With close to 100 million speakers, Tai-Kadai constitutes one of the world's major language families. The Tai-Kadai Languages provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions in the area.

It presents an important overview of Thai that includes extensive cross-referencing to other sections of the volume and sign-posting to sources in the bibliography. The volume also includes much new material on Lao and other Tai-Kadai languages, several of which are described here for the first time.

Much-needed and highly useful, The Tai-Kadai Languages is a key work for professionals and students in linguistics, as well as anthropologists and area studies specialists.

ANTHONY V. N. DILLER is Foundation Director of the National Thai Studies Centre, at the Australian National University.

JEROLD A. EDMONDSON is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Arlington and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars.

YONGXIAN LUO is Senior Lecturer in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Linguistic Society.

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.

This book examines conditionals in the Greek Pentateuch from the point of view of the study of translation syntax. It takes seriously into account the double character of Septuagintal Greek, both as a translation from Hebrew and as vernacular Greek. Methodologically, the underlying Hebrew is taken as the point of departure in close comparison with the resultant translation, with the purpose of examining major features in the translators handling of this complex construction. These include the rendering of verbal and non-verbal forms in the protasis and apodosis, the question of sense-division between the two constituent clauses, the influence of genre or discourse type and interference from the underlying form or structure. Detailed analyses of the resultant translation displays features that are natural Greek, on the one hand, and features that betray the character of 'translation-language', on the other hand, owing to interference from the source text. The latter manifests itself most conspicuously in renderings that are ungrammatical or unnatural, and, in a more subtle way, through equivalents which are grammatically acceptable but occur with a strikingly high frequency in the Septuagint as compared with original Greek compositions contemporary with the Septuagint. Over the last 30 years, this pioneering series has established an unrivaled reputation for cutting-edge international scholarship in Biblical Studies and has attracted leading authors and editors in the field. The series takes many original and creative approaches to its subjects, including innovative work from historical and theological perspectives, social-scientific and literary theory, and more recent developments in cultural studies and reception history.

Assuming no prior grammatical knowledge, Understanding Syntax explains and illustrates the major concepts, categories and terminology involved in the study of cross-linguistic syntax. Taking a theory-neutral and descriptive viewpoint throughout, this book: introduces syntactic typology, syntactic description and the major typological categories found in the languages of the world; clarifies with examples grammatical constructions and relationships between words in a clause, including word classes and their syntactic properties; grammatical relations such as subject and object; case and agreement processes; passives; questions and relative clauses; features in-text and chapter-end exercises to extend the reader's knowledge of syntactic concepts and argumentation, drawing on data from over 100 languages; highlights the principles involved in writing a brief syntactic sketch of language. This fifth edition has been revised and updated to include extended exercises in all chapters, updated further readings, and more extensive checklists for students. Accompanying e-resources have also been updated to include hints for instructors and additional links to further reading. Understanding Syntax is an essential textbook for students studying the description of language, cross-linguistic syntax, language typology and linguistic fieldwork.

Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles was first published in 1954.

This monograph explores the different types of clausal relations in the world's languages. In the recent literature, there have been claims that the strict dichotomy of subordination and coordination cannot be maintained since some constructions seem to be in between these two categories. This study investigates these constructions in detail. The first part is concerned with clause chaining constructions, while the second is concerned with different cases of asymmetric coordination in English. In both parts, it is shown that the different tests to distinguish clausal relations indeed yield different results for the specific constructions. This poses a severe challenge for the established theories of clausal relations. However, as it is argued, recent analyses of coordination provide for the possibility to map a subordinate structure onto a coordinate one by means of regular transformational rules. It is shown that a single movement step derives all the peculiar properties of the phenomena in question. This book thus provides the first comprehensive solution for a long-standing problem in theoretical syntax.

Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles was first published in 1954.

The Movement Theory of Control (MTC) makes one major claim: that control relations in sentences like 'John wants to leave' are grammatically mediated by movement. This goes against the traditional view that such sentences involve not movement, but binding, and analogizes control to raising, albeit with one important distinction: whereas the target of movement in control structures is a theta position, in raising it is a non-theta position; however the grammatical procedures underlying the two constructions are the same. This book presents the main arguments for MTC and shows it to have many theoretical advantages, the biggest being that it reduces the kinds of grammatical operations that the grammar allows, an important advantage in a minimalist setting. It also addresses the main arguments against MTC, using examples from control shift, adjunct control, and the control structure of 'promise', showing MTC to be conceptually, theoretically, and empirically superior to other approaches.

The phenomenon of grammaticalization--the historical process whereby new grammatical material is created--has attracted a great deal of attention within linguistics in recent years. This book shows how this approach leads to a number of important conceptual and theoretical issues concerning the nature of functional categories and the form of parameters, as well as the relation of both of these to language change.

This descriptive grammar provides a uniquely comprehensive description of Maori, the East Polynesian language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Today, the language is under threat and it seems likely that the Maori of the future will differ quite considerably from the Maori of the past. Winifred Bauer offers a wide-ranging and detailed description of the structure of the language, covering syntax, morphology and phonology. Based upon narrative texts and data elicited from older native-speaking consultants and illustrated with a wealth of examples the book will be of interest to both linguistic theoreticians and descriptive linguists, including language typologists.

Hungarian is spoken by 14-15 million people worldwide. A unique language, completely unrelated to the languages of its neighbouring countries, it boasts a grammar full of complex features and vocabulary of basically Uralic (Finno-Ugric) origin. Hungarian addresses current issues in the description of languages and applies up-to-date research techniques to Hungarian. This comprehensive descriptive grammar of the Hungarian language will appeal to both the professional linguist and advanced learner of Hungarian alike.

Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles was first published in 1954.

Evenki is one of the nine Tungusic languages spoken in Siberia and Northern China. This books gives a complete description of all this language's linguistics domains. Evenki is remarkable for both the vast area where it is spoken- from Western Siberia to the Amur regions and from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to Northern China- and for its immense number of dialects and subdialects.

Kashmir boasts a language which challenges every field of linguistics. Kashmiri is spoken by approximately 3,000,000 people. Its syntax, similar to Germanic and other verb second languages, has raised many significant issues within current generative theories proposed by Chomsky and other prominent linguists.

This book discusses a class of Reduced Constructions which exhibit both mono- and bi-clausal characteristics. In Spanish, as well as other Romance languages, the most salient mono-clausal characteristic is the possibility of clitic climbing, i.e. the possibility of an object clitic attaching to a verb that is higher (in the appropriate sense) than the verb which selects the object to which the clitic corresponds. Reduced constructions come in essentially two varieties: clause reduction (or restructuring) constructions and union (or causative / perception verb)constructions. There has been a good deal of work on a number of aspects of reduced constructions; here the author discusses work in three areas: the analysis of pronominal clitics, the structure of clause reduction and union constructions (and how these treatments interact with the analysis of clitics to yield an account of clitic climbing), and the encoding of embedded subjects in union constructions.

Taking a unique approach which combines sociolinguistics with theoretical linguistics, this book presents a view of language and grammar as both a cognitive and socio-cultural phenomena. Beginning with Bakhtin's theories of conceptual grammar and lexico-grammar, this book encompasses a broad philosophical range, engaging with the ideas of key figures such as Bergson, Chomsky, Derrida and Wittgenstein. Drawing on their work, it investigates how language progresses from an inner reflection of the rational mind to develop social and ideological aspects as it interacts with culture. In doing so, it shows how identity is unitary and rational at the linguistic core whilst multiple social identities are simultaneously shaped by linguistic differences at the cultural peripheries. Encompassing theoretical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, multilingualism, sociolinguistics and semiotics, Rationality and Interpretation demonstrates how the different branches of linguistics can complement each other and highlights the socio-cultural influences of language development, as well as how language development is shaped by those influences.

In the beginning, before there are words, or syntax, or discourse, there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without exposure to speech, no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile of language--develops, regardless of how rich a child's biological endowment for language learning may be. But little is given directly in speech--not words, for example, as anyone who has ever listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can attest. Rather, words and phrases, or rudimentary categories--or whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first year, an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech. Beyond this, how impoverished or rich an infant's representations of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly, in the debate over determinants of early language acquisition, the input speech stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential source of information.
This volume brings together internationally-known scholars from a range of disciplines--linguistics, psychology, cognitive and computer science, and acoustics --who share common interests in how speech, in its phonological, prosodic, distributional, and statistical properties, may encode information useful for early language learning, and how such information may be deciphered by very young children. These scholars offer a spectrum of viewpoints on the possibility that aspects of speech may provide bootstraps for language learning; contribute important, state-of-the-art findings across a variety of relevant domains; and illuminate critical directions for future inquiry. The publication of this volume represents a significant step in renewing the bonds between two fields that have long been sundered--speech perception and language acquisition.

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.

Turkish is spoken by about fifty million people in Turkey and is the co-official language of Cyprus. Whilst Turkish has a number of properties that are similar to those of other Turkic languages, it has distinct and interesting characteristics which are given full coverage in this book. Jaklin Kornfilt provides a wealth of examples drawn from different levels of vocabulary: contemporary and old, official and colloquial. They are accompanied by a detailed grammatical analysis and English translation.

Spanish Subjunctive in Context is a new type of subjunctive resource manual. It aims to prove the essential ingredient missing in traditional grammar explorations and isolated single sentence examples; the full context of the situation. The subjunctive is presented in a clear and methodical way using full-length Spanish comic strips, where the full context that generates the subjunctive can be seen.

The Iranian languages are a major component of the Indo-European family, and an important link between Asian, European and African languages. They contain features that can provide crucial evidence for synchronic and diachronic typology and other theoretical linguistic issues, but which are widely unknown, and difficult to access. In addition to the descriptions of each language in the family, the volume provides paradigms and syntagms, and systematic comparative-historical and typological statements.

This indispensable volume contains articles that represent the best of Huang's work on the syntax-semantics interface over the last two decades. It includes three general topics: (a) questions, indefinites and quantification, (b) anaphora, (c) lexical structure and the syntax of events.

Armenian is geographically one of the most widespread languages of the world, with distinct dialects located as far west as Poland and as far east as India. It has a rich literary history dating from the fourth-century translation of the Bible into Classical Armenian. It is one of the most linguistically divergent of the Indo-European languages, having undergone a host of complicated phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes that continue to resist satisfactory analysis. However, the language has yet to receive a comprehensive treatment by theoretical linguists. Bert Vaux remedies this problem, bringing Armenian into the sphere of phonological discussion by making available to Western readers the results of Armenological work published in Armenian and Russian, and by presenting theoretical analyses of many of the more striking phonological phenomena described in these sources or culled from the author's fieldwork. The topics addressed include syllabification, stress assignment, vowel harmony, feature geometry, consonantvowel interactions, and prosodic structure. Series Information: The Phonology of the World's Languages Series Editor: Professor Jacques Durand, Universite de Toulouse-le-Mirail Series ISBN: 0-19-961355-9 Series Description: The phonology of most languages has until now been available only in a fragmented way, through unpublished theses, or articles scattered in more or less accessible journals. Each volume in this series will offer an extensive treatment of the phonology of one language within a modern theoretical perspective and will provide comprehensive references to recent and more classical studies of the language.

First published in 1900, this was the first of two volumes of the magnum opus from pioneer assyriologist and linguist Rev. Archibald Sayce and provided an introduction to theories on the nature, behaviour and development of languages along with the morphology and physiology of speech. In it, Sayce was the first to emphasize the principle of partial assimilation and the linguistic principle of analogy. This 4th edition, ten years after the first, reflected on the limitations of science revealed since 1890, in an era when languages, like other humanities subjects, still idealised scientific approaches. Archibald Henry Sayce was one of the greatest comparative linguists of the time, being proficient in Accadian, Arabic, Cuneiform, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Hittite, Japanese, Latin, Persian, Phoenician, Sanscrit and Sumerian. He had a good knowledge of every Semitic and Indo-European language and could write good prose in at least twenty languages. Sayce's first major contribution to scholarship was a highly significant translation of an Accadian seal, a 'bilingual text' from which to translate cuneiform, similar to the Rosetta Stone. Here then, no doubt, the reader learns from a master of comparative linguistics.

An overview of the major grammatical categories and constructions in the world's languages, Introduction to Typologyprovides a thorough and comprehensive coverage of typology in the areas of morphology and syntax, while underscoring the similarities and differences that underlie the vast array of human languages. Pedagogically sound, this introductory text includes a glossary and highlights and defines each new term as it appears. Each chapter concludes with a summary of new terminology and concepts as well as a list of additional, related readings. Introduction to Typology assumes neither prior knowledge of typology nor extensive background in linguistics, making it useful as a primary or supplementary text for a variety of courses, particularly those dealing with grammatical structure and linguistic universals.