Improving the quality of your writing starts with rethinking your assumptions and developing healthier writing habits. This book will help you do both.

Become a Better Writer: How to Write with Clarity and Simplicity is a practical guide for those who wish to write more clearly and concisely. Drawing on their extensive experience as writers and editors, the authors discuss tools and tips for making your writing accessible and meaningful to your target audience.

The book is readable and engaging, covering different kinds of writing (including reports, essays, emails, novels and speeches) across a wide range of subjects. The examples discussed are derived from real-world material and are particularly relevant to the African context. The book will be especially useful to writers of non-fiction.

Andrew Carnie’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction, Fourth Edition, and The Syntax Workbook, Second Edition, in a combined set

This set includes both the newly revised fourth edition of Syntax: A Generative Introduction and the new second edition of The Syntax Workbook. For a generation of students, Andrew Carnie’s introduction to syntax has provided a valuable first step into the study of sentence structure through clear, student-friendly descriptions and examples. The workbook provides extensive opportunity to practice and apply the lessons from the textbook. This combined book set provides students with all material needed for a full course in syntax.

In this set, students receive:

• The newest editions of Andrew Carnie’s textbook, updated with new material on Chomsky’s Merge and with new problem sets
• The newest edition of the workbook, which has been updated and revised to support the fourth edition of the textbook
• Access to the companion website for additional practice sets, videos, and other supplementary material

This combined set is ideal for undergraduates in syntax courses who will either need both texts for their courses or who wish to supplement the primary textbook with the workbook and companion website for further at-home practice.

One of the fundamental properties of human language is movement, where a constituent moves from one position in a sentence to another position. Syntactic theory has long been concerned with properties of movement, including locality restrictions. Smuggling in Syntax investigates how different movement operations interact with one another, focusing on the special case of smuggling. First introduced by volume editor Chris Collins in 2005, the term 'smuggling' refers to a specific type of movement interaction. The contributions in this volume each describe different areas where smuggling derivations play a role, including passives, causatives, adverb placement, the dative alternation, the placement of measure phrases, wh-in-situ, and word order in ergative languages. The volume also addresses issues like the freezing constraint on movement and the acquisition of smuggling derivations by children. In this work, Adriana Belletti and Chris Collins bring together leading syntacticians to present a range of contributions on different aspects of smuggling. Tackling fundamental theoretical questions with empirical consequences, this volume explores one of the least understood types of movement and points the way toward new research.

A recent wave of research has explored the link between wh- syntax and prosody, breaking with the traditional generative conception of a unidirectional syntax-phonology relationship. In this book, Jason Kandybowicz develops Anti-contiguity Theory as a compelling alternative to Richards' Contiguity Theory to explain the interaction between the distribution of interrogative expressions and the prosodic system of a language. Through original and highly detailed fieldwork on several under-studied West African languages (Krachi, Bono, Wasa, Asante Twi, and Nupe), Kandybowicz presents empirically and theoretically rich analyses bearing directly on a number of important theories of the syntax-prosody interface. His observations and analyses stem from original fieldwork on all five languages and represent some of the first prosodic descriptions of the languages. The book also considers data from thirteen additional typologically diverse languages to demonstrate the theory's reach and extendibility. Against the backdrop of data from eighteen languages, Anti-contiguity offers a new lens on the empirical and theoretical study of wh- prosody.

This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure. The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of pragmatics of all theoretical stripes. It will also be a valuable resource for linguists in other fields, including philosophy of language, semantics, morphosyntax, prosody, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, and for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.

In languages with aspect-based split ergativity, one portion of the grammar follows an ergative pattern, while another shows a "split." In this book, Jessica Coon argues that aspectual split ergativity does not mark a split in how case is assigned, but rather, a split in sentence structure. Specifically, the contexts in which we find the appearance of a nonergative pattern in an otherwise ergative language involve added structure - a disassociation between the syntactic predicate and the stem carrying the lexical verb stem. This proposal builds on the proposal of Basque split ergativity in Laka 2006, and extends it to other languages. The book begins with an analysis of split person marking patterns in Chol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico. Here appearance of split ergativity follows naturally from the fact that the progressive and the imperfective morphemes are verbs, while the perfective morpheme is not. The fact that the nonperfective morphemes are verbs, combined with independent properties of Chol grammar, results in the appearance of a split. In aspectual splits, ergativity is always retained in the perfective aspect. This book further surveys aspectual splits in a variety of unrelated languages and offers an explanation for this universal directionality of split ergativity. Following Laka's (2006) proposal for Basque, Coon proposes that the cross-linguistic tendency for imperfective aspects to pattern with locative constructions is responsible for the biclausality which causes the appearance of a nonergative pattern. Building on Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria's (2000) prepositional account of spatiotemporal relations, Coon proposes that the perfective is never periphrastic - and thus never involves a split - because there is no preposition in natural language that correctly captures the relation of the assertion time to the event time denoted by the perfective aspect.

How Words Mean introduces a new approach to the role of words and other linguistic units in the construction of meaning. It does so by addressing the interaction between non-linguistic concepts and the meanings encoded in language. It develops an account of how words are understood when we produce and hear language in situated contexts of use. It proposes two theoretical constructs, the lexical concept and the cognitive model. These are central to the accounts of lexical representation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (or LCCM Theory).
Vyvyan Evans integrates and advances recent developments in cognitive science, particularly in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. He builds a framework for the understanding and analysis of meaning that is at once descriptively adequate and psychologically plausible. In so doing he also addresses current issues in lexical semantics and semantic compositionality, polysemy, figurative language, and the semantics of time and space, and writes in a way that will be accessible to students of linguistics and cognitive science at advanced undergraduate level and above.

The Syntax of Ellipsis investigates a number of elliptical constructions found in Dutch dialects within the framework of the Minimalist Program. Using two case studies, Van Craenenbroeck argues that both the PF-deletion and the pro-theory of ellipsis are needed to account for the full range of elliptical phenomena attested in natural language.
The first case study focuses on instances of stranding to the right of a sluiced wh-phrase: prepositions in English (What about?) and demonstrative pronouns in southern Dutch dialects (Wie dat? 'who that'). Van Craenenbroeck gives both of these phenomena a PF-deletion analysis, which turns out to have considerable repercussions for the structure of the left periphery and the syntax of wh-movement. Specifically, while minimal wh-phrases move from their IP-internal base position to specCP, complex ones are base-generated in the (split) left periphery.
The second case study is concerned with Short Do Replies in southern Dutch dialects, a type of contradictory reply that at first sight bears a close resemblance to English VP-ellipsis. Van Craenenbroeck shows that in this case the ellipsis site is best represented as a null, structureless proform that is licensed by the head of a high PolP. Moreover, this pronominal is argued to occur in two other dialectal constructions as well: contradictory replies of the type Da's nie 'that is not' found in Brabant Dutch, and the occurrence of subject clitics and agreement endings on the words for yes and no in Southern Dutch dialects (e.g. Ja-n-s 'yes-PLURAL-they').
The Syntax of Ellipsis will be of interest to scholars of the left periphery, wh-movement, and Dutch dialects.

Over the past twenty years or so, the work on Japanese within generative grammar has shifted from primarily using contemporary theory to describe Japanese to contributing directly to general theory, on top of producing extensive analyses of the language. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics captures the excitement that comes from answering the question, "What can Japanese say about Universal Grammar?" Each of the eighteen chapters takes up a topic in syntax, morphology, acquisition, processing, phonology, or information structure, and, first of all, lays out the core data, followed by critical discussion of the various approaches found in the literature. Each chapter ends with a section on how the study of the particular phenomenon in Japanese contributes to our knowledge of general linguistic theory. This book will be useful to students and scholars of linguistics who are interested in the latest studies on one of the most extensively studied languages within generative grammar.

Locality is a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all (although of course they may be allowed to iterate indefinitely). The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the theory of locality. The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax.

Work in morphology is typically concerned with productive word formation and regular inflection, in any event with open class categories such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and their various forms. The Architecture of Determiners, by contrast, is devoted to a set of function words: the closed class of determiners. While it is traditionally assumed that function words are syntactically atomic, Thomas Leu shows that a comparative perspective on a series of determiners - each insistently vivisected into its minimal morphotactic segments - reveals an anatomy with properties analogous to clausal syntax, including a lexical, an inflectional, and left peripheral layer, as well as transformational relations among subconstituents. Leu argues that determiners are extended adjectival projections with a closed class minimal stem. Leu focuses on Swiss German and German, using other Germanic and non-Germanic languages as a comparative domain. His discussion of the internal structure of determiners includes demonstratives (ch.2), distributive quantifiers (ch.4), possessive and negative determiners (ch.5), and interrogative determiners such as 'was fur' (ch.6). His main claim - that all of these involve extended adjectival projections - connects naturally to a discussion of adjectival / determiner inflection in German. Chapter 3 addresses the oft-debated strong versus weak agreement alternation in a novel way, proposing that the adjective moves within its own extended projection, in a way akin to verb movement to C in the clause. This accounts for the central facts of nominative and accusative inflection. Chapter 7, then, addresses dative and genitive morphology, setting them syntactically apart from adjectival / determiner inflection in a way that leads to a surprising account of most of the systematic (meta-) syncretism patterns in German adjectival inflection.

By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall, linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems differ, and how they change over time. Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English provides a systematic look at minimal differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America. The book makes available for the first time a range of data on unfamiliar constructions drawn from several regional and social dialects, data whose distribution and grammatical properties shed light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally. The nine contributions collected in this volume fall under a number of overlapping topics: variation in the expression of negation and modality (the "so don't I " construction in eastern New England, negative auxiliary inversion in declaratives in African-American and southern white English, multiple modals in southern speech, the "needs washed " construction in the Pittsburgh area); pronouns and reflexives (transitive expletives in Appalachia, personal dative constructions in the Southern/Mountain states, long-distance reflexives in the Minnesota Iron Range); and the relation between linguistic variation and language change (the rise of "drama SO " among younger speakers, the difficulty in establishing which phenomena cluster together and should be explained by a single point of parametric variation). These chapters delve into the syntactic analysis of individual phenomena, and the editors' introduction and afterword contextualize the issues and explore their semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic implications.

Japanese syntax has been studied within the framework of generative linguistics for nearly 50 years. But when it is studied in comparison with other languages, it is mostly compared with English. Japanese Syntax in Comparative Perspective seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining Japanese in comparison with other Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Turkish, and Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages of India. By focusing on Japanese and other Asian languages, the ten papers in this volume (on topics such as ellipsis, postponing, and wh-questions) make a unique contribution to the study of generative linguistics, and to the Principles and Parameters theory in particular.

Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.

Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a number of languages and language families, along with an account of the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional category followed by renewal. Some well-known cycles involve negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again. Verbal agreement is another example: full pronouns are reanalyzed as agreement markers and are renewed again. Each chapter provides data on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages. Van Gelderen argues that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal Grammar. She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it evolved.

This introductory guide to grammar explains one hundred basic grammatical terms. A knowledge of such terms, and how they interconnect, is crucial for an understanding of the structure and function of language. The explanations are listed alphabetically for easy reference, like a dictionary, but offer much more than a simple definition. Each entry is divided into sections, providing a clear explanation, examples, exercises, and highlighting the main contrasts and interrelationships between the terms. Many entries contain a ?for interest? section which sets out further fascinating points, often drawing on some of the more exotic languages of the world, or discussing important contemporary issues, such as dialects, standard language, and sexism in language. Clearly written and easy to use, this book will be an invaluable source of information for students of language and linguistics.

This book is the final volume of a four-volume set on modern Chinese complex sentences, assessing the key attributes, related sentence structures, and semantic and pragmatic relevance of complex sentences. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. Following on from analysis on coordinate, causal, and adversative types of complex sentences, the ten chapters in this volume review the characteristics of complex sentences as a whole. The author discusses the constituents, related structures, semantic and pragmatic aspects of complex sentences, covering topics such !!as the constraints and counter-constraints between sentence forms and semantic relationships, six type crossover markers, distinctions between simple sentences and complex sentences, clauses formed by a noun/nominal phrase followed by le, the shi structure, subject ellipsis or tacit understanding of clauses, as well as double-subject sentences, alternative question groups and their relationships with complex sentences. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.

Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas - New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist, mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial experience and new means of communication via social media. The volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition across indigenous languages.

This volume provides a detailed and comprehensive description of the morphological system of Dutch. Following an introduction to the basic assumptions of morphological theory, separate chapters are devoted to the inflectional system, derivation, and compounding, the interface between morphology and phonology, the interaction between morphology and syntax, and, new to this edition, a more detailed study of the features of separable complex verbs. Geert Booij demonstrates in this book that the morphology of Dutch poses multiple interesting descriptive and theoretical challenges. The volume also contributes to ongoing discussions on the nature and representation of morphological processes, the role of paradigmatic relations between words - and between words and phrases - and the interaction between morphology, phonology, and syntax. This second, fully revised edition has been updated throughout with expanded coverage of Dutch morphological phenomena and results from new research. Alongside a brand new chapter on separable complex verbs, it also includes a more sophisticated analysis of the relation between morphology and syntax, and an introduction to the basic tenets of Construction Morphology.

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.

Product Description An enthusiastic and practical approach to language learning A riveting and valuable combination of David Crystal's language expertise and Geoff Barton's sound, practical classroom experience. Essential reference for every student working towards GCSE and Standard Grade.

This monograph presents a contrastive-corpus analysis of the semantic category of gratification. It takes as a case study the verb reward and its various forms in Polish and in English, as prototypical of the semantics of gratification. The study, set predominantly in the framework of semantic syntax, and drawing from the theory of valence and frame semantics, adopts a corpus-driven and usage-based approach to language analysis. By exploring the syntactic realization and distribution of arguments opened by the predicates of gratification in the two languages, the book offers new insights into language representation in English and Polish, and addresses the combinatoricity of human thought and cognitive mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of the situation of rewarding.