Studies in Language Companion Series

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.

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.

The concept of ‘animacy’ concerns the fundamental and cognitive question of the extent to which we recognize and express living things as saliently human-like or animal-like.

In Animacy and Reference Mutsumi Yamamoto pursues two main objectives: First, to establish a conceptual framework of animacy, and secondly, to explain how the concept of animacy can be reflected in the use of referential expressions. Unlike previous studies on the subject focussing on grammatical manifestations, Animacy and Reference sheds light upon the conceptual properties of animacy itself and its reflection in referential processes.

For the research of this study the author focussed on languages that show completely different tendencies. As a result, English and Japanese ‘parallel corpora’ are analysed yielding salient observations and opening intriguing discussions.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of ‘give’ (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument structure, typology of the Amdo Sprachbund, spatial realtors (Northeastern Turkic), core argument patterns (languages of Northern California), and typology of grammatical relations (LENCA) are the topics of articles based on cross-linguistic data. The broad empirical sweep and the fine-tuned theoretical analysis highlight the central role of argument structure and grammatical relations with respect to a plethora of linguistic phenomena.

The contributions in the first part ‘Re-modelling logic’ of this volume take account of formal logic in the theory of ‘rational’ argumentation. Part two contains papers that distinguish the various dialogue games for logics in terms of ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ of the players. The authors following in the third section study the interaction between participants in a dialogue. Here the tools of the logician are used for the wider purpose of studying the nature of dialogue. The fourth section concern modes of argumentation that are actually found in philosopical texts from earlier centuries. To be followed by contributions in Part five that may be read as attempts to retrieve what was left of the spirit of criticism and debate in philosphy after the onslaught of Cartesianism and idealism.

In this work, the Spanish copulae ser and estar are argued to be aspectual morphemes. Their binary opposition reflects the universal aspectual values [±Perfective], which are the same ones overtly expressed by the preterite and imperfect past tense forms in Spanish. It can therefore be shown that different types of states, just like different types of events, can be categorized based on their aspectual composition. Additionally, the inherent semantic differences between events and states can be accounted for by analyzing aspect as applying to events internally and to states externally. A useful resource for the beginning linguist as well as the most seasoned analyst, this work is written in language that is easy to understand while remaining faithful to all of the appropriate relevant technical terminology. Anyone who is seriously interested in exploring why the Spanish verbs ser and estar are used the way they are should read this book.

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.

Since the pioneering analyses of Renward Brandstetter (1860–1942) a quasi-morphological element called the ‘root’ has been recognized in Austronesian linguistics. This monograph confronts many of the methodological and substantive issues raised but never fully resolved by Brandstetter. In an effort to reassess the value of his work for contemporary linguistics the author examines Brandstetter’s methods and results, and applies a modified from of this approach to new material. The study establishes 230 roots based on more than 2,560 root tokens in some 117 languages. It is thus intended to serve as a rudimentary root dictionary and a basic handbook on the subject of the root for future scholars of Austronesian.

The volume attempts to deal with equational sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and their remote structure. In this unique monograph Mohamed Sami Anwar oes to show that equational sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic are derived from underlying sentences that have transitive or intransitive verbs and that the verb be in its overt form is only a tense marker. The chapter following the introduction deals with the equational sentences functioning as conveyers of stative ideas. The third chapter deals with the verb be in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and how it functions only as a tense marker. The fourth chapter is an analysis of determination as regards the subject and why in some cases the predicate, at the surface structure, has to occur before the subject. The final chapter deals with the predicate slot and its types of fillers, and analyzes also the remote structure of the equational sentences to interpret the phenomenon of the presence and absence of agreement in number and gender between the subject and the predicate.

The three concepts of case, valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, semantico-syntactic verbal classes, and the semantic correlates of transitivity. The volume unifies papers written within different theoretical frameworks and representing variegated approaches (Optimality Theory, Government and Binding, various versions of the Functional approach, Cross-linguistic and Typological analyses), containing both numerous new findings in individual languages and valuable observations and generalizations related to case, valency and transitivity.

This book offers an analysis of the French clitic object pronouns lui and le in the radically functional Columbia school framework, contrasting this framework with sentence-based treatments of case selection. It suggests that features of the sentence such as subject and object relations, normally taken as pretheoretical categories of observation about language, are in fact part of a theory of language which does not withstand empirical testing. It shows that the correct categories are neither those of structural case nor those of lexical case, but rather, semantic ones. Traditionally, anomalies in the selection of dative and accusative case in French, such as case government, use of the dative for possession and disadvantaging, its use in the faire-causative construction, and other puzzling distributional irregularities have been used to support the idea of an autonomous, non-functional central core of syntactic phenomena in language. The present analysis proposes semantic constants for lui and le which render all their occurrences explicable in a straightforward way. The same functional perspective informs issues of cliticity and pronominalization as well. The solution offered here emerges from an innovative instrumental view of linguistic meaning, an acknowledgment that communicative output is determined only partially and indirectly by purely linguistic input, with extralinguistic knowledge and human inference bridging the gap. This approach entails identification of the pragmatic factors influencing case selection and a reevaluation of thematic-role theory, and reveals the crucial impact of discourse on the structure as well as the functioning of grammar. One remarkable feature of the study is its extensive and varied data base. The hypothesis is buttressed by hundreds of fully contextualized examples and large-scale counts drawn from modern French texts.

This volume brings together 18 typological studies of causative and related constructions (transitivity, voice, other expressions of cause) by 19 scholars from North America, Western Europe, and Russia. The inspirations for the volume is the pioneering work on causative constructions by the Leningrad Typology Group; several of the contributors have close connections to the charter members of that group, others have appreciated this work from a distance. The volume as a whole is based on the concept of causative constructions as embracing both morphology and syntax, with an important semantic component as well. In addition to general studies concerning the morpho syntactic and semantic typology and the history of causative constructions and relations to other phenomena, the following individual languages are treated in detail: Russian, English, Dutch, Svan, Even, Korean, Yukaghir, Alutor, Aleut, Haruai, Dogon, Athabaskan languages. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in causative constructions and transitivity relations, and to all who are interested in the linguistic expression of causal relations.

The complex diachronic and synchronic status of the concepts be and have can be understood only with consideration of their full range of constructions and functions. Data from modern Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian) provides a window into zero copulas, non-verbal have expressions, and verbal constructions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, be and have are analyzed in terms of a blended prototype model, wherein existence/copula for be and possession/relationship for have are inseparably combined. These concepts are related to each other in their functions and meanings and serve as organizing principles in a conceptual network of semantic neighbors, including give, take, get, become, make, and verbs of position and motion. Renewal and replacement of be and have occur through processes of polysemization and suppletization involving lexical items in this network. Topics include polysemy, suppletion, tense/mood auxiliaries, modality, causatives, evidentiality, function words, contact phenomena, syntactic calques, and idiomatic constructions.

Was Tesnière the founding father of dependency grammar or merely a culmination point in its long history? Leaving no doubt that the latter position is correct, Chapters of Dependency Grammar tells the story of how dependency-oriented grammatical description developed from Antiquity up to the early 20th century. From Priscian’s Rome to Dmitrievsky’s Russia, from the French Encyclopaedia to Stephen W. Clark’s school grammars in 19th century America, it is shown how the concept of dependencies (asymmetric word-to-word relations) surfaced again and again, assuming a central place in syntax. A particularly intriguing aspect of the storyline is that even without any direct contact or influence, authors were making key breakthroughs in similar directions. In the works of Sámuel Brassai, a Transylvanian polymath, and Franz Kern, a German grammarian, the first dependency trees appear in 1873 and 1883, respectively, predating Tesnière’s stemmas by several decades.

The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European — Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume I, surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense linguistic diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.

This collective volume explores clause-linkage strategies in a cross-linguistic perspective with greater emphasis on subordination. Part I presents some theoretical reassessment of syntactic terminologies and distinctive criteria for subordination, as well as typological methods based on sets of variables and statistics allowing cross-linguistic comparability. Part II deals with strategies relating to clause-chaining, conjunctive conjugations, converbial constructions, masdars. Part III centers on the interaction between the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of clause-linking and subordination, in relation to informa­tional structure, to referential hierarchy, and correlative constructions. Part IV presents insights in the clause-linking and subordinating functions of some T.A.M. markers, verbal inflectional morphology and conjugation systems, which may also interact with informa­tional hierarchy, via the backgrounding effects and lack of illocutionary force of some aspect and mood forms. The volume is of particular interest to linguists and typologists working on clause-linkage systems and on the interface between syntax, pragmatics, and semantics.

Conditionals encode speculation. They convey how events could have been different in the past or present, or might be different in the future if particular conditions had been or will be met. While all languages afford the means to speculate or hypothesize about possible events, the ways in which they do so vary. This work explores some of this variation through an analysis of the stucture and semantics of complex conditional sentences in Russian and Macedonian. It addresses typological questions about the general properties of natural language conditionals and examines the role of the grammatical categories tense, aspect, mood and status in the coding of conditional meaning. The book also discusses the relationship between the use of these categories and the shape of a language’s conditional system. For example, the use of tense in counterfactual contexts in Macedonian correlates with the grammaticalization of more shades of conditional meaning than are grammaticalized in Russian, which does not employ tense forms in this way. The study draws on data from a rich variety of sources and thus includes kinds of conditionals overlooked in many other studies. The book addresses issues of concern to Slavists and raises questions for those interested in conditionals and the coding of hypothetical meaning.

The book defines the concept of Semantic-Communicative Structure [= Sem-CommS]-a formal object that is imposed on the starting Semantic Structure [= SemS] of a sentence (under text synthesis) in order to turn the selected meaning into a linguistic message. The Sem-CommS is a system of eight logically independent oppositions: 1. Thematicity (Rheme vs. Theme), 2. Givenness (Given vs. Old), 3. Focalization (Focalized vs. Non-Focalized), 4. Perspective (Foregrounded vs. Backgrounded), 5. Emphasis (Emphasized vs. Non-Emphasized), 6. Presupposedness (Presupposed vs. Non-Presupposed), 7. Unitariness (Unitary vs. Articulated), 8. Locutionality (Communicated vs. Signaled). The values of these oppositions mark particular subnetworks of the starting SemS and thus allow for the distinction between sentences such as (a) A man killed a dog vs. The dog was killed by a man, (b) John washed the window vs. It was John who washed the window or (c) It hurts! vs. Ouch! The proposed Sem-Comm-oppositions are conceived as an attempt at sharpening the well-known notions of Topic ~ Comment, Focus, etc. Possible linguistic strategies for expressing the values of the Sem-Comm-oppositions in different languages are discussed at some length, with linguistic illustrations.

This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they descended from a common ancestor language, the contributions present in-depth, empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments, thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change, grammaticalisation, and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.

The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the research community, the book is a focused exploration of discourse patterns of Alto Perené Arawak, with emphasis on conversational structures. The book’s methodological scaffold is based on proposals and insights from multiple research fields, such as comparative conversation analysis, sociology, interactional linguistics, documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and prosodic typology. The interactional patterns of a small Arawak language of Peru are shown to share the common infrastructure reported in the organization of conversation across other languages and cultures. Yet the analysis demonstrates a variety of unique nuances in the organization of interactional behavior of Alto Perené Arawak participants. The peculiarities observed are attributed to the language-specific semiotic resources and participants’ orientation to the local cultural norms. The book’s structured examination of conversational data of a small indigenous language of South America is anticipated to be of utility to linguistic research on understudied non-Western languages.

Cross-linguistic semantics – investigating how languages package and express meanings differently – is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The opening chapters give a state-of-the-art overview of the NSM model, propose several theoretical innovations and advance a number of original analyses in connection with names and naming, clefts and other specificational sentences, and discourse anaphora. Subsequent chapters describe and analyse diverse phenomena in ten languages from multiple families, geographical locations, and cultural settings around the globe. Three substantial studies document how the metalanguage of NSM semantic primes can be realised in languages of widely differing types: Amharic (Ethiopia), Korean, and East Cree. Each constitutes a lexicogrammatical portrait in miniature of the language concerned. Other chapters probe topics such as inalienable possession in Koromu (Papua New Guinea), epistemic verbs in Swedish, hyperpolysemy in Bunuba (Australia), the expression of "momentariness" in Berber, ethnogeometry in Makasai (East Timor), value concepts in Russian, and “virtuous emotions” in Japanese. This book will be valuable for linguists working on language description, lexical semantics, or the semantics of grammar, for advanced students of linguistics, and for others interested in language universals and language diversity.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art account of research into datives and other morphological cases. The contributors, among them leading scholars in the field, present fresh insights into traditional issues such as the dichotomy between lexical and structural case, and open up fascinating new areas of research. A recurrent feature of the majority of contributions is their combined syntax-semantics perspective. Germanic varieties, Serbian, Albanian and other Balkan languages alongside Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog are discussed from various theoretical angles such as mainstream generativism, lexical-functional grammar, and functional typology. Despite the broad range of facts spanning the distance between acquisition data and dialectology, the papers are connected by a renewed interest in form-function correspondencies. This volume will be welcomed by theoretical linguists and typologists with an interest in argument and event structure, linguists studying the case systems of individual languages and researchers in search for up-to-date discussion of Germanic datives.

This volume proposes a new way to address the classical question concerning the relation between language, cognition, and culture from the perspective of two basic systems: deixis and the pronominal system. It investigates the linguistic structuring of basic concepts of person, place and time in Romance languages, disclosing structural differences that may be related to mental parameters and other extra-linguistic circumstances and thus possibly linked to a light revision of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The methodological and theoretical focus is based on the discursive and pragmatic functional approach to deixis. The articles concern linguistic variation and language change, and most of the studies adopt cross linguistic perspectives, primarily among Romance languages, but also with a classical perspective from Ancient Greek discussing the existence of universal categorical patterns. The studies reveal similarities and differences between Romance languages mutually, and set the stage for comparisons between Romance and non-Romance languages. These similarities and differences are subject to change in connection with cultural developments in society and offer in this volume a coordinated effort in exploring the linguistic expressions of these extra-linguistic concepts.

This volume applies a diachronic perspective to the verb and mainly deals with typological change affecting tense, aspect, mood and modality in a variety of Indo-European languages (Latin, Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Hittite, and Semitic) and the non-Indo-European Turkic, Amerindian and some Australian languages. The analyses of the structural changes and the interchange between the different grammatical categories that cause them which are presented in the chapters of this volume yield astonishing results. The diachronic perspective combined with a comparative approach provides profound knowledge of the typology of the verb and other typological issues and will serve researchers, as well as advanced and beginning of linguistics students in a way that has rarely been encountered before.

Despite intensive research, negation remains elusive. Its expression across languages, its underlying cognitive mechanisms, its development across time, and related phenomena, such as negative polarity and negative concord, leave many unresolved issues of both a definitional and a substantive nature. Such issues are at the heart of the present volume, which presents a twofold contribution. The first part offers a mix of large-scale typological surveys and in-depth investigation of the evolution of negation in individual languages and language families that have not frequently been studied from this point of view, such as Chinese, Berber, Quechua, and Austronesian languages. The second part centers on French, a language whose early stages are comparatively richly documented and which therefore provides an important test case for hypotheses about the diachrony of negative marking. Representing, moreover, a variety of theoretical approaches, the volume will be of interest to researchers on negation, language change, and typology.

This volume on grammaticalization focuses on new theoretical and methodological challenges underpinning language change. It provides new approaches and insights deepening our understanding of the cognitive, pragmatic, and socio-cultural mechanisms that trigger the formation and the change of grammars. In this volume, grammaticalization is dealt with diachronically, synchronically and as a by-product of dialogic interaction. Another key feature of this book is language diversity; as it includes studies on language families ranging from Niger-Congo, Koreanic, Japonic, Sino-Tibetan to Germanic and Romance. The novel aspects of grammaticalization addressed are new slants on the fundamental debate about grammaticalization as expansion vs reduction; the grammatical formation of ideophones; the semantic domain of fear as a source and a trigger of grammatical change, and many other aspects of semantic and morphosyntactic development.

This volume brings together for the first time research by linguists working in cross-linguistic discourse analysis and by second language researchers working in the contrastive rhetoric tradition. The collection of articles by prominent authors and younger scholars encompasses a variety of research approaches and treats numerous naturally-occurring spoken and written genres, including conversations, narratives, academic expository writing, journalism, advertising, and professional promotional texts. Languages examined include English, Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Urdu, Dutch, Turkish and Serbo-Croatian. Taken individually and collectively, the articles in this collection draw important conclusions concerning the roles of cognition, multilingualism, communities of practice, and linguistic typology in shaping discourse within and across cultures.

This book aims at investigating discourse phenomena (i.e., linguistic elements and constructions that help to manage the organization, flow, and outcome of communication) from a typological and cross-linguistic perspective. Although it is a well-established idea in functional-typological approaches that grammar is shaped by discourse use, systematic typological cross-linguistic investigations on discourse phenomena are relatively rare. This volume aims at bridging this gap, by integrating different linguistic subfields, such as discourse analysis, pragmatics, and typology. The contributions, both theoretically and empirically oriented, focus on a broad variety of discourse phenomena (ranging from discourse markers to discourse function of grammatical markers, to strategies that manage the discourse and information flow) while adopting a typological perspective and considering typologically distant languages.

Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like, each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.

In many East Asian languages, despite the prevalent occurrence of implicit reference, reference management is largely achieved without recourse to familiar agreement features. For this reason, recovering ellipted reference has been a perplexing problem in the analysis of these languages.This book elucidates the linguistic mechanisms for ellipsis resolution in Japanese, mechanisms which involve complex processes of inference that integrate grammatical, sociolinguistic, and discourse considerations with real world knowledge. These processes are realised in an integrated algorithm, the validity of which is tested against naturally-occurring written texts.

This book also builds connections between theoretical linguistics and practical applications. The findings not only have theoretical implications for identifying crucial factors in the linguistic encoding of implicitly expressed information, factors which are very different from those found in European languages, but also offer practical applications, particularly for the design of machine translation systems and for learners of Japanese.

Despite a significant increase in interest over the last two decades in the English Noun Phrase, there are still many open questions and unexplored issues. The papers collected in this volume contribute to this ongoing research by addressing a range of topics concerning the internal structure, use and development of English Noun Phrases. The eleven chapters represent three main themes: 1. Determination, modification and complementation; 2. Shell nouns and the X-is construction; 3. Binominal constructions. These topics are approached in different ways: some chapters are synchronic in nature, others diachronic; and while most subscribe to functional-cognitive modelling, some take a more formal approach. In addition, different methodologies are employed, varying from qualitative and quantitative corpus analyses to experimental methods. As a result, the contributions to this volume represent both the main topics currently discussed in research on the English Noun Phrase, and the diversity in the way these topics are investigated.

This book contains new articles by leading philosophers and linguists discussing a promising philosophical framework distinct from currently dominant ones: Linguistic Realism. As opposed to Nominalism and Chomskyian Conceptualism, this approach distinguishes between use of language, knowledge of language, and language as such. The latter is conceived as part of the realm of abstract objects. The authors show how adopting Linguistic Realism overcomes entrenched problems with other frameworks and suggest that Linguistic Realism will best serve those interested in formal linguistics, the cognitive dimension of natural language, and linguistic philosophy. The essays offer different perspectives on Linguistic Realism, either supporting this paradigm or taking it as a starting point for developing modified conceptions of linguistics and for further tying linguistics to the kind of formal theories of sensory cognition that were pioneered in visual perception by David Marr—whose work is predicated on exactly the object/knowledge distinction made by Linguistic Realists.

This book investigates historical motivations for the emergence of the resultative construction in Chinese from the following four aspects: (a) disyllabification, (b)adjacent context, (c) semantic integrity, and (d) frequency of co-occurence of a pair of verb and resultative. The author also addresses a series of grammatical changes and innovations caused by the formation of this resultative construction, such as the development of aspect, mood, verb reduplication, the new predicate structure, the disposal construction, the passive construction, the verb copying construction, and the new topicalization construction, all of which together shape the grammatical system of Modern Chinese. The present analysis raises and discusses a number of theoretical issues that are meaningful to various linguistic disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and general historical linguistics.

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 combines a fieldwork-based language-specific analysis with a typological investigation. It offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the form and semantics of experiencer constructions in Yucatec, the Mayan language of the Yucatecan peninsula in Mexico. Since the linguistic expression of experience is not restricted to a specific grammatical area the study touches a great variety of grammatical fields in the language such as argument structure, grammatical relations, possessive constructions, subordinate constructions, etc. The empirical analysis of the Yucatec data is preceded by a thorough examination of the functional domain and the cross-linguistic coding of experience which until now could not be found in the literature. This study will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of typology and Native American linguistics, and especially to those interested in argument structure and the syntax-semantics interface.

This book, intended primarily for researchers and advanced students, expands greatly on previous work by the authors exploring the topography of the multidimensional “functional-cognitive space” within which functional, cognitive and/or constructionist approaches to language can be located. The analysis covers a broad range of 16 such approaches, with some additional references to Chomskyan minimalism, and is based on 58 questionnaire items, each rated by 29 experts on particular models for their importance in the model concerned. These ratings are analysed statistically to reveal overall patterns of (dis)similarity across models. The questionnaire ratings and experts’ comments are then used, together with the authors’ close reading of the literature, in detailed discussion leading to a final dichotomous rating for each feature in each model, the results again being analysed statistically. The final chapter presents the overall conclusions and suggests how existing collaborations between approaches could be strengthened, and new ones created, in future research.

Exploring Functional-Cognitive Space has been awarded the 2016 prize of the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics (Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada, AESLA) for work by experienced researchers.

Exploring the Turkish Linguistic Landscape provides in-depth analyses of different aspects of Turkish in the domains of phonology, morphology and syntax, discourse and language acquisition relevant to recent theoretical discussions. While some of the papers in the volume offer new analyses to known linguistic puzzles, others raise new questions which have not been addressed in the literature before. This collection of original articles written by colleagues and students of Prof. Eser Erguvanlı-Taylan, honoring her contribution to the field of linguistics, features articles on vowel reduction, consonant clusters, negation, conditionals, voice morphology, evidentiality, acquisition of irregular morphology, complementation and subordination in varieties of Turkish. It will be of interest to a wide audience ranging from theoreticians to typologists and is expected to generate further research on Turkish, as well as to contribute to the cross-linguistic literature on the issues addressed in the volume.

Focus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.

The period of 1965 to 1978 was an extremely productive time for U.S. (Russian born) Romance etymologist and philologist Yakov Malkiel whose specialty was the development of Latin words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes in modern Romance languages, particularly Spanish. Malkiel will be known as the great champion of etymology in linguistics as evidenced by several of the selected essays in From Particular to General Lingusitics. But here Malkiel also moves in several other subfields of linguistics and proves that whatever the subject of discussion is, it is characterized by a tenaciously comprehensive use of evidence.

Functional Grammar (FG) as set out by Simon Dik is the ambitious combination of a functionalist approach to the study of language with a consistent formalization of the underlying structures which it recognizes as relevant. The present volume represents the attempts made within the FG framework to expand the theory so as to cover a wider empirical domain than is usual for highly formalized linguistic theories, namely that of written and spoken discourse, while retaining its methodological precision. The book covers an array of phenomena, both from monologue and from dialogue material, relating to discourse structure, speaker aims and goals, action theory, the flow of information, illocutionary force, modality, etc. The central question underlying most of the contributions concerns the relation between, and the division of labour between the existing grammatical module of FG on the one hand, and a discourse or pragmatic module capable of handling such discourse phenomena on the other. What emerges are new proposals for the formal treatment of for instance illocutionary force and the informational status of constituents. Many of the data discussed are from ‘real’ language rather than being invented, and samples from various languages other than English

(Spanish, Polish, Latin, French) are examined and used as illustrations of the theoretical problem to be solved.

Readership: theoretical linguists and discourse and conversation analysts

This book, a tribute to Angela Downing, consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language, with topics ranging from the general (grammar as an evolutionary product, text comprehension, integrative linguistics) to particular aspects of the grammars of languages (Bulgarian, English, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish). The more specific papers are sequenced according to Halliday’s division into ideational, textual and interpersonal aspects of the grammar, and cover a wide range of areas, including aspect, argument structure, noun phrase/nominal group structure and nominalisations, pronominal clitics, theme in relation to writing skills, discourse structures and markers, the role of attention in conversation, the functions of topic, phatic communion, subjectification, formulaic language and modality. A recurrent theme in the volume is the use of corpus materials in order to base functional descriptions on authentic productions. Overall, the volume constitutes a panoramic but nevertheless detailed view of some important current trends in functional linguistics.

The 23rd UWM Linguistics Symposium (1996) brought together linguists of opposing theoretical approaches – functionalists and formalists – in order to determine to what extent these approaches really differ from each other and to what extent the approaches complement each other. The two volumes of Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics contain a careful selection of the papers originally presented at the symposium.

Volume I includes papers discussing the two basic approaches to linguistics; with contributions by: Werner Abraham, Stephen R. Anderson, Joan L. Bybee, William Croft, Alice Davidson, Mark Durie, Ken Hale, Michael Hammond, Bruce P. Hayes, Nina Hyams, Howard Lasnik, Brian MacWhinney, Geoffrey S. Nathan, Daniell Nettle, Frederick J. Newmeyer, Edith A. Moravcsik, Doris Payne, Janet Pierrehumbert, Kathleen M. Wheatley.

Volume II consists of case studies which draw upon the strengths of both approaches and thus help to bridge the gap between the two camps; with contributions by: Mira Ariel, Melissa Axelrod, Robbin Clamons, Bernard Comrie, Kees Hengeveld, Erika Hoff-Ginsberg, James Hurford, Lizanne Kaiser, Nicholas Kibre, Simon Kirby, Feng-hsi Liu, André Meinunger, Viola Miglio, Ann Mulkern, Waturu Nakamura, Maria Polinsky, Elizabeth Purnell, Gerald Sanders, Nancy Stenson, Maggie Tallerman, Ronnie Wilbur.

This book analyzes the relationship between gender, age and role in Japanese television interviews. It covers a wide range of topics on Japanese communication; cultural and gender variables are interwoven in the interpretation of the findings. The study shows how participants interact through language and how they project their identities in the context of the interview. Based on a qualitative analysis, speech in mixed and same gender interactions is analysed, turntaking, terms of address and aizuchi (listener’s responses) are examined. The findings reveal interesting characteristics of all-female interactions, such as the influence of age that appears to be more important than gender; an observation that has repercussions in the study of gender and language differences in modern Japan. This book is an interdisciplinary study that integrates notions of politeness and theories of gender and language, and will be of interest to people researching Japanese culture and communication, gender studies and institutional language.

The Grammar of Possession: Inalienability, incorporation and possessor ascension in Guaraní, is an exhaustive study of linguistic structures in Paraguayan Guaraní which are directly or indirectly associated with the semantic domain of inalienability. Constructions analyzed in the book include adnominal and predicative possessive constructions, noun incorporation, and possessor ascension. Examples are drawn from a rich data base that incorporate native speaker intuitions and resources in the construction of illustrative linguistic forms as well as the analysis of the communicative use of the forms under study. The book provides a complete picture of inalienability as a coherent integrated system of grammatical and semantic oppositions in a language that has received little attention in the theoretical linguistic literature.

The analysis moves from general principles to specific details of the language while applying principles of Cognitive Grammar and Functional Linguistics. There is an explicit aim to uncover the particularities of form-meaning connections, as well as the communicative and discourse functions of the structures examined. Other approaches are also considered when appropriate, resulting in a theoretically informed study that contains a rich variety of considerations.

This volume contains a selection of papers on grammaticalization from a broad perspective. Some of the papers focus on basic concepts in grammaticalization research such as the concept of 'grammar' as the endpoint of grammaticalization processes, erosion, (uni)directionality, the relation between grammaticalization and constructions, subjectification, and the relation between grammaticalization and analogy. Other papers shed a critical light on grammaticalization as an explanatory parameter in language change. New case studies of micro-processes of grammaticalization complete the selection. The empirical evidence for (and against) grammaticalization comes from diverse domains: subject control, clitics, reciprocal markers, pronouns and agreement markers, gender markers, auxiliaries, aspectual categories, intensifying adjectives and determiners, and pragmatic markers. The languages covered include English and its varieties, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, Slavonic languages, and Turkish. The book will be valuable to scholars working on grammaticalization and language change as well as to those interested in individual languages.

The general objective of the study is systematic examination of the processes involved in the formation and evolution of complex sentence constructions in a group of genetically related languages. The Chadic language group, at about 140 languages, constitutes the largest and most diversified branch of the Afroasiatic family. One of the findings of the present work is that languages starting from the same base may develop quite different morphological and syntactic structures. With respect to issues of general linguistic interest, the book deals with motivations for grammaticalization: It is proposed that one of the most important motivations is satisfaction of the principle of well formedness, that is, that every element in an utterance must have its role transparent to the hearer either by inherent lexical properties or by grammatical means. In the present work both aspects of grammaticalization, viz. the emergence of grammatical constructions and the emergence of grammatical morphemes, are given equal weight. In addition to semantic metaphor and metonymy as mechanisms in the processes of grammaticalization, the present work develops the notion of semiotic metonymy, whereby a part of a sign performs the function of the sign. It is shown that semiotic metonymy plays an important role in the grammaticalization of grammatical morphemes and constructions into other morphemes and constructions. The book also shows that unindirectionality is not a governing principle with respect to the development of grammatical morphemes into other grammatical morphemes; rather, there is considerable evidence and theoretical justification for the bidirectionality principle.

This study of Old Spanish and present-day Mexico and New Mexico data develops a grammaticization account of variation in progressive constructions. Diachronic changes in cooccurrence patterns show that grammaticization involves reductive change driven by frequency increases. Formal reduction results in the emergence of auxilliary-plus-gerund sequences as fused units. Semantically, the constructions originate as spatial expressions; their grammaticization involves gradual loss of locative features of meaning. Semantic generalization among parallel evolutionary paths results in the competition among different constructions in the domain of progressive aspect. Patterns of synchronic variation follow from both the retention of meaning differences and the routinization of frequent collocations, as well as sociolinguistic factors. Register considerations turn out to be crucial in evaluating the effects of language contact. Purported changes in Spanish — English bilingual varieties are largely a feature of oral, informal language rather than a manifestation of convergence.