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Poland and Sweden. But also English speech communities and questions of English grammatical gender are dealt with.In accordance with recent sociolinguistic research the contributors refrain from generalizing theses about how men and women normally speak; no conversational style feature adheres so firmly to one sex as was thought in early feminism. The studies, however, show that even today the feminine gender is often staged in a way that leads to situative asymmetry to the advantage of men. The broader societal context of patriarchy does not determine all communicative encounters, but demands particular efforts from women and men to be subverted.

The introduction to this volume by Anders Holmberg provides a reflection on movement in the light of recent developments in Minimalist theory. His discussion of the theories of category versus feature movement in terms of displacement and copying, provides the background for 12 papers dealing with clitics, pronouns and movement in variety of language families. Articles on Romance include papers on the genitive clitic in Andean Spanish, proclitic groups and word order in Caribbean Spanish, overt pronouns and empty categories in Brazilian Portuguese, the clitic en in Catalan, and clitic doubling in Romanian. Papers on Germanic discuss movement of verbal complements in Dutch and German, analyses of English finite auxiliaries in syntax and phonology, and complementizers in dialects of German in a reiterative syntax analysis. Other articles deal with object shift in Serbo-Croatian, operator-bound clitics in Niuean, a serial verb analysis of the ba construction in Mandarin Chinese, and experiencer verbs in Japanese.

This book contributes to a more balanced view of the most dramatic results of language contact by presenting linguistic and historical sketches of lesser-known contact languages. The twelve case studies offer eloquent testimony against the still common view that all contact languages are pidgins and creoles with maximally simple and essentially identical grammars. They show that some contact languages are neither pidgins nor creoles, and that even pidgins and creoles can display considerable structural diversity and structural complexity; they also show that two-language contact situations can give rise to pidgins, especially when access to a target language is withheld by its speakers. The chapters are arranged according to language type: three focus on pidgins (Hiri Motu, by Tom Dutton; Pidgin Delaware, by Ives Goddard; and Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin, by George L. Huttar and Frank J. Velantie), two on creoles (Kituba, by Salikoko S. Mufwene, and Sango, by Helma Pasch), one on a set of pidgins and creoles (Arabic-based contact languages, by Jonathan Owens), one on the question of early pidginization and/or creolization in Swahili (by Derek Nurse), and five on bilingual mixed languages (Michif, by Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen; Media Lengua and Callahuaya, both by Pieter Muysken; and Mednyj Aleut and Ma’a, both by Sarah Thomason). The authors’ collective goal is to help offset the traditional emphasis, within contact-language studies, on pidgins and creoles that arose as an immediate result of contact with Europeans, starting in the Age of Exploration. The accumulation of case studies on a wide diversity of languages is needed to create a body of knowledge substantial enough to support robust generalizations about the nature and development of all types of contact language.