The Iranian languages form the major eastern branch of the Indo-European group of languages, itself part of the larger Indo-Iranian family. Estimated to have between 150 and 200 million native speakers, the Iranian languages constitute one of the world's major language families. This comprehensive volume offers a detailed overview of the principle languages which make up this group: Old Iranian, Middle Iranian, and New Iranian. The Iranian Languages is divided into fifteen chapters. The introductory chapters by the editor present a general overview and a detailed discussion of the linguistic typology of Iranian. The individual chapters which follow are written by leading experts in the field. These provide the reader with concise, non-technical descriptions of a range of Iranian languages. Each chapter follows the same pattern and sequence of topics, taking the reader through the significant features not only of phonology and morphology but also of syntax; from phrase level to complex sentences and pragmatics. Ample examples on all levels are provided with detailed annotation for the non-specialist reader. In addition, each chapter covers lexis, sociolinguistic and typological issues, and concludes with annotated sample texts. This unique resource is the ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will also be of interest to researchers or anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistics anthropology and language development. Gernot Windfuhr is Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan; he has published widely on Persian and Iranian languages and linguistics and related languages, as well as on other aspects of Iranian culture including Persian literature and Pre-Islamic Iranian religions.

The grammar presents a full decription of Pali, the language used in the Theravada Buddhist canon, which is still alive in Ceylon and South-East Asia. The development of its phonological and morphological systems is traced in detail from Old Indic. Comprehensive references to comparable features and phenomena from other Middle Indic languages mean that this grammar can also be used to study the literature of Jainism.

This collection of essays, written between 1980 and 2001, places the search for theoretical elegance at centre stage. The author shows that although the conceptual difference between 'elegance' and the minimalist search for 'perfection' may appear to be subtle, its consequences are in fact wide ranging and radical. These considerations lead to a markedly different and novel theory of syntax where most of the major features of minimalism, such as derivation, economy, merge, move, phrases and projection, are not just reanalysed or shifted to other components but in a majority of cases are dispensed with completely or reduced to much simpler notions. Towards an Elegant Syntax makes available important and some less easily accessible publications with new introductory material.

After Piaget moves beyond the harsh critiques of Piaget that have for decades circled among the followers of more popular paradigms such as socio-cultural or cognitivism approaches since Piaget lost his prominence. This collection of essays looks at the achievements of Jean Piaget and how his ideas have advanced long after his death.

Piaget should be viewed as a thinker who moved towards the adoption of the dialectical perspective in developmental psychology and influenced many contemporaries. The move towards the creation of new models for psychology continues to be the hallmark of the future. Taking the qualitative synthesis of new forms seriously was central to Piaget's legacy.

The School of Geneva has made possible a variety of empirical extensions of Piaget's general ideas by his students and exemplified the heterogeneity of research traditions that have come into existence. This cutting edge work brings together new developments of ideas and research practices that have grown out of Piaget's tradition and provides a retrospective glance into the intellectual atmospheres of the different periods at which the contributors encountered Piaget. This book continues the fine innovative tradition in the History and Theory of Psychology series edited by Jaan Valsiner.

This book provides an in-depth investigation of single and double cliticization based on research in theoretical syntax and first language acquisition. Although the main focus is the analysis of data from Bulgarian, the work draws crosslinguistic parallels to some of the Romance and Balkan Sprachbund languages. Acquisition data from three original experimental studies with 79 typically-developing monolingual Bulgarian children aged between 2 and 4 are reported. This is the first study of the placement properties of object clitics in both pre- and post-verbal positions, and of the acquisition of clitic doubling for Bulgarian. The reported research has direct relevance to the current debate of the crosslinguistic variance in the acquisition of clitics.

* highlights important language elements by utilising original and recent Chinese texts regarding social issues * Designed to progress learners' language competency to an advanced level through a natural connection between Chinese language learning and Chinese Social Studies. * Facilitates language learning and provides important insight for the formation of cross-cultural relationships. * Prepares readers for the transition from academic study to employment. * Written by a team of native and non-native speakers.

This book offers a concise introduction to synchronic English linguistics. Following an introduction to language and linguistics as such, it provides detailed descriptions of the different language levels: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and meaning in language (comprising semantics and pragmatics). Furthermore, one chapter deals with constructional approaches to English grammar. The final chapter serves as an outlook on the application of linguistic theory in various domains of language use, including historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, language acquisition and forensic linguistics. Every chapter contains specific exercises that help to rehearse the key concepts introduced in this book.

Negation is a sine qua non of every human language but is absent from otherwise complex systems of animal communication. In many ways, it is negation that makes us human, imbuing us with the capacity to deny, to contradict, to misrepresent, to lie, and to convey irony. The apparent simplicity of logical negation as a one-place operator that toggles truth and falsity belies the intricate complexity of the expression of negation in natural language. Not only do we find negative adverbs, verbs, copulas, quantifiers, and affixes, but the interaction of negation with other operators (including multiple iterations of negation itself) can be exceedingly complex to describe, extending (as first detailed by Otto Jespersen) to negative concord, negative incorporation, and the widespread occurrence of negative polarity items whose distribution is subject to principles of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters in this book survey the patterning of negative utterances in natural languages, spanning such foundational issues as how negative sentences are realized cross-linguistically and how that realization tends to change over time, how negation is acquired by children, how it is processed by adults, and how its expression changes over time. Specific chapters offer focused empirical studies of negative polarity, pleonastic negation, and negative/quantifier scope interaction, as well as detailed examinations of the form and function of sentential negation in modern Romance languages and Classical Japanese.

Over the years, a major strand of Miyagawa's research has been to study how syntax, case marking, and argument structure interact. In particular, Miyagawa's work addresses the nature of the relationship between syntax and argument structure, and how case marking and other phenomena help to elucidate this relationship. In this collection of new and revised pieces, Miyagawa expands and develops new analyses for numeral quantifier stranding, ditransitive constructions, nominative/genitive alternation, "syntactic" analysis of lexical and syntactic causatives, and historical change in the accusative case marking from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese. All of these analyses demonstrate an intimate relation among case marking, argument structure, and word order.

The ideal companion to developing the essential skills needed to undertake the core module of contract law as part of undergraduate study of law or a qualifying GDL/CPE conversion course. Providing support for learning and revision throughout, the key skills are demonstrated in the context of the core topics of study with expertly written example sets of notes, followed by opportunities to learn and test your knowledge by creating and maintaining your own summaries of the key points. The chapters are reinforced with a series of workpoints to test your analytical, communication and organisational skills; checkpoints, to test recall of the essential facts; and research points, to practice self-study and to gain familiarity with legal sources. 'Course Notes: Contract Law' is designed for those keen to succeed in examinations and assessments with view to taking you one step further towards the development of the professional skills required for your later career. In addition, concepts are set out both verbally and in diagrammatic form for clarity, and the essential case law is displayed in a series of straightforward and indisposable tables illustrating how best to analyse and compare legal points as expressed by the opinions of the authorities in each case. To check your answers to questions examples are provided online along with sample essay plans and web links to useful web sites and sources as part of the ever popular resources at www.unlockingthelaw.co.uk, making this the ideal resource to guide you through the demands of compiling and revising the information you will need for your exams.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Derivations draws together some of the most influential work of one of the world's leading syntactitians, Juan Uriagekera. These essays provide several empirical analyses and technical solutions within the Minimalist Program. The book persues a naturalistic take on Minimalism, explicitly connecting a variety of linguistic principles and conditions to arguably analogous laws and circumstances in nature.

Generative Grammar presents a substantial contribution to the field of linguistics in drawing together for the first time the author's most significant work on the theory of generative grammar. The essays collected here display Freidin's role in moving the theory forward in terms of new proposals, and analyse the efforts to understand the evolution and history of the theory by careful investigation of how and why it has changed over the years.

This volume, first published in 1960 to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of Jespersen, collects together as many of his writings as possible in order to allow students of the English language, or indeed of language in general, to read those shorter papers which have hitherto escaped their notice. The layout of the book largely follows the nature of the subjects dealt with: English grammar, phonetics, history of English, language teaching, language in general, international language and miscellaneous papers.

In this book, modality and its learner variety in Japanese are investigated from the perspective of grammaticalization in the functional framework. It describes the grammatical system of modality in Japanese in terms of the form-function relationship within the scope of a framework based on the European school of modality.

Accordingly, it deals with the modal system and its constituents in Japanese, accommodating all the grammatical means of modariti (modality) in the Nihongo bunpou (Japanese grammar system). This study also casts light on the learner variety of modality, which is comprised of two core systems, epistemic and deontic, both of which are evident at the utterance level and the morphosyntactic level.

The learner variety of modality elucidated here is presented as a proto-modality, which is viewed as a system in its own right rather than as an improvised or distorted version of the native modal system in Japanese.

Studies in Linguistics and Cognition offers a comprehensive collection of essays in the interdisciplinary fields of linguistics and cognition. These essays explore the connections between cognitive approaches and different theoretical and applied linguistic theories, such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics and semantics among others, providing revealing insights into the nature of the cognitive processes underlying language. The authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, ranging from the study of figurative language, phrasal verbs and humorous discourse to the analysis of fuzzy concepts, attitude verbs and neologisms. These and other related questions are dealt with in this integrative overview of the linguistic and cognitive processes. The volume is structured in three main sections, each corresponding to a distinct level of meaning description: Section I deals with Lexicon and Cognition, Section II with Semantics and Cognition and Section III with Communication and Cognition. This book provides thought-provoking reading for linguists, pragmaticians, psychologists, philosophers and cognitive scientists as well as scholars in computational linguistics and natural language processing who are interested in gaining a better understanding of the interface between cognition and linguistics.

Iceberg semantics is a new framework of Boolean semantics for mass nouns and count nouns in which the interpretation of a noun phrase rises up from a generating base and floats with its base on its Boolean part set, like an iceberg. The framework is shown to preserve the attractive features of classical Boolean semantics for count nouns; the book argues that Iceberg semantics forms a much better framework for studying mass nouns than the classical theory does. Iceberg semantics uses its notion of base to develop a semantic theory of the differences between mass nouns and count nouns and between different types of mass nouns, in particular between prototypical mass nouns (here called mess mass nouns) like water and mud versus object mass nouns (here called neat mass nouns) like poultry and pottery. The book shows in detail how and why neat mass nouns pattern semantically both with mess mass nouns and with count nouns. Iceberg semantics is a compositional theory and in Iceberg semantics the semantic distinctions defined apply to noun phrases of any complexity. The book studies in depth the semantics of classifier noun phrases (like three glasses of wine) and measure noun phrases (like three liters of wine). The classical wisdom is that classifier interpretations are count. Recent literature has argued compellingly that measure interpretations are mass. The book shows that both connections follow from the basic architecture of Iceberg semantics. Audience: Scholars and students in linguistics - in particular semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics and syntax - and neighbouring disciplines like logic, philosophy of language, and cognitive science.

This book systematically discusses the link between bilingual language production and its manifestation in historical documents, drawing together two branches of linguistics which have much in common but are traditionally dealt with separately. By combining the study of historical mixed texts with the principles of modern code-switching and bilingualism research, the author argues that the cognitive processes underpinning the human capacity to produce mixed utterances have remained unchanged throughout history, even as the languages themselves are constantly changing. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, syntactic theory (particularly generative grammar), language variation and change.

The Glot International State-of-the-Article books constitute the ideal solution for every-one who wants to have a good idea of what the others are doing but does not have time to follow the developments in all other parts of the field on a day to day basis. All articles were previously published in Glot International and have been revised and updated, and special attention was given to the extensive bibliography, which constitutes an important part of each overview article. Among the essays in the first volume are overview articles dealing with VP ellipsis (by Kyle Johnson), Ergativity (by Alana Johns), tone (by San Duanmu), acquisition of phonology (by Paula Fikkert), and semantic change (by Elizabeth Closs Traugott). The second volume offers articles on subjects ranging from the development of grammars (by David Lightfoot) and markedness in phonology (by Keren Rice) to the syntactic representation of linguistic events (by Sara Thomas Rosen), optionality in Optimality syntax (by Gereon Muller) and the nature of coordination (by Ljiljana Progovac).

This volume brings together various strands of research focusing on aspects of the syntax of agreement, and the role that agreement plays in linguistic theory. The essays collected here show how and why agreement has emerged in recent years as the central theoretical construct in minimalism. Although the theoretical context of the volume is minimalist in character, Boeckx formulates formal and substantive universals in the domain of agreement.

This volume is about 'dislocation' - the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge. Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis.

An Introduction to English Sentence Structure puts the study of English sentences into the meaningful perspective provided by the broad essentials of functionalism. The book starts from the premise that the structure of language reflects the structure of events in everyday experience. By contrast, grammars that are more structural in nature often begin with gross facts about language structure, such as the observation that clauses can be divided into subjects and predicates. The book's premise reflects the fundamental Hallidayan principle that language simultaneously codes for three dimensions of structure: clause as representation, clause as exchange, and clause as message. This approach has the effect of situating the study of language in the student's familiar world of ideas, relationships, and discourses. The book blends insights from three prominent modern schools of grammatical thought (functionalism, structuralism, and generativism) using functionalism as the philosophical and organizational motif. The book focuses on the representational function of language, encouraging students to use their knowledge of the way the world works in order to understand how language works. The approach taken is hybrid: It assumes that form matters, and in this sense it is structural. It also assumes that forms follows function, and in this sense it is functional. As its subtitle suggests, the book is concerned with the argument structure of clauses, the boundary markers of clause combinations, and the syntactic and experiential resources that permit language users to supply the content of empty categories, which are the missing elements.

How do we teach and learn vocabulary? How do words work in literary texts? In this book, Ronald Carter provides the necessary basis for the further study of modern English vocabulary with particular reference to linguistic descriptive frameworks and educational contexts. Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives includes an introductory account of linguistic approaches to the analysis of the modern lexicon in English and discusses key topics such as vocabulary and language teaching, dictionaries and lexicography and the literary, stylistic study of vocabulary. This Routledge Linguistics Classic includes a substantial new introductory chapter situating the book in the current digital age, covering changes and developments in related fields from lexicography and corpus linguistics to vocabulary testing and assessment as well as additional new references. Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives has been widely praised since first publication for the breadth, depth and clarity of its approach and is a key text for postgraduate students and researchers studying vocabulary within the fields of English Language, Applied Linguistics and Education.

The syntax and semantics of deverbal action nominals, notoriously ambiguous between event and result interpretation, have been a thought-provoking issue in many areas of theoretical linguistics. This volume contributes to current work on this topic by showing how the analysis of these nouns can benefit from a morphological and lexical-semantic treatment. While being a revealing synthesis of a number of formal accounts on this popular research domain, this study specifically targets the largely unexplored area of result nouns and addresses several crucial issues. What are result nouns in a strictly lexical-semantic perspective? Why do some verb classes allow ambiguous event/result nominal correlates, while others do not? What are the relevant verbal features involved in result noun formation? Is there a range of predictability in the number and types of meaning conveyed by a derived nominal? Couched within a framework of decompositional lexical semantic, the analysis offers original formal solutions to the polysemy issues arising in this word formation domain and convincingly argues in favor of the semantic alignment between the morphologically simplex and complex lexicon. A compelling range of Italian data provides empirical support to the author's claims.