Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

This book deals with the category of converbs, whose denomination refers to a set of structures which cross-linguistically are not comparable. Specifically, we tackle the following topics: (1) converbs and related constructions as areal features, distinguishing between a general coordinating and subordinating type of converb; (2) converbs in the context of linguistic families, particularly in the Indo-European domain, displaying different non-finite structures to express the adverbial domain; (3) converbial constructions and competing construction types, (4) the diachronic typology of converbs and their source constructions.　

The monograph explores the semantic and morphosyntactic representation of affectedness, i.e., the property of an event participant to undergo change, in transitive predicates. Specifically, it provides a first in-depth investigation of how affectedness, the notion of path, and resultativity determine Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Turkish. It argues that affectedness is the crucial event semantic characteristic enhancing DOM, and articulates a theoretical link between affectedness in the lexical syntactic structure and morphological accusative marking. The study addresses affectedness from a cross-linguistic perspective and makes a remarkable contribution to our understanding and modelling of the syntax-semantics interface.

The encoding of motion event components is a central element in determining the nature of linguistic and conceptual representations underlying motion event construal. This work approaches the verbalization and conceptualization of motion events in German and English from a theoretical point of view and on the basis of a corpus study, an online survey, and an in-person experiment. The research focuses on the investigation of different factors determining motion event construal of native speakers and learners by examining cognitive variables – i.e., visual endpoint salience and cognitive cost caused by non-habitual aspect use – and grammatical factors – i.e., grammatical viewpoint aspect.

The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?

Repetition is a well-studied phenomenon in morphology and lexicology but has received less attention on the syntactic level. The book sheds light on syntactic constructions with lexical repetition in East Slavic languages. Several contributions address syntactic constructions that have developed in form and meaning in accordance with general tendencies found in many languages, for example, English Boys will be boys. However, most chapters focus on constructions that resist typological explanation, for example Rus. Беда так беда ‘trouble- nom.sg so trouble- nom.sg’, Ukr. дурень дурнем ‘fool- nom.sg fool- ins.sg’.

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The tendency to view grammar in isolation from multilingual settings is so pervasive that even modern approaches do not often overcome the monolingual paradigm. At the same time, the effects of language contact very clearly manifest themselves, as discussed in the literature on language contact, contact-induced and "shared" grammaticalization, sometimes resulting in areal patterns particularly relevant for linguistic typology. It appears that there continues to be an important gap between the fact of commonly happening grammatical transfer in language contact and our theorizing about such grammars. This gap needs to be narrowed and eventually closed for the sake of both theories of grammar and theories of language contact. In fact, one can take this further and ask the question: Do we really need a separate theory of language contact? The rather attractive alternative would be to reduce the effects of language contact to theories of language acquisition, sociolinguistics, external factors as well as more generalised cognitive mechanisms such as copy and analogy which once properly interwoven they can offer holistic explanations. The aim of the edited volume is to contribute to this and other related questions.

In research on Information Structure, there is an ongoing discussion about the role of contrast.
While most linguists consider contrast to be compatible with both focus and topic, some argue that it is an autonomous IS category. Contrast has been shown to be encoded by different linguistic means, such as specific morphemes, adverbials, clefts, prosodic cues. Hence, this concept is also related to other domains, in particular morphosyntax and prosody. The precise way in which they interact is however not yet entirely clear. Moreover, from a methodological point of view, the identification and annotation of contrast in corpora is not straightforward.
This volume provides a selection of articles discussing the definition of contrast, the importance of distinguishing different types of contrast, the use of several encoding strategies, and the annotation of contrast in corpora using the Question Under Discussion Model. The contributions offer data on English, French, French Belgian Sign Language, German, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.

This book constitutes the first systematic analysis of meta-discourse in the spoken domain, addressing the question of how, why, and when speakers switch from discourse to meta-discourse by means of comment clauses (e.g., ‘I think’). The case of Present-day Italian is considered, exploring the internal properties of comment clauses (e.g., morphosyntax and semantics of the verb), their relations with the surrounding discourse (e.g., position of comment clause), and their prosodic profiles.

This study shows that speakers recur to meta-discourse to convey a non-random set of functions, having mainly to do with the online process of reference construction (e.g., approximation and reformulation) and with the degree of speaker’s commitment (e.g., epistemicity and emphasis). Comment clauses are also used as attention-getting or topic-resuming devices, though less frequently. One of the most interesting results of this study is the identification of a close relation between meta-discourse and stance-taking in spoken domain, with speakers recurring to comment clauses to convey their attitude.

Finally, meta-discourse turns out to be highly influenced, if not constrained, by universal properties of the spoken domain (i.e., non-linearity).

This volume addresses a number of issues in current morphological theory from the point of view of diminutive formation, such as the role of phonology in diminutives and hypocoristics and consequently its place in the overall architecture of grammar, i.e. phonology-first versus syntax/morphology-first theoretical analyses, diminutives in the L1 acquisition of typologically diverse languages, and the borrowing of non-diminutive morphology for the expression of diminutive meanings, among others.

Among the peculiarities of diminutive morphology discussed are the relation between diminutives and mass nouns, the avoidance of diminutives in plural contexts in some languages, and the relatively frequent semantic bleaching and reanalysis of diminutive forms cross-linguistically. Special attention is paid to the debate on the head versus modifier status of diminutive affixes (corresponding to high versus low diminutives in alternative analyses), with data from spoken and sign languages.

Overall, the volume addresses a number of topics that will be of interest to scholars of almost all linguistic subfields and persuasions.

Sentence (1) represents the phenomenon of reported thought, (2) that of reported speech:

(1) Sasha thought: "This is fine" or Sasha thought that this would be fine

(2) Sasha said: "This is fine" or Sasha said that this would be fine

While sentences as in (1) have often been discussed in the context of those in (2) the former have rarely received specific attention. This has meant that much of the semantic and structural complexity, cross-linguistic variation, as well as the precise relation between (1) and (2) and related phenomena have remained unstudied.

Addressing this gap, this volume represents the first collection of studies specifically dedicated to reported thought. It introduces a wide variety of cross-linguistic examples of the phenomenon and brings together authors from linguistic typology, corpus and interactional linguistics, and formal and functional theories of syntax to shed light on how talking about thoughts can become grammar in the languages of the world.

The book should be of interest to linguists, philosophers of language, linguistic anthropologists and communication specialists seeking to understand topics at the boundary of stylistics and morphosyntax, as well as the grammar of epistemicity.

Pragmatics represents the study of language use in socially grounded contexts and it is thus a central discipline in Linguistics. Due to its focus on language use, it has been referred to as a transdiscipline that interacts with a broad variety of disciplines that are concerned with social action and, as such, pragmatics overlaps with many other linguistic and non-linguistic disciplines.

Irish English is one of the earliest varieties of English to have attracted the interest of scholars working on pragmatic variation. From a sociolinguistic and a pragmatics perspective, it represents one of the best studied varieties of English and can thus be argued to offer important impulses to the study of variationist pragmatics in general. Ulster Scots, though in close contact with Irish English, has received less attention.

Given this important position of Irish English in pragmatics research and the paucity of such research on (Ulster) Scots, this volume explicitly focuses on socio-pragmatics and deals with the way speakers in and around Ireland use language in a way so that it assists them in the construction of their social identities or helps them navigate socio-cultural spaces.

The book offers the first full-scale focused treatment of linguistic indexicality as a tool for analysis and explanation of the organization of linguistic structures. The book demonstrates the application of the concept of indexicality in the description of a broad range of linguistic phenomena, from the internal workings of morphology via relations within syntactic constructions to lexical and grammatical elements designed to hook on to features outside the clause in the interactional context.

The book offers a focused treatment of the general nature of linguistic indexicality in the larger perspective of the semiotics of language, including examinations of domain-straddling indexical functions. It presents studies of the role of indexicality in synchrony and diachrony with descriptive cases from a number of languages from diverse language families and it examines the way indexicality enters into the mechanisms of change, including examinations of semiotic shifts from indexical to symbolic function and vice versa.

The book is relevant for researchers and students in historical and synchronic linguistics from a variety of linguistic frameworks with an interest in the role of semiotics in linguistic analysis.

The aim of this volume is to bring together researchers interested in investigating the role that Discourse Markers play in language production and comprehension from an experimental or corpus-based perspective.

In any kind of human communication, Discourse Markers are part of the game. This omnipresence informs us of a crucial inherent aspect of human language. Yet, as a linguistic category, Discourse Markers remain underdetermined. To gain deeper insight into this complex linguistic category, more systematic work is needed on the production and on the interpretation of Discourse Markers in a variety of situational settings, resorting to different methodological approaches. The contributions in this volume aim at drawing more attention to the double face of Discourse Markers, namely as signals intentionally used by the speaker to facilitate the addressee’s interpretation of the discourse, but also as potential traces of the speaker’s production difficulties.

The combination of experimental and corpus-based approaches and the focus on processing of Discourse Markers in both production and comprehension makes this volume a unique contribution in answering the question why we use Discourse Markers in certain situations, but also when we do not.

The dispersal of the Indo-European language family from the third millennium BCE is thought to have dramatically altered Europe’s linguistic landscape. Many of the preexisting languages are assumed to have been lost, as Indo-European languages, including Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Armenian, dominate in much of Western Eurasia from historical times. To elucidate the linguistic encounters resulting from the Indo-Europeanization process, this volume evaluates the lexical evidence for prehistoric language contact in multiple Indo-European subgroups, at the same time taking a critical stance to approaches that have been applied to this problem in the past.

Linguistic variation, loosely defined as the wholesale processes whereby patterns of language structures exhibit divergent distributions within and across languages, has traditionally been the object of research of at least two branches of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic typology. In spite of their similar research agendas, the two approaches have only rarely converged in the description and interpretation of variation. While a number of studies attempting to address at least aspects of this relationship have appeared in recent years, a principled discussion on how the two disciplines may interact has not yet been carried out in a programmatic way. This volume aims to fill this gap and offers a cross-disciplinary venue for discussing the bridging between sociolinguistic and typological research from various angles, with the ultimate goal of laying out the methodological and conceptual foundations of an integrated research agenda for the study of linguistic variation.

This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.

Despite the intensive research carried out in recent years, modality remains an intriguing and challenging issue in linguistics. This book investigates modality from a syntactic viewpoint and with a bottom-up approach. A strong focus of the book is the interaction between the different linguistic tools that build modality (moods, modal verbs, modal adverbs, etc.), taking both the role of syntactic structure and the compositionality of modal meanings into account. The volume comprises corpus-based studies devoted to several syntactic aspects of modality in Ancient Greek, within different theoretical frameworks. The chapters shed new light on different modal categories (e.g. epistemicity, possibility, counterfactuality, evidentiality, subjectivity) and show how these modal meanings arise from the combination of different linguistic devices in specific syntactic contexts (e.g. combinations of modal elements, types of main and dependent clauses, types of illocutionary acts, etc.). By approaching modality from a different perspective and providing an up-to-date discussion of several aspects of modality, the book makes a significant contribution to current debates.

Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.

The present volume is dedicated to the phenomenon of pragmaticalization in the context of the theory of grammaticalization. While, in recent decades, the growing interest in the analysis of pragmatic phenomena within grammaticalization research was triggered, amongst others, by studies in the field of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in language, we still lack a model for a broad understanding of how changes on the discourse level come about and face a lack of information which provides a conclusive theoretical framework to systematically record the emergence of an entire layer of discourse units in language. The book is one of the first comprehensive collections contributed to the topic of pragmaticalization, and includes empirical studies on a wide range of languages from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Aiming to refine our understanding of pragmatic shifts which can be observed by several linguistic units, the contributions discuss such issues as pros and cons of the concept of pragmaticalization, the parameters of pragmaticalization, the emergence of discourse markers and constructions with various pragmatic functions, pathways of change, including the influence of language contact.

Grapholinguistics, the multifaceted study of writing systems, is growing increasingly popular, yet to date no coherent account covering and connecting its major branches exists. This book now gives an overview of the core theoretical and empirical questions of this field. A treatment of the structure of writing systems—their relation to speech and language, their material features, linguistic functions, and norms, as well as the different types in which they come—is complemented by perspectives centring on the use of writing, incorporating psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic issues such as reading processes or orthographic variation as social action. Examples stem from a variety of diverse systems such as Chinese, English, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, German, and Korean, which allows defining concepts in a broadly applicable way and thereby constructing a comparative grapholinguistic framework that provides readers with important tools for studying any writing system. The book emphasizes that grapholinguistics is a discipline in its own right, inviting discussion and further research in this up-and-coming field as well as an overdue integration of writing into general linguistic discussion.

Valency patterns and valency orientation have been frequent topics of research under different perspectives, often poorly connected. Diachronic studies on these topics is even less systematic than synchronic ones. The papers in this book bring together two strands of research on valency, i.e. the description of valency patterns as worked out in the Leipzig Valency Classes Project (ValPaL), and the assessment of a language's basic valency and its possible orientation. Notably, the ValPaL does not provide diachronic information concerning the valency patterns investigated: one of the aims of the book is to supplement the available data with data from historical stages of languages, in order to make it profitably exploitable for diachronic research. In addition, new research on the diachrony of basic valency and valency alternations can deepen our understanding of mechanisms of language change and of the propensity of languages or language families to exploit different constructional patterns related to transitivity.

The field of South Asian linguistics has undergone considerable growth and advancement in recent years, as a wider and more diverse range of languages have become subject to serious linguistic study, and as advancements in theoretical linguistics are applied to the rich linguistic data of South Asia. In this growth and diversity, it can be difficult to retain a broad grasp on the current state of the art, and to maintain a sense of the underlying unity of the field. This volume brings together twenty articles by leading scholars in South Asian linguistics, which showcase the cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, and offer the reader a comprehensive introduction to the state of the art in South Asian linguistics. The contributions to the volume focus primarily on syntax and semantics, but also include important contributions on morphological and phonological questions. The contributions also cover a wide range of languages, from well-studied Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Bangla and Panjabi, through Dravidian languages to endangered and understudied Tibeto-Burman languages. This collection is a must-read for all scholars interested in current trends and advancements in South Asian linguistics.

Grammaticalization has often been described as a gradual phenomenon. While many studies have discussed the quantitative aspects of grammaticalization, there has been little to no work that has tried to propose a way of measuring degrees of grammaticalization. This book addresses this gap by proposing a corpus-based approach to the measurement of grammaticalization, using binary logistic regression modelling.

Such an approach has theoretical benefits as it can provide empirical evidence for the gradience and gradualness of grammaticalization. It can help substantiate observations that have been done on the basis of case studies so far, such as the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization. In addition, as the methods proposed in this book rely on corpus-based data only, it offers a way of comparing grammaticalization across multiple languages, which is currently a challenging endeavour.

What this book hopes to achieve is to start a discussion on the measurement of grammaticalization. To draw a parallel, the field of morphological productivity has greatly benefited from the discussions (and disputes) regarding how its object of study should be measured, and I believe that so will the field of grammaticalization.

How is grammaticalization theory to accommodate the external factors that drive change and the competition that inevitably comes with change? This volume collects a wide range of papers at this intersection between grammaticalization theory and variationist linguistics. Grammaticalization and grammatical innovation, even if inevitably subject to formal change, are primarily driven by functional and communicative pressures. These include extravagant abuse of a construction for effect, but just as well reduction of its semantics to enhance its scope. Variation is shown to feed into this process through various means, including social embedding, functional competition (between variant constructions or between functions within a construction), stylistic specialization, contact-induced grammaticalization, but also analogical support of variant syntactic patterns. Attention is also paid to the methodological integration of variationist thinking and grammaticalization theory, including the issue of relative weight of language-internal and language-external variables, and how to measure their interaction. This study of grammaticalization through the lens of variation is of interest to all linguists studying language variation and change.

The notion of light verb constructions has been traditionally related to the ‘insignificance’ of the verb, which is described as a grammatical item only codifying TAM system and ϕ-features, whereas the whole predicative content is thought to be conveyed by the noun. This book deals with the light verb constructions as instances of complex verbs, intended as multi-predicational but monoclausal structures. This allows to deepen the actual verb lightness, the effective noun predicativity, as well as their effect on the cohesion of the construction. The papers in this volume reflect on the concrete contribution of noun and verb to the event and argument structure, and on the relevance of semantically different noun classes for the verb selection. From different theoretical approaches, data of a great variety of languages are investigated, such as Indo-European languages – both modern (Germanic, Slavic, Romance and Iranian languages) and ancient (Latin and Ancient Greek) – but also Mandarin Chinese, and different polysynthetic languages (e.g. Ket, Nivkh, Murrinh-Patha, Kiowa, Bininj Gun-wok, Ainu). The range of topics, languages and perspectives presented in this book make it of great interest to both theoretical and applied linguists.

This volume offers several empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to the study of observable variation within individuals on various linguistic levels. With a focus on German varieties, the chapters provide answers on the following questions (inter alia):
Which linguistic and extra-linguistic factors explain intra-individual variation? Is there observable intra-individual variation that cannot be explained by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors? Can group-level results be generalised to individual language usage and vice versa? Is intra-individual variation indicative of actual patterns of language change? How can intra-individual variation be examined in historical data?
Consequently, the various theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches in this volume offer a better understanding of the meaning of intra-individual variation for patterns of language development, language variation and change.
The inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the volume is an exciting new frontier, and the results of the studies in this book provide a wealth of new findings as well as challenges to some of the existing findings and assumptions regarding the nature of intra-individual variation.

Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed.

The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume.

Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more.

The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles.

Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.

This volume assembles contributions addressing clausal complementation across the entire South Slavic territory. The main focus is on particular aspects of complementation, covering the contemporary standard languages as well as older stages and/or non-standard varieties and the impact of language contact, primarily with non-Slavic languages. Presenting in-depth studies, they thus contribute to the overarching collective aim of arriving at a comprehensive picture of the patterns of clausal complementation on which South Slavic languages profile against a wider typological background, but also diverge internally if we look closer at details in the contemporary stage and in diachronic development. The volume divides into an introduction setting the stage for the single case-studies, an article developing a general template of complementation with a detailed overview of the components relevant for South Slavic, studies addressing particular structural phenomena from different theoretical viewpoints, and articles focusing on variation in space and/or time.

Linguists have typically studied language change at the aggregate level of speech communities, yet key mechanisms of change such as analogy and automation operate within the minds of individual language users. Drawing on lifespan data from 50 authors and the intriguing case of the special passives in the history of English, this study addresses three fundamental issues relating to individuality in language change: (i) how variation and change at the individual level interact with change at the community level; (ii) how much innovation and change is possible across the adult lifespan; (iii) and to what extent related linguistic patterns are associated in individual cognition. As one of the first large-scale empirical studies to systematically link individual- and community-based perspectives in language change, this volume breaks new ground in our understanding of language as a complex adaptive system.

The book aims to examine the relationship between exemplification and categorization, using linguistic data from Japanese to better understand how people create and communicate conceptual categories in real-life situations (cf. the notion of ad hoc categories). In the book, exemplification is defined in functional terms as a process through which a speaker signals that a given entity should be construed as representative of a larger category of similar entities. The status of example can thus be encoded by means of dedicated analytical markers that overtly signal the exemplifying relation (e.g. for example), but also by making explicit reference to the larger category from which the examples have been selected. Through a case-study on four Japanese exemplifying markers (ya, nado, tari, toka), this book aims to understand (i) how examples are used and encoded by speakers to make reference to conceptual categories, (ii) what types of categories speakers can create and communicate by means of exemplification, (iii) how the relationship between exemplification and categorization can be used by speakers to achieve specific discourse effects, such as vagueness and politeness.

Now in Paperback

Current semantic fieldwork research has shown that the study of modality cannot be conducted via translation alone, yet much of what we know about modal expressions across the world’s language is still translation-based. This book aims to facilitate the study of modality across more diverse languages and a wider participant base by explaining and illustrating a nuanced set of methods, including storyboards, questionnaires, corpora research, experimental tasks, as well as a discussion of practical semantic fieldwork techniques. The methodological protocols tested and employed by the authors on underdescribed languages - spanning seven different language families - are intended to be applicable as cross-linguistic tools, while also indicating the successes and challenges of their contributions. Expanding the study of modality to a wider set of underdescribed languages will undoubtedly bring new insights into our theoretical understanding of modality and deepen our understanding of a cross-linguistic typology of modal expressions.

New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics brings together varying perspectives in second language (L2) pragmatics to show both historical developments in the field, while also looking towards the future, including theoretical, empirical, and implementation perspectives. This volume is divided in four sections: teaching and learning speech acts, assessing pragmatic competence, analyzing discourses in digital contexts, and current issues in L2 pragmatics. The chapters focus on various aspects related to the learning, teaching, and assessing of L2 pragmatics and cover a range of learning environments. The authors address current topics in L2 pragmatics such as: speech acts from a discursive perspective; pragmatics instruction in the foreign language classroom and during study abroad; assessment of pragmatic competence; research methods used to collect pragmatics data; pragmatics in computer-mediated contexts; the role of implicit and explicit knowledge; discourse markers as a resource for interaction; and the framework of translingual practice. Taken together, the chapters in this volume foreground innovations and new directions in the field of L2 pragmatics while, at the same time, ground their work in the existing literature. Consequently, this volume both highlights where the field of L2 pragmatics has been and offers cutting-edge insights into where it is going in the future.

In contrastive linguistics of English and German, there is a tradition of accounting for contrasts with respect to grammar and, to a lesser extent, for lexis and phonetics. Moving on to discourse and text, there is a sizeable body of literature on cohesive patterns in English and German respectively - but very little in terms of a comparison. The latter, though, is of particular interest for language learners, translators and, of course, linguists and researchers in language technology.

This book attempts to close this gap, based on a number of years of corpus-based study into variation and cohesion in the two languages. While there is an overall focus on language contrasts, it also investigates variation between different registers language-internally, and between written and spoken mode in particular. For each of the five major types of cohesion (co-reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctive relations and lexical cohesion), overviews are given of contrasts in the system and of contrastive frequencies in texts.

Results and methods presented in this book are thus relevant for language teaching, translation, language technology and corpus-based work on English and German generally.

In grammar design, a basic distinction is made between derivational and modular architectures. This raises the question of which organization of grammar can deal with linguistic phenomena more appropriately. The studies contained in the present volume explore the interface relations between different levels of linguistic representation in Functional Discourse Grammar as presented in Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008) and Keizer (2015). This theory analyses linguistic expressions at four linguistic levels: interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic and phonological. The articles address issues such as the possible correspondences and mismatches between those levels as well as the conditions which constrain the combinations of levels in well-formed expressions. Additionally, the theory is tested by examining various grammatical phenomena with a focus both on the English language and on typological adequacy: anaphora, raising, phonological reduction, noun incorporation, reflexives and reciprocals, serial verbs, the passive voice, time measurement constructions, coordination, nominal modification, and connectives. Overall, the volume provides both theoretical and descriptive insights which are of relevance to linguistics in general.

This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.

While ample studies exist on ditransitives in various languages, notably from a typological perspective, more work needs to be done on identifying the main processes and factors that trigger and constrain the changes they undergo over time. The goal of this volume is to help fill this gap by bringing together data and information on individual languages that have thus far been left out of the discussion and by expanding our knowledge of already studied linguistic traditions so as to achieve a broader diachronic description. Since one of the distinctive features of ditransitives is their synchronic variability in terms of structural alternation and alignment split, diachronic research can throw up new insights into developmental dynamics that are eminently complementary; namely, on the one hand, the emergence, development and loss of construction alternation and, on the other, the acquisition of new functions over time. The analyses offered in the book yield different and interconnected answers to the general question of how ditransitives change by drawing on different functional principles that play a role in the diachronic reorganization of this dynamic domain and by providing a number of original theoretical suggestions.

The book develops a Theory of the Figurative Lexicon. Units of the figurative lexicon (conventional figurative units, CFUs for short) differ from all other elements of the language in two points: Firstly, they are conventionalized. That is, they are elements of the mental lexicon – in contrast to freely created figurative expressions. Secondly, they consist of two conceptual levels: they can be interpreted at the level of their literal reading and at the level of their figurative meaning – which both can be activated simultaneously.
New insights into the Theory of Figurative Lexicon relate, on the one hand, to the metaphor theory. Over time, it became increasingly clear that the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the sense of Lakoff can only partly explain the conventional figurativeness. On the other hand, it became clear that “intertextuality” plays a far greater role in the CFUs of Western cultures than previously assumed.
The book’s main target audience will be linguists, researchers in phraseology, paremiology and metaphor, and cultural studies. The data and explanations of the idioms will provide a welcome textbook in courses on linguistics, culture history, phraseology research and phraseodidactics.

The impact of the ecclesiastical languages Greek, Latin and Church Slavonic on the Slavic standard languages still lacks a systematic analysis in the theoretical framework of contact linguistics. Based on corpus data, this volume offers an account in the light of “literacy language contact”, i.e. contact between varieties that are used only in a written variant and only in formal registers. Latin was used as literary language in medieval Slavia Romana; Greek was the source language for Church Slavonic, which, in turn, was the literary language for many Slavonic speaking communities and thus had an enormous impact on the development of the modern Slavonic standard languages. The book offers in-depth analyses of the impact of Latin on pre-Standard Slavonic varieties, the influence of Greek on (Old) Church Slavonic and the role of Church Slavonic as a source language for Old and Modern Russian. The contributions discuss (morpho)syntactic phenomena such as non-finite clauses, relative clauses, word order, the use and function of case and tense forms. The volume addresses Slavists, General linguists and scholars of Classical Philology interested in language contact and syntactic issues.

The monograph presents the Meaning-Text approach applied to the domain of syntax from a typological angle; it deals with several long-standing syntactic problems on the basis of a dependency description.
Its content can be presented in five parts + an Introduction:
The Introduction explains the architecture of the book and sketches the Meaning-Text linguis-tic model, underlying the subsequent discussion.
I. Surface-syntactic relations in the languages of the world, with special studies of subjects and objects.
II. Grammatical voice in the dependency framework: the “passive” construction in Chinese.
III. The relative clause: a calculus and analysis of possible types; the pseudo-relative (“headless”) clause.
IV. Binary conjunctions (such as IF …, THEN …), free indefinite pronouns ([He went] nobody knows where), and syntactic idioms.
V. Word order: linearization of dependency structures.
The monograph offers a new perspective in syntactic studies. It is strongly typology-oriented (using the data from typologically diverse languages: English, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Basque, Georgian, etc.) and based on a system of rigorous definitions of the notions involved, which ensures a link with computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing

This book showcases the state of the art in the corpus-based linguistics of medieval Celtic languages. Its chapters detail theoretical advances in analysing variation/change in the Celtic languages and computational tools necessary to process/analyse the data. Many contributions situate the Celtic material in the broader field of corpus-based diachronic linguistics. The application of computational methods to Celtic languages is in its infancy and this book is a first in medieval Celtic Studies, which has mainly concentrated on philological endeavours such as editorial and literary work. The Celtic languages represent a new frontier in the development of NLP tools because they pose special challenges, like complicated inflectional morphology with non-straightforward mappings between lemmata and attested forms, irregular orthography, and consonant mutations. With so much data available in non-electronic form and ongoing efforts to convert these data to computer-readable format, there is much room for the developing/testing of new tools. This books provides an overview of this process at a crucial time in the development of the field and aims to the data accessible to computational linguists with an interest in diachronic change.

How language users from different linguistic backgrounds cope with forms of complexity is still a territory with many unanswered questions. The current book is concerned with morphologically and syntactically complex items, that is, derivatives, inflected forms, compounds, phrases and forms related by agreement and examines how these constructions are acquired and learned in a great range of different languages, such as Turkish, Welsh, Basque and Catalan. Relying on a variety of methodologies targeting production or comprehension, among others, lexical decision and priming experiments, an EEG study, a corpus analysis and a reading test, the authors consider data from native speakers mastering one or more languages and second-language users. Overall, the volume reflects upon and contributes to our understanding of how the pecularities of language and its users affect the learnability of complex forms.

This book collects twenty-five of the author's essays, each of which addresses a descriptive or a foundational issue that arises at the interface between linguistic semantics and pragmatics, on the one hand, and the philosophy of language, on the other.

Arranged into three interconnected parts (I. Matters of Meaning and Truth; II. Matters of Meaning and Force; III. Knowledge Matters), the essays suggest that some key topics in the above-mentioned fields have often been approached in ways that considerably underestimate their empirical or conceptual complexity, and attempt to delineate perspectives from which, and conditions under which, an improved understanding of those topics could be sought.

The book will be of interest to linguists working in semantics and pragmatics, and to philosophers working in the philosophy of language and in epistemology.

This study offers a first comprehensive synchronic account of the Present-day English gerundial system. Most synchronic studies of gerunds have hitherto focused on the verbal gerund, scrutinizing its categorial status or comparing it with other non-finite clausal structures. A systematic comparison with its nominal counterpart, however, is lacking. Based on a detailed empirical analysis of lexico-grammar and semantics, this study develops an innovative cognitive-constructionist model of the English gerund system which depicts the usage profiles of nominal and verbal gerunds in terms of probabilistic trends rather than by means of categorical labels. It is shown that a better understanding of the functioning of the English gerund system requires a description that operates on multiple levels, accounting for both the abstract construal gerunds can impose on an event as well as the token-level constraints on variation between the two gerund types. This multifaceted approach, it is argued, not only offers a new perspective on the configuration of ing-forms in Present-day English, it can also be of relevance to the description of other complex grammatical structures.

This study offers a reconceptualization of the factive presupposition. It presents a cognitive-functional account based on three central features: the event structure of semantic classes of matrix predicates, the sources of modal stances in the complement clause, and the coercive potential of predicate-complement combinations. In this way the study complements the dominant formal pragmatic and formal syntactic theories on factivity.

The volume aims to bring together original, unpublished papers on discourse structure and meaning from different frameworks or theoretical perspectives to address research questions revolving around issues instigated by Turkish. Another goal is to offer methodologically different solutions for the research gaps identified in individual chapters. The contributions are based on empirical generalizations and make use of, for example, computerized corpora as the data, examples compiled from naturally occurring discourse, or data gathered in experimental conditions. Hence, the book has a firm theoretical standing and it is empirically well-grounded.

The collection is expected to be of direct interest to the community of scholars and researchers in discourse structure and semantics as well as corpus linguistics. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and all interested readers, offering them a fresh view on various discourse-related phenomena from the perspective of Turkish.

This pioneering research brings a new insight into derivational processes in terms of theory, method and typology.

Theoretically, it conceives of derivation as a three-dimensional system. Methodologically, it introduces a range of parameters for the evaluation of derivational networks, including the derivational role, combinability and blocking effects of semantic categories, the maximum derivational potential and its actualization in relation to simple underived words, and the maximum and average number of orders of derivation.

Each language-specific chapter has a unified structure, which made it possible to identify – in the final, typologically oriented chapter – the systematicity and regularity in developing derivational networks in a sample of forty European languages and in a few language genera and families. This is supported by considerations about the role of word-classes, morphological types, and the differences and similarities between word-formation processes of the languages belonging to the same genus/family.

Austin’s words on page 1 of his seminal work How to do things with words are valid for this study on clause typing in the Old Irish verbal complex: “The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention paid to it specifically”.
Old Irish, a regular V1 language, morphologically distinguishes six clause types, to wit, declarative, relative, wh- and polar interrogative, responsive and imperative clause types. After discussing the constituency of the Old Irish verbal complex and the pragmatically marked orders, i.e. cleft-sentence and left-dislocation, the form, function, paradigmatic consistency and syntax of those clause types are then analysed in detail. The other main issues of this study are the descriptively adequate paradigm of clause types and the interaction of clause typing with subordination and with non-verbal predication in Old Irish.
This monograph offers a comprehensive view of clause typing, its morphological expression and related phenomena in the earliest Insular Celtic language, and may also contribute to the general consideration of these topics in both the typological and diachronic perspectives.

This monograph explores the properties of passive and middle voice constructions in Norwegian and Swedish, concentrating on the linguistic variation related to these two constructions in Mainland Scandinavian. At an empirical level, we provide a detailed discussion of the morphosyntax and semantics of the two main types of passives in both languages, lexical (s-) and periphrasitic (bli-) passives. At a theoretical level, we propose an architecture of the language faculty where exponents play a central role. Exponents are selected to identify the structures generated by the grammar and provide a platform that make these units interpretable by the sensori-motor and conceptual-intentional interfaces. Exponents this play an essential role in determining the well-formedness of linguistic structures. We demonstrate how different syntactic structures identified and lexicalized by exponents in these two languages are capable of capturing the microvariation observed in the voice systems of these two languages in a straightforward way. The amount of linguistic information (i.e., aspect and mood) identified by each exponent in each language determines the types of complements and specifiers that can be integrated into and lexicalized by a given exponent. Although our approach shares certain affinities with other neo-constructionist approaches, a novel proposal we advance in this book is that exponents are housed in an intermediate level of structure that exists between the narrow syntax and its external interfaces. This exponency-level (Ʃ-structure) allows for a more parsimonious theoretical analysis that does not sacrifice descriptive adequacy.

Word storage and processing define a multi-factorial domain of scientific inquiry whose thorough investigation goes well beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplinary taxonomies, to require synergic integration of a wide range of methods, techniques and empirical and experimental findings. The present book intends to approach a few central issues concerning the organization, structure and functioning of the Mental Lexicon, by asking domain experts to look at common, central topics from complementary standpoints, and discuss the advantages of developing converging perspectives. The book will explore the connections between computational and algorithmic models of the mental lexicon, word frequency distributions and information theoretical measures of word families, statistical correlations across psycho-linguistic and cognitive evidence, principles of machine learning and integrative brain models of word storage and processing. Main goal of the book will be to map out the landscape of future research in this area, to foster the development of interdisciplinary curricula and help single-domain specialists understand and address issues and questions as they are raised in other disciplines.

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

The language of Postclassical Greek is a somewhat neglected area of research despite the language of this period being well attested with a large number of different sorts of texts ranging from papyri and dialect inscriptions to literary texts by Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine writers. These texts offer an extensive amount of data and are rather understudied in comparison with texts of the Classical period. This volume aims to fill some of this void by offering an interdisciplinary approach to the language of the period. As such, it brings together contributions from disciplines including usage-based linguistics, theoretical syntax, historical linguistics, papyrology
and palaeography, sociolinguistics and research on multilingualism. It is hoped, therefore, that the volume will appeal to a wide audience interested in exploring language development from several perspectives.

Languages across the world differ from each other in a number of respects, and one such difference is in terms of how their lexicons are categorized. Compared to most European languages with distinct, functionally dedicated word classes in the traditional sense, quite a few languages are observed to possess lexical items that can fulfill the functions typically associated with more than one traditional word class such as ‘noun’ and ‘verb’. According to Rijkhoff and van Lier (2013), these lexemes exhibit what is called ‘flexibility’.
Classical Chinese is observed to feature word-class flexibility, in the sense that there are lexemes that can be used to serve the functions of two or more traditional word classes, without the functional change being marked by any derivational means. For instance, a lexical item like xìn can either function as a verb meaning ‘to be trustworthy [intr.]’ or ‘to believe, to trust [tr.]’ or serve as a noun meaning ‘trust, oath of alliance’. Similarly, a human-denoting lexeme such as yŏu FRIEND cannot only mean ‘a friend’ but also ‘to be a friend, to behave friendly [intr.]’, ‘to make friends with [tr.]’ or ‘to consider as a friend [tr.]’; an instrument word like biān WHIP cannot only mean ‘a whip’ but also ‘to whip’. This situation is often thought to be related to the fact that Classical Chinese does not have any kind of productive morphology in the traditional sense (e.g. Zádrapa 2011). This is reflected in the lack of markedness distinctions across Croft’s (2000, 2001) conceptual space for parts of speech.
This study ascribes flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese to precategoriality, in line with Bisang (2008 a, b). Precategoriality can roughly be defined as the absence of the noun-verb distinction in the lexicon; instead, the linking of individual words to the syntactic position of N or V as well as their text frequency in these positions are subject to pragmatics. Precategorial lexical items are those that are not preclassified into parts of speech in the lexicon; rather, their word-class specification is ultimately determined at the syntactic level, according to their position/function in a given word-class indicating construction.
From a diachronic viewpoint, this study assumes that precategoriality and categoriality of individual lexical items are not static, but that they are potentialities and tendencies that may change over time. Specifically, (full) precategoriality and (full) categoriality are assumed to constitute a continuum in the lexicon of Chinese throughout its history. In any given historical period, lexical items of the language are distributed between the two extremes on the continuum, according to the intensity of the association between their lexical meaning and the syntactic position/function of e.g. N or V. Generally, along the continuum at a given historical stage, lexemes with a strong association between meaning and function (i.e. lexemes that are normally associated only with one word-class specification for a particular syntactic role) tend to be located close to the extreme of (full) categoriality. In contrast, lexemes that are not necessarily related to one specific association between meaning and function, but can potentially occur in a variety of such associations, are assumed to be placed closer to (full) precategoriality instead. Roughly speaking, the group of lexemes that is located towards (full) precategoriality are flexible lexemes, though with varying degrees of flexibility, whose semantics licenses a syntactic variety and can thus be linked to more than one word-class specification through syntactic specification, a syntactically specified process of category assignment.
Based on these considerations, this study aims to present the results of a corpus-based investigation into flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese. The research focuses on two types of syntactic specifications of flexible lexemes, namely, those using action-denoting lexemes in nominal function (the V→N type), and those using object-denoting lexemes in verbal function (the N→V type). The two types of syntactic specifications are investigated for this study in the five Classical Chinese texts (Zuozhuan, Mengzi, Guoyu, Mozi, and Zhanguoce). Based on empirical facts, flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese is addressed at three descriptive levels in this study:
First, at the level of syntax, the discussion focuses on the most important syntactic configurations for the use of flexible lexemes and their relations to the basic word order of this language, with flexibility being observed in two positions of an argument structure construction: the V-position and the syntactic position of an argument. The findings of this study demonstrate that as far as the argument structure constructions formed with flexible lexemes are concerned, VO word order is much more frequent than OV. This strong preference for VO is, in connection with lexical flexibility, explained as follows: With the loss of derivational morphology in early stages of Old Chinese (e.g. Sagart 1999), word order became the most important indicator of word class and strongly supported the omission of strict verb-noun distinctions (co-existence of precategoriality and categoriality) in the lexicon of this language.
Second, at the level of cognitive semantics (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Kövecses and Radden 1998; Schönefeld 2005), the discussion concentrates on the metonymic relationships that constitute the cognitive-semantic foundation of the use of flexible lexemes in Classical Chinese. In a metonymic mapping of either the V→N or the N→V type, the original semantics of a lexical item (which may typically be associated with a certain syntactic role of N or V) is used as a reference point to provide mental access to the newly derived meaning of the item in another syntactic function. Given the typologically salient characteristics of Classical Chinese discussed in this book, the argument is that the flexible use of an existing word form as a metonymically related but syntactically distinct item is one of the most economic ways in this language to name a new concept or a newly construed situation in discourse.
Third, at the level of argument structure constructions (Bisang 2008a, b), the discussion focuses on how the different metonymic relationships mentioned interact with a given argument structure construction (which carries its own meaning within itself), and how these are further concretized into rule-based or metaphorically motivated pragmatic implicatures. A closer examination of an argument structure construction with an object word in the V-position reveals that there are two underlying frameworks for deriving the concrete meaning of the construction. In the rule-based framework, the verbal function of a given object word can basically be derived through grammatical analysis of the whole construction. In the metaphorical framework, the composed semantics of the construction actively interacts with the outside world in our conceptual system, where metaphor (Lakoff 1987, 1993; Kövecses 2010) serves as an essential cognitive principle in establishing and (re-)interpreting relations in the construction. The two mechanisms, rule-based and metaphorical, complement each other and work together to account for flexibility in Classical Chinese.
This study argues that flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese can only be fully understood by integrating a wide range of aspects, both linguistic and non-linguistic. The components that are needed to account for it include constructions (form-meaning pairings), semantics (Croft’s conceptual space), pragmatic implicatures, metonymies, metaphors, as well as world knowledge as reflected within a culture. In my view, it is reasonable to argue that these components need not be specific to the language investigated here; they are applicable to any language that shows flexibility in its parts-of-speech system.

Conceptually, the volume focuses on the relationship of the three key notions that essentially triggered the inception and subsequent realization of this project, to wit, language contact, grammaticalization, and areal grouping.
Fully concentrated on the areal-typological and historical dimensions of Slavic, the volume offers new insights into a number of theoretical issues, including language contact, grammaticalization, mechanisms of borrowing, the relationship between areal, genetic, and typological sampling, conservative features versus innovation, and socio-linguistic aspects of linguistic alliances conceived of both synchronically and diachronically. The volume integrates new approaches towards the areal-typological profiling of Slavic as a member of several linguistic areas within Europe, including SAE, the Balkan Sprachbund and Central European groupings(s) like the Danubian or Carpathian areas, as well as the Carpathian-Balkan linguistic macroarea. Some of the chapters focus on structural affinities between Slavic and other European languages that arose as a result of either grammatical replication or borrowing. A special emphasis is placed on contact-induced grammaticalization in Slavic micro-languages

One hot topic in contemporary linguistics concerns how we express the passage of time in natural language. In particular, interesting questions have been raised as to how formerly understudied languages fit into deep-rooted theoretical frameworks, which among other features comprise a grammatical category of tense.

This monograph mainly contributes to this debate in two complementary ways: through a detailed description of a large set of new data from two varieties of Caboverdean, a Portuguese-related language, and through a novel approach to the role of its few temporal morphemes, which allows to better define how tense meanings, aspect, and mood, together with other linguistic and extralinguistic information, provide what we understand as past, present, and future.

The adequate study of this non-standardized language, with its impressive internal variation, thus brings new insights to old theoretical problems. Additionally, a welcome side effect of these new descriptions and analyses is that they promote a scientifically grounded attitude towards linguistic diversity.

Linguistic varieties such as female speech, foreigner talk, and colloquial language have not gone unnoticed when it comes to Classical Greek, but little is known about later periods of the Greek language. In this collective volume leading experts in the field outline some of the most important varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, basing themselves on a broad range of literary and documentary sources, and advancing a number of innovative methodologies. Close attention is paid to the linguistic features that characterize these varieties, with in-depth discussions of lexical, morpho-syntactic, orthographic, and metrical variation, as well as the interrelationship between these different types of variation. The volume thus offers valuable insights into the nature of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, laying the foundation for future studies of linguistic variation in these later stages of the language, while at the same time providing a point of comparison for Classical Greek scholarship

The globalized use of language calls into question conventional ways of thinking in linguistics,applied linguistics and language pedagogy.
This book critically examines this thinking from an historical, at times satirical, perspective and proposes an alternative conceptualization.
The first section defines a number of key concepts about communication which are taken up in subsequent sections and shown to be relevant to the different but related areas of language study. Issues about the relationship between linguistics and applied linguistics set the scene for a discussion of the nature of discourse, and then how this bears on the understanding of the globalised use of English as a lingua franca.The final section considers the implications of this perspective on communication for how the subject of English language teaching might be redefined.
The book is relevant for anyone who sees the need for a critical consideration of established concepts in linguistics and language pedagogy.

Until recently, collaborative efforts between formal linguistics and literary studies have been relatively sparse; this book is an attempt to bridge this gap and add to the hitherto small pool of studies that combine the two disciplines.
Our study concentrates on Emily Dickinson’s poetry, since it displays a highly uncommon and therefore challenging use of language. We argue this to be part of her poetic strategy and consider Dickinson an intuitive linguist: her apparent non-compliance with linguistic rules is a productive exploration of linguistic expression to reveal the flexibility and potential of grammar, leading to complex processes of interpretation. Our study includes a number of in-depth analyses of individual poems, which combine formal linguistic methods and literary scholarship and focus on specific aspects such as ambiguity, reference, and presuppositions. One of our findings concerns the dynamic interpretation of lyrical texts in which the pragmatic step of establishing what a poem means for the reader is postponed to text level.
We provide readers with a tool-box of methods for the formal linguistic analysis not just of Emily Dickinson’s poetry but of linguistically complex literary texts in general.

The Iranian languages are one of the world's major language families. With an estimated 150 to 200 million native speakers, these languages constitute the western group of the larger Indo-Iranian family, which represents a major eastern branch of the Indo-European languages. Geographically, the Iranian Languages are spoken from Central Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the West to Pakistan and western edged of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China in the east. Iranian languages have long been among the major interests of the philologists and general linguists, and European scholars have made tremendous contributions to the study of this language family. In light of such efforts, now we know that the Iranian languages can be historically divided into three phases, that are old, middle and new Iranian languages, and the new Iranian languages may be generally grouped as Eastern and Western. In recent years, the orientation towards typology has led to the appearance of somewhat more ponderance on the subject but the work has not included description of some of the very important languages of the Caspian, and or of the religious minorities (such as those of the Zoroastrians or the Jewish community), of the four-fold Central Plateau dial.

Based on comparative analyses of diachronic data, the articles in this volume address both theoretical and methodological issues in the study of grammaticalization and lexicalization in both Eastern and Western languages. The central question raised and discussed in this volume is how, if any, typological properties of the two genetically unrelated language families interact with the processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.

Insubordinate clauses present a challenge for grammatical analysis. This is owed to their unusual combination of subordinate structure with main clause use. This volume brings together a collection of articles on the form and function of insubordination in a range of languages – providing an up-to-date overview of current research on the topic.

Trends in Hindi Linguistics provides a snapshot of current developments in Hindi syntax and semantics and covers topics such as definiteness marking, comparative constructions with differentials, conjunct verbs, participial relative clauses, ellipsis, scrambling, infinitives and directive strategies. Together these papers give a rich and in-depth account of the vitality of current research on Hindi.

Linguistic variation is a topic of ongoing interest to the field. Its description and its explanations continue to intrigue scholars from many different backgrounds. By taking a deliberately broad perspective on the matter, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation and examining phenomena ranging from negation over connectives to definite articles in well- and lesser-known languages, the volume furthers our understanding of variation in general. The papers offer new insights into, among other things, the theoretical notion of comparative concepts, the social or mental nature of language structure, the areal factor in lexical typology and the diachronic implications of semantic maps. The collection will thus be of relevance to typologists and historical linguists, as well as to people studying variation within the areas of cognitive and functional linguistics.

Most scholars define reduplication as a formally restricted grammatical process, neatly distinguishing it from 'mere' repetition as a discoursal option. However, there is a fuzzy grey area between the two processes that has rarely been explored so far. In this timely collection, the phenomenon of exact repetition, understood broadly as the systematic iteration of one and the same linguistic item within relatively close syntactic proximity, is investigated from a number of angles. The volume contains studies from phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and deals with a broad range of languages, including alleged 'reduplication avoiders'. In bringing together different theoretical perspectives, phenomenological domains, and methodologies, and in linking the fields of syntax and discourse to those of morphology and morphophonology, the volume provides new insights into the structure and meaning of exact repetition phenomena, and, more generally, into their status within a theory of language. The collection will appeal to formally and functionally oriented scholars from all subfields of linguistics, including typology.

This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.

The purpose of the book is twofold. First it tries to give a descriptive account of subjects in English. The second aim is to elucidate the status of the subject both as a concept in grammatical theory and with regard to the question whether the subject is determined by item-specific arbitrary formal restrictions in the same way as postverbal complements of the verb have been shown to be.

The book provides new findings about the grammar of genres and styles. It combines new methods with different kinds of empirical material, from social reports to live TV sports commentaries or 16th century newspapers, in English, French, Latin and Spanish. The study of non-discrete units suggests new ways of seeing the linguistic variation between genres and styles and the ways in which belonging to a genre predetermines linguistic choices.

Free Access in January 2019

There has been an increasing interest in the emerging subfield within linguistics and anthropology often referred to as community-based research (Himmelmann 1998, Rice 2010, Crippen and Robinson 2013, among others). This volume brings together perspectives from academics, community members, and those that find themselves in both academia and the community. The volume begins with a working definition of the notions of community-based research as a practice and illustrates how such notions shifted, without abandoning the outlined tenets within the working definition, as the chapters developed to include notions of community-based research as a tool and ideology as well as an orientation. Each of the 17 chapters represents a case-study with the first five including discussions of broader issues and theoretical perspectives while exploring community-based research as an emerging subfield within linguistics. The case-studies comprise work from the Americas, Australia, India, Europe, and Africa. The goal of the volume is to build on the emerging literature and practices in the field to arrive at a better understanding of how community-based research is theorized and practiced in a variety of environments, communities, and cultures.

This book studies insubordination using Germanic data. On a descriptive level, it distinguishes a wide number of (previously undescribed) types of complement and conditional insubordination in English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. On a theoretical level, these data are used to investigate the boundaries of insubordination, and the degree to which insubordination is a constructionally and semantically unified phenomenon.

The volume presents an essential selection collected from the essays of Wolfgang Klein. In addition to journal and book articles, many of them published by Mouton, this book features new and unpublished texts by the author. It focuses, among other topics, on information structure, the expression of grammatical categories and the structure of learner varieties.

Languages carry information. To fulfil this purpose, they employ a multitude of coding strategies. This book explores a core property of linguistic coding – called lexical diversity. Parallel text corpora of overall more than 1800 texts written in more than 1200 languages are the basis for computational analyses. Different measures of lexical diversity are discussed and tested, and Shannon’s measure of uncertainty – the entropy – is chosen to assess differences in the distributions of words. To further explain this variation, a range of descriptive, explanatory, and grouping factors are considered in a series of statistical models. The first category includes writing systems, word-formation patterns, registers and styles. The second category includes population size, non-native speaker proportions and language status. Grouping factors further elicit whether the results extrapolate across – or are limited to – specific language families and areas. This account marries information-theoretic methods with a complex systems framework, illustrating how languages adapt to the varying needs of their users. It sheds light on the puzzling diversity of human languages in a quantitative, data driven and reproducible manner.

The book is dedicated to the study of the causes and mechanisms of syntactic change in Slavonic languages, including internally motivated syntactic change, syntactic change under contact conditions (structural convergence, pattern replication, shift-induced transfer etc.): It also explores metalinguistic factors such as ideologically driven selection and propagation of syntactic structures.

This book lies at the crossroads of areal typology, language contact and genetic affiliation. Concerned with mainland Southeast Asia in particular, the various grammatical sketches lay emphasis on characteristics shared by unrelated languages.

This set of essays highlights the state of the art in the linguistics of Iranian languages. The contributions span the full range of linguistic inquiry, including pragmatics, syntax, semantics, phonology/phonetics, lexicography, historical linguistics and poetics and covering a wide set of Iranian languages including Persian, Balochi, Kurdish and Ossetian. This book will engage both the active scholar in the field as well as linguists from other fields seeking to assess the latest developments in Iranian linguistics.

Intercultural Pragmatics is a large and diverse field encompassing a wide range of approaches, methods, and theories. This volume draws scholars together from a broad range of cognitive, philosophical, and sociopragmatic perspectives on language use in order to lay the path for a mutually informing and enriching dialogue across subfields and perceived barriers to doing pragmatics interculturally.

This book brings together a series of contributions to the study of grammaticalization of tense, aspect, and modality from a functional perspective. All contributions share the aim to uncover the functional motivations behind the processes of grammaticalization under discussion, but they do so from different points of view.

This book explores the linguistic expression of identity, intended as the social positioning of self and others, by focusing mostly on a scenario of prolonged language contact, namely the ancient Mediterranean area. The volume includes studies on language contact and on identity strategies developed at different levels of analysis, from phonetics to pragmatics, in, among others, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, (Cypriot) Arabic, Medieval Sardinian.

This book fills a gap in lexical morphology, especially with reference to analogy in English word-formation. Many studies have focused their interest on the role played by analogy within English inflectional morphology. However, the analogical mechanism also deserves investigation on account of its relevance to neology in English. This volume provides in-depth qualitative analyses and stimulating quantitative findings in this realm.

Research into the “grammar of language death” is often biased toward formal processes (e.g. paradigmatic levelling). In this study the author changes the perspective and shows that the relative susceptibility of linguistic elements to loss, change and innovation in language death circumstances can be dependent on meaning and thus organized along semantic notions rather than along structure.

The major aim of this volume is to investigate infinitival structures from a diachronic point of view and, simultaneously, to embed the diachronic findings into the ongoing theoretical discussion on non-finite clauses in general. All contributions subscribe to a dynamic approach to infinitival clauses by investigating their origin, development and loss in miscellaneous patterns and across different languages.

This volume advances our understanding of two highly debated aspects of grammaticalization: its relation to (inter)subjectification and its directionality. These aspects are studied with respect to such phenomena as auxiliaries, discourse markers, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns. Bringing together a wide range of languages, the collection provides insight into the crucial dimensions of grammaticalization research.

This book gives an analysis of relative clauses as they evolve throughout the history of (Mainland) Scandinavian, from Ancient Nordic to Early Modern Norwegian.

Nominal apposition—the combining of two equivalent nouns—has been a neglected topic in linguistics, despite its prominence in syntax and morphology in some languages. This book presents an extensive comparative and diachronic analysis of nominal apposition in Indo-European, examining its occurrence, characteristics and functions in early languages, identifying parallels with similar phenomena elsewhere, and tracing its evolution in Latin-Romance.

This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of
Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic
description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers
addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in
Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality,
interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide
important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of
evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to
capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and
diachronic perspective.

This volume brings together descriptions and analyses of the conjoint/disjoint alternation, a typologically significant phenomenon found in many Bantu languages. The chapters provide in-depth documentation, comparative studies and theoretical analyses of the alternation from a range of Bantu languages, showing its crosslinguistic variation in constituent structure, morphology, prosody and information structure.

The present volume is devoted to the study of language use in translated texts as a function of various linguistic, contextual and cognitive factors. It contributes to the recent trend in empirical translation studies towards more methodological sophistication, including mixed methodology designs and multivariate statistical analyses, ultimately leading to a more accurate understanding of language use in translations.

In what ways are language, cognition and perception interrelated? Do they influence each other? This book casts a fresh light on these questions by putting individual speakers’ cognitive contexts, i.e. their usage-preferences and entrenched patterns of linguistic knowledge, into the focus of investigation.

It presents findings from original experimental research on spatial language use which indicate that these individual-specific factors indeed play a central role in determining whether or not differences in the current and/or habitual linguistic behaviour of speakers of German and English are systematically correlated with differences in non-linguistic behaviour (visual attention allocation to and memory for spatial referent scenes).

These findings form the basis of a new, speaker-focused usage-based model of linguistic relativity, which defines language-perception/cognition effects as a phenomenon which primarily occurs within individual speakers rather than between speakers or speech communities.

The use of resumptive pronouns is quite productive in Mandarin Chinese; however, their distribution has rarely been studied in a systematic way. This book not only gives a thorough description of the general distribution of resumptive pronouns in different contexts but also offers a theoretical account in the framework of the Minimalist Program. Different types of A'-dependencies, mediated by gaps and by resumptive pronouns, are derived by different minimalist mechanisms, such as Agree, Match and Move. These mechanisms only apply at Narrow Syntax and do not uniformly obey locality constraints. Importantly, interpretative properties of an A'-bound element, such as reconstruction effects, is only related to its internal structure irrespective of how the A'-chain concerned is derived. From this perspective, resumptivity is an exclusively syntactic-related phenomenon and is thus not subject to any interface condition. Adopting a comparative approach, this study improves the general understanding of resumptivity crosslinguistically.

This collection of papers is the first book ever published in English that presents detailed analyses of valency and transitivity alternations in Japanese from multifaceted standpoints: morphology, semantics, syntax, dialects, history, acquisition, and language typology.

Tone is about melody and meaning, inflection is about grammar, and this book is about a bit of both. The contributions to this volume study possible and sometimes complex ways in which the tones of a language engage in the expression of grammatical categories. There is a widespread conception that tone is a lexical phenomenon only. This is partly a consequence of the main interest in tone coming from phonology, while the main interest in inflection has stemmed from segmental morphology. Similarly, textbooks on inflection and textbooks on tone give very few examples of the inflectional use of tone, and such examples are often the same ones or too similar.

This volume aims to broaden our understanding of the link between tone and inflection by showing that there is more to tone than meets the eye. The book includes general chapters as well as case studies on lesser known languages of Asia, Africa and Papua New Guinea, with a special focus on the Oto-Manguean languages, a large and diverse linguistic stock of Mexico that inspired Kenneth Pike’s 1948 seminal work on tone. Most of the contributions to this volume provide first-hand data from recent fieldwork that stems from important language documentation activities.

Up to now, the focus in the field of language documentation has been predominantly on North American and Australian languages. However, the greatest genetic diversity in languages is found in Latin America, home to over 100 distinct language families. This book gives the Latin American context the attention it requires by consolidating the work of field researchers experienced in the region into one volume for the first time.

This study presents a unified, economic account of the intricate relationship between form, meaning and interpretation in the Norwegian nominal system – without reference to polysemy. It covers all kinds of nominal signs, i.e. nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners, as well as the conventionalised syntactic combinations between them. Among its central innovations is the introduction of the feature general number into Norwegian morphology.

Bringing together evidence from natural and social sciences, the work introduces the non-reductionist Instruction Grammar programme. Viewed from within the practicalities of the lifeworld, utterances are described as instructions to simulate perceptions and attributions for action. The approach provides solutions to long-standing philosophical problems of cognitive grammar theories and traditionally puzzling syntactic phenomena.

This book delivers the first comprehensive study on German modal verbs which summarises and critically reflects the discussion of the last 500 years, checks these findings against large corpus data and is accessible to the English reader. It is shown that non-epistemic modal verbs modify events, whereas their epistemic counterparts modify the proposition, and how the latter developed from the former.

This book deals with shared verb morphology in Japanese and other languages that have been identified as Transeurasian (traditionally: “Altaic”) in previous research. It analyzes shared etymologies and reconstructed grammaticalizations with the goal to provide evidence for the genealogical relatedness of these languages.

The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need.

While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other.

These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.

This study investigates adverbial clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. In line with other recent typological research in the context of complex sentences and clause-linkage, it proceeds from a detailed, multivariate analysis of the morphosyntactic characteristics of the phenomenon under scrutiny.

This study describes third person reference in the fourth century Latin text commonly known as the Itinerarium Egeriae, focusing on what is traditionally labelled demonstratives (hic, iste, ille, is, ipse and idem), bare NPs, and null pronouns.

The contents of the present volume will enhance our understanding of the diachrony of agreement systems and provide a useful starting point for future studies on this both fascinating and intricate field of research.

The book contains a collection of papers dealing with the question of how rhythm shapes language. Until now, there was no comprehensive theory that addressed these findings adequately. By bringing together researchers from many different fields, this book will make a first attempt to fill this gap.

This book investigates morpho-syntactic convergences that characterize the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund: Balkan Slavic, Greek, Romanian, Albanian, Balkan Romani. Apart from new data, the volume features contributions within different theoretical frameworks (contact linguistics, functional linguistics, typology, areal linguistics, and generative grammar).

This volume brings together sixteen in-depth studies of final particles in various languages of the world, offering a rich variety of approaches to this still relatively underresearched class of elements.

The volume is of interest to typologists, to experts in syntax and the analysis of spoken language, and to linguists studying the form and function of final particles in single languages.

Final particles offers an overview of the different types of final particles found in typologically distinct languages, different methological approaches to the study of final particles, and of typical grammaticalization pathways that these elements have taken in different languages.

Information structure and the organization of oral texts have been rarely studied crosslinguistically. This book contains studies of the grammatical organization of information in languages from different areas (e.g. Amazonian, Finno-Ugric, South-Asian) from a variety of theoretical angles. It will be a valuable resource for researchers investigating the interaction of morphosyntax and discourse in familiar and less familiar languages.

This volume, which has textbook character, is intended to provide an in-depth introduction to different theoretical and methodological research frameworks concerned with the role of item-specific grammatical and lexical behaviour.

The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).

There is no written grammar of Colloquial Israeli Hebrew whatsoever. This book is the first written grammar of the spontaneous language spoken in Israel that describes Colloquial Israeli Hebrew from a synchronic point of view, and that is not a text book based on normative Hebrew rules.

Bringing together diachronic research from a variety of perspectives, notably typology, formal syntax and semantics, this volume focuses on the interplay of syntactic and semantic factors in language change - an issue so far largely neglected both in (mostly lexical) historical semantics as well as historical syntax, but recently brought into focus by grammaticalization theory as well as Minimalist diachronic syntax. The contributions draw on data from numerous Indo-European languages including Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic, Greek as well as English and German, and discuss a range of phenomena such as change in negation markers, indefinite articles, quantifiers, modal verbs, argument structure among others. The papers analyze diachronic evidence in the light of contemporary syntactic and semantic theory, addressing the crucial question of how syntactic and semantic change are linked, and whether both are governed by similar constraints, principles and systematic mechanisms. The volume will appeal to scholars in historical linguistics and formal theories of syntax and semantics.

The volume advances our understanding of the role of scales and hierarchies across the linguistic sciences. Although scales and hierarchies are widely assumed to play a role in the modelling of linguistic phenomena, their status remains controversial, and it is these controversies that the present volume tackles head-on.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of the Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian and Latgalian), which have only marginally featured in the discourse of theoretical linguistics and linguistic typology. The aim of the book is to bridge the gap between the study of the Baltic languages, on the one hand, and the current agenda of the theoretical and typological approaches to language, on the other. The book comprises 13 articles dealing with various aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, and their interactions, plus a lengthy introduction, whose aim is to outline the state of the art in the research on the Baltic languages. The contributions are data-driven, being based on field-work, corpus research, and data published in the sources not accessible to the general linguistic audience. On the other hand, all contributions are informed in the relevant contemporary linguistic theories and in the advances of linguistic typology. Some of the contributions aim at a more detailed, accurate and theoretically informed description of the data, others look at the Baltic material from a more theoretical point of view, still others assume an areal-typological or contact perspective.

This book is about the close historical and linguistic relationship between the languages of Surinam and Benin, a relationship which can be viewed in terms of a Trans Atlantic Sprachbund or linguistic area. It consists of a detailed analysis of various possible substrate and adstrate effects in a number of components of the grammar, in the Surinam Creole languages, primarily from the Gbe languages of Benin but also from Kikongo.

Many grammatical issues of Archaic and Medieval Chinese still lack a comprehensive analysis. The book provides the first thorough investigation of the syntactic and semantic constraints of the linguistic categories tense and aspect and their relation with the lexical aspect of the verb in Han period Chinese. The author uncovers fascinating details of a language with a highly restricted verbal morphology.

Interjections in Ancient Greek have long lacked a comprehensive account, despite their frequent occurrence in major texts. The present study of their semantics and pragmatics, encompassing all items encountered in Greek drama from the 5th century BC, applies a moderate minimalism, theory-driven method. Readers are offered a thorough and detailed study of this elusive, and in several respects deviant, class of linguistic items.

This edition brings together some lesser known grammaticalization paths travelled by ‘come’ and ‘go’ in familiar and less familiar languages. No single book volume has been dedicated to the topic of grammatical targets different from tense and aspect so far. This study will increase our insight in grammaticalization processes in general as they force us to rethink certain aspects of grammaticalization.

Mandarin Chinese has become indispensable for crosslinguistic comparison and syntactic theorizing. It is nevertheless still difficult to obtain comprehensive answers to research questions, because Chinese is often presented as an "exotic" language defying the analytical tools standardly used for other languages. This book sets out to demystify Chinese. It places controversial issues in the context of current syntactic theories and offers precise analyses based on a large array of representative data. Although the focus is on Modern Mandarin, earlier stages of Chinese are occasionally referred to in order to highlight striking continuities in its history. VO order is one such constant factor, thus invalidating the idea that Chinese went through a major word order change from OV to VO and back to OV. Another claim often made for Chinese as an isolating language, viz. the existence of an impoverished inventory of parts of speech, is likewise refuted. Other long debated issues addressed here include the relevance of the dichotomy topic vs subject prominence and the role of Chinese as a recurring exception to crosscategorial harmonies posited in typological studies.

The volume consists of six essays by S.-Y. Kuroda on narrative theory, with a substantial introduction, notes, a bibliography and an index of proper names.
This is the English version of a French critical edition published by Editions Armand Colin in their "Recherches" series in October 2012, translated from English by Cassian Braconnier, Tiên Fauconnier and Sylvie Patron, edition with an introduction and notes by Sylvie Patron.

The book offers a usage-based account of how humans comprehend complex linguistic structures. The author proposes a theory of constructional access, which treats syntactic patterns as complex and abstract signs. In this view, syntactic processing is subject to the very same dynamics as lexical processing and should yield the same type of frequency effects.

The book investigates pathways of (inter)subjectification followed by prenominal elements in the English Noun Phrase, by tracing the development of identifying, noun-intensifying and subjective compound uses. By means of in-depth corpus study, the assumed unidirectionality of (inter)subjectification in the NP is verified and refined.

The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. Of an estimated 600 languages spoken here at Asia's heart, few are researched in depth and many virtually undocumented. Historical developments and relationships between the region's languages also remain poorly understood. This book brings together new work on under-researched Himalayan languages with investigations into the complexities of the area's linguistic history, offering original data and perspectives on the synchrony and diachrony of the Greater Himalayan Region.
The volume arises from papers given and topics discussed at the 16th Himalayan Languages Symposium in London in 2010. Most papers focus on Tibeto-Burman languages. These include topics relating to individual - mostly small and endangered - languages, such as Tilung, Shumcho, Rengmitca, Yongning Na and Tshangla; comparative research on the Tibetic, East Bodish and Tamangic language groups; and several papers whose scope covers the whole language family. The remaining paper deals with the origins of Burushaski, whose genetic affiliation remains uncertain.
This book will be of special interest to scholars of Tibeto-Burman, and historical as well as general linguists.

The present volume collects contributions addressing different aspects of the measurement of linguistic differences, a topic which probably is as old as language itself but at the same time has acquired renewed interest over the last decade or so, reflecting a rapid development of data-intensive computing in all fields of research, including linguistics.

This monograph argues that the structuralist movement in linguistics was curtailed prematurely, before its contribution to cognitive science could be fully realized. Building upon Roman Jakobson's pioneering work on the nature of the linguistic sign, a new and detailed appreciation of the role of sign relations in the ultimate structuring of consciousness is presented, proving that the structural approach has as much to contribute today as any current cognitive theory. This study takes the view that the structure which linguistic signs themselves evince should be treated as an organic property of mind in its own right, as the device by which the ultimate differences in meaning in the human cognitive sphere are realized. Adherence to this principle assumes not only that the linguistic sign must be fundamentally monosemic, but also that the level of abstraction at which the relations between signs function must lie beyond the logical or rational level where polysemy is the rule.

The study demonstrates that while the conceptual relations or categories uncovered at such a higher-order level of consciousness are of necessity highly abstract and hidden from normal awareness, they are nevertheless neither ineffable nor devoid of content. Rather, the categories identified and defined in this study are shown to have verifiable correlates at the supra-rational level where transpersonal rather than ego-oriented psychology operates, the level that Jung termed the collective unconscious. It is here that we find corresponding properties in reports from altered states of consciousness, in the structure of myths worldwide, as well as in studies of the image-making capacity of the human mind. Ultimately, when the structure of actual linguistic signs is treated as an ordered set of conceptual relations, one necessarily arrives at the conclusion that the sign relations of different languages are anything but Whorfian, but are all pointing to the same universal set of conceptual properties. This set of properties is then shown to be able to account for the relations between signs in all areas of linguistic structure, from the grammatical to the lexical and the syntactic.

The monograph goes on to provide a detailed account of the process of making reference, of how speakers are able to contextualize the truly abstract conceptual relations inherent in the structure of signs in their language, to produce a potentially infinite variety of polysemous meanings in actual speech situations at whatever level of concreteness they choose; and how the feedback from such acts of communication determines the evolutionary trajectory of a system of signs conceived as a living organism, specifically as a neuronal structure inherent in the human brain operating as a fundamentally probabilistic or stochastic system.

This monograph addresses fundamental syntactic issues of classifier constructions, based on a thorough study of a typical classifier language, Mandarin Chinese. It shows that the contrast between count and mass is not binary. Instead, there are two independently attested features: Numerability, the ability of a noun to combine with a numeral directly, and Delimitability, the ability of a noun to be modified by a delimitive modifier, such as size, shape, or boundary modifier. Although all nouns in Chinese are non-count nouns, there is still a mass/non-mass contrast, with mass nouns selected by individuating classifiers and non-mass nouns selected by individual classifiers. Some languages have the counterparts of Chinese individuating classifiers only, some languages have the counterparts of Chinese individual classifiers only, and some other languages have no counterpart of either individual or individuating classifiers of Chinese. The book also reports that unit plurality can be expressed by reduplicative classifiers in the language. Moreover, for the constituency of a numeral expression, an individual, individuating, or kind classifier combines with the noun first and then the numeral is integrated; but a partitive or collective classifier, like a measure word, combines with the numeral first, before the noun is integrated into the whole nominal structure. Furthermore, the book identifies the syntactic positions of various uses of classifiers in the language. A classifier is at a functional head position that has a dependency with a numeral, or a position that has a dependency with a generic or existential quantifier, or a position that represents the singular-plural contrast, or a position that licenses a delimitive modifier when the classifier occurs in a compound.

The grammar of negative polarity items is one of the challenges for linguistic theory. NPIs cross-cut all traditional categories in grammar and semantics, yet their distribution is by no means arbitrary. Theories of NPI licensing have been proposed in terms of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics - each with its own merits and problems. The volume comprises state-of-the-art studies and suggests an interpolation approach to NPI licensing.

Vocatives have rarely been comprehensively discussed in their various facets. With 12 contributions covering the diversity of vocative marking, structures, and functions, as well as the relevance of vocatives for theoretical and methodological reasoning, this volume contributes to closing a significant gap in linguistic research. It provides a detailed picture of the vocative as a structure between 'system' and 'performance'.

This book centers on the idea that some verbs and other argument structure constructions have an inherently different propensity to realize lexically unfamiliar arguments, independently of lexical semantic meaning. This notion is explored both qualitatively using selected examples, and quantitatively using large amounts of corpus data, in both cases primarily from English and German.

Germania Semitica explores prehistoric language contact in general, and attempts to identify the languages involved in shaping Germanic in particular. The book deals with a topic outside the scope of other disciplines concerned with prehistory, such as archaeology and genetics, drawing its conclusions from the linguistic evidence alone, relying on language typology and areal probability. The data for reconstruction comes from Germanic syntax, phonology, etymology, religious loan names, and the writing system, more precisely from word order, syntactic constructions, word formation, irregularities in phonological form, lexical peculiarities, and the structure and rules of the Germanic runic alphabet. It is demonstrated that common descent is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for reconstruction. Instead, lexical and structural parallels between Germanic and Semitic languages are explored and interpreted in the framework of modern language contact theory.

This present book studies from a dialectological perspective various African Arabic varieties, such as Maghreb Arabic, Bongor Arabic, Juba Arabic and Logorí Arabic. On the one hand, different specific linguistic aspects related to phonetics and phonology as well as to morphology, syntax and lexicology are discussed in this volume; e.g. the Arabic loanwords in Somali with regard to the strata in South Arabian, the structural features of Logorì Arabic and its use as Lingua Franca or native language, the contact-induced innovation processes in North African Arabic negation by analogy with Berber negation. On the other hand, the African Arabic theme is approached from a more general perspective analysing the contact effects on linguistic features and systems from a broader comparative, typological and universal viewpoint, e.g. a general typology of Arabic in Africa, the question of possible universal features of pidginization and creolization drawn on evidence from Arabic-based pidgins and creoles. Its outcomes offer important insights for all linguistic studies and approaches, and directly connect with other research fields such as sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics and language acquisition.

Presenting original, detailed studies of keywords of Danish, this book breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values. Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly meaning, ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes. It is argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who live by Danish concepts are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by central Danish keywords and lexical grids. By means of a sophisticated semantic methodology, the author accounts for the meanings of even highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts.

The book offers new tools for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe. Additionally, it contributes to the emerging discipline of cultural semantics, and to the ongoing debates of linguistic diversity, metalanguage, and the use of linguistic evidence in studies of culture and social cognition.

Verbs denoting 'to give' have developed grammatical meanings in many languages of the world. The present study analyses the grammaticalization of give in causative and modal constructions in the closely related Slavic languages Russian, Polish and Czech.
Adopting a corpus driven approach, it takes departure from a detailed analysis of the use of these constructions in large reference corpora. This synchronic approach is supplemented by an analysis of the use of these constructions in Old Church Slavonic and by diachronic corpus-based accounts of the developments in Czech and Polish.
The study provides thorough descriptions of the syntax and semantics of causative constructions, ranging from permissive (letting someone do something) and reflexive permissive (letting something be done to oneself) to factitive causative (having something done by someone). It traces the development and synchronic status of modals that have developed out of reflexive permissives in Polish and Czech. General issues discussed in the study include polarity sensitivity in causatives, types of causee coding, the emergence of non-agreeing diathesis structures in Polish and the role of language contact with German.

Plural marking, numeral classifiers and reduplication constitute the main means of quantification marking in the domain of grammar. The contributions in this book focus on the typological correlation between the three different strategies for quantification, as well as on some general issues. A better understanding of the quantification strategies in the languages of China will enrich our comprehension of human language and thought. The book is expected to have an impact on the study of linguistic typology, language contact, and patterns of the evolution.

Linguists have standardly assumed that grammar is about identifying all and only the 'good' sentences of a language, which implies that there must be other, 'bad' sentences - but in practice most linguists know that it is hard to pin those down. The standard assumption is no more than an assumption. A century ago, grammarians did not think about their subject that way, and our book shows that the older idea was right: linguists can and should dispense with the concept 'starred sentence'. We draw on corpus data in order to support a different model of grammar, in which individuals refine positive grammatical habits to greater or lesser extents in diverse and unpredictable directions, but nothing is ever ruled out. Languages are not merely alternative methods of verbalizing universal logical forms. We use empirical evidence to shed light on the routes by which school-age children gradually expand their battery of grammatical resources, which turn out to be sometimes counter-intuitive. Our rejection of the 'starred sentence' concept has attracted considerable discussion, and we summarize the reactions and respond to our critics. The contrasting models of grammar described in this book entail contrasting pictures of human nature; our closing chapter shows that grammatical theory is not value-neutral but has an ethical dimension.