Grammaticalization and lexicalization have been two major issues in the study of diachronic change in the past few decades. Drawing evidence from Western languages, researchers have uncovered a number of characteristics of the process of grammaticalization and lexicalization, as well as the relationship between the two. However, the question remains whether or not those characteristics are applicable to genetically unrelated and typologically different languages, such as Chinese. The contributors of this volume attempt to answer just this question. Based on Chinese historical data from the past three thousand years, five articles in the volume investigate the development of a certain grammatical category: the definite article (M. Fang), modal verbs of volition (A. Peyraube and M. Li), the classifier class (J.Z. Xing), the repeater class (C. Zhang), and the process of lexicalization (X. Dong), while the remaining four articles are case studies of unique grammatical words which have all undergone a complicated process of grammaticalization and some involved lexicalization: the sentence particle ye (Q. Chen), the versatile directional verb lai (C. Liu), the degree adverb hen (M. Liu and C. Chang), and the giving verb gei (F. Tsao). All these studies have identified tendencies of diachronic change in Chinese and some of them have also revealed certain typological characteristics that Chinese has compared to other languages.

Winner of the Swedish National Language Council s Erik Wellander Prize, 2003

Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar is an award-winning complete reference guide to modern Swedish grammar. Systematic and accessible, the volume is organised to promote a thorough understanding of Swedish grammar, presenting the complexities of Swedish in a concise and readable form. Explanations are full, clear and free of jargon, and an extensive index, numbered paragraphs, cross-references and summary charts provide readers with easy access to the information they require.

Now in its third edition, the text has been comprehensively updated to conform to new standards set in the description of language and to reflect the recommendations of the Language Council of Sweden. It offers an improved layout, completely revised index and more user-friendly paragraph structure. Continuing the tradition of previous editions, the emphasis remains fixed on Swedish in everyday communication, drawing on modern corpus material, the internet and the media to provide high frequency words and expressions. Examples have been modernised throughout and new content takes account of recent trends resulting from the increasing democratisation of written Swedish.

Features include:

• detailed treatment of grammatical structures and parts of speech
• a wealth of examples from present-day Swedish
• particular attention to areas of confusion and difficulty for learners
• Swedish/English contrasts highlighted throughout the book
• chapters on word formation, orthography and punctuation.

Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar is the most thorough and detailed Swedish grammar available in English and is an essential reference source for the learner and user of Swedish, irrespective of level. It is ideal for use in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.

Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure offers a detailed study of the clausal architecture of infinitival constructions providing a unified analysis of restructuring, control, modals, and raising. The book critically evaluates previous proposals from both syntactic and semantic perspectives and presents a new analysis incorporating many recent developments in generative linguistic theory. In addition to its theoretical contribution, Infinitives contains a detailed descriptive overview of a range of constructions, primarily from the Germanic languages and will thus not only be of value to generative linguists but will also serve as a general reference source for those interested in the Germanic languages.

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.

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Cinquieme Colloque de Linguistique Romane/Fifth Colloquium on Romance Linguistics, which was held at Groningen University in September 1998. The theme of the colloquium was 'adverbial modification in Romance languages'. Therefore, adverbial modification is the common denominator of the works in this volume. However, and interestingly enough, the viewpoints taken by the Various authors differ considerably: some of the works deal with traditional adverbs (Ocampo, Kampers-Manhe, Bok-Bennema, Molendijk), others with elements such as mood (de Jonge, Quer) or negation (de Swart). Degree modification is discussed by Cover and Doetjes. Modifying clauses are the topic of Le Draoulec's article and modifying nominals play a central role in Schroten's contribution. A special type of modification is the pragmatic one, which is represented by Montolio's article. Also, various theoretical approaches are represented in this volume, such as the generative approach (e.g. Kampers-Manhe, Bok-Bennema), formal semantics (Molendijk, De Swart) and functional-cognitive linguistics (Ocampo, De Jonge), among other ones. Moreover, the languages dealt with are Catalan, French, Rumanian and Spanish. Thus, this volume offers a wide perspective on adverbial modification in Romance languages both from a theoretical point of view as from the point of view of the different languages involved.

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 provides the first cross-linguistic study of repair strategies in verbal fronting, verb doubling and do-support, addressing both typological properties and theoretical aspects. First, it brings together data hitherto scattered across the empirical and theoretical literature and adds newly collected data from two African languages. For each of the 47 languages, the properties of verbal fronting are documented in detail. Based on this sample, the empirical part establishes two novel typological generalizations regarding the interaction between the size of the fronted category and the type of repair strategy used. The first of these identifies a systematic typological gap: No language that allows both verb and verb phrase fronting has do-support with the former and verb doubling with the latter. In the theoretical part, it is shown that previous theories of verb doubling/do-support are unable to account for both generalizations. A new approach within the Copy Theory of the Minimalist Framework is developed, that rests on the interaction of head movement, copy deletion, and the properties of different movement types. The book thus provides the first comprehensive empirical and theoretical overview of repair patterns in verbal fronting.

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 reconstructs the worldview of a Lutheran merchant from the city of Augsburg in the seventeenth century. Miller's is a singular story. Though he lived through some of the great events of his age, he scarcely mentioned them. Though he was raised in the standard values of his age, he understood and applied them idiosyncratically. This is the story of one man's experience and perception based on his memoir and associated documents. Yet, despite its individual focus, the book explores universal institutions of early modern Europe: patriarchy, hierarchy, honor, community, and confession.

This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorthan 'become' is explained as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. The merger of is 'is' and bith 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. The co-occurrence of multiple changes led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity in one fell swoop. In explaining each of these changes, the book goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb's embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. Using a radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from (changing) frequencies, Peter Petre draws attention to general principles of constructional change, including but not limited to grammaticalization and lexicalization. He proposes novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, Petre explains how each individual's mental grammar can be seen as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition.

This book seeks to answer the questions: why do grammars change, and why is the rate of such change so variable? A principal focus is on changes in English between the Anglo-Saxon and early modern periods. The author frames his analysis in a comparative framework with extended discussions of language change in a wide range of other Indo-European languages. He deploys Chomsky's minimalist framework in a fruitful marriage of comparative and theoretical linguistics within an argument that will be accessible to practitioners in both fields.

Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia is a three-volume study of the Arabic dialects spoken in Bahrain by its older generation in the mid-1970s, and the socio-cultural factors that produced them. Volume 1: Glossary, published in 2001, lists all the dialectal vocabulary, with extensive contextual exemplification, and cross-referenced to other lexica, which occurred in the complete set of texts recorded during fieldwork. Volume 2: Ethnographic Texts presents a selection of these texts, transcribed, annotated and translated, and with detailed background essays, covering major aspects of the pre-oil culture of the Gulf and the initial stages of the transition to the modern era: pearl diving, agriculture, communal relations, marriage, childhood, domestic life, work. Excerpts from local dialect poems concerned with these subjects are also included. Volume 3: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style is based on an extensive archive of recorded material, gathered for its ethnographic as well as its purely linguistic interest.

This new and fully revised edition of A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar serves as a user-friendly and up-to-date source of information on the morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of Biblical Hebrew verbs, nouns and other word classes (prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, modal words, negatives, focus particles, discourse markers, interrogatives and interjections). Building upon the initial publication by incorporating up-to-date developments in the study of the Biblical Hebrew, the grammar is both easily accessible and a fascinating examination of the language. It will be invaluable both for exegetes and translators who have completed an introductory or intermediate course in Biblical Hebrew, and also for more advanced scholars seeking to take advantage of traditional and recent descriptions of the language that go beyond the basic morphology of Biblical Hebrew.

This book provides a brand new treatment of Ancient Greek (AG) verb-first (V1) compounds. In AG, the very existence of this type is surprising: its left-oriented structure goes against the right-oriented structure of the compound system, in which there also exists a large class of verb-final (V2) compounds (many of which express the same agentive semantics). While past studies have privileged either the historical dimension or the assessment of semantic and stylistic issues over a systematic analysis of V1 compounds, this book provides a comprehensive corpus of appellative and onomastic forms, which are studied vis-a-vis V2 ones. The diachronic dimension (how these compounds developed from late PIE to AG and then within AG) is combined with the synchronic one (how they are used in specific contexts) in order to show that, far from being anomalous, V1 compounds fill lexical gaps that could not, for specified morphological and semantic reasons, be filled by more 'regular' V2 ones. Introductory chapters on compounding in morphological theory and in AG place the multi-faceted approach of this book in a modern perspective, highlighting the importance of AG for linguists debating the properties of the V1 type cross-linguistically.

Southern Min (also known as Hokkien or Minnan) is a major branch of Chinese spoken mainly in Fujian and Taiwan, but also in Guangdong, Hainan and Hong Kong, as well as in many countries of Southeast Asia. Highly conservative in its linguistic profile, it is considered by many scholars to be a living language fossil due to the preservation of many archaic features that reflect its long-lasting history and culture. Yet to date there has been no comprehensive study of Southern Min using a typological framework, as the tendency is to base analyses on the model of Mandarin Chinese, the standard language. This grammar aims to present a systematic description of the Hui'an variety of Southern Min, mainly based on data collected via naturally occurring conversation. The volume includes four parts: nominal structure, predicate structure, clause structure and complex sentences, as well as a brief overview of phonology. It will have great appeal for heritage speakers, graduate students and scholars in both Chinese linguistics and typology.

The book revisits the notion of deontic modality from the perspective of an understudied category in the modal domain, viz. adjectives. On the basis of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, it analyses the semantics of English adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality, which are mainly based on the study of modal verbs. In a first step, it is shown that the set of meanings expressed by extraposition constructions with deontic adjectives is quite different from the set of meanings identified in the literature on modal verbs. Adjectival complement constructions lack the directive meanings of obligation or permission, which are traditionally regarded as the core deontic categories, and they have semantic extensions towards non-modal meanings in the evaluative domain. In a second step, the analysis of adjectives is used to propose an alternative definition of deontic modality, which covers both the meanings of verbs and adjectives, and which can deal with the different extensions towards modal and non-modal categories. This is integrated into a conceptual map, which works both in diachrony, defining pathways of change from premodal to modal to evaluative meaning, and in synchrony, accommodating refinements within each set of meanings. In the process, this study points to the emergence of partially filled constructions, and it offers additional evidence for well-established changes in the history of English, such as the decline of the subjunctive and the rise of the to-infinitive in complement constructions. The book is of particular interest to researchers and graduate students with a focus on mood and modality, and the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.

This monograph investigates the modular architecture of language through the nature of "uninterpretable" phi-features: person, number, gender, and Case. It provides new tools and evidence for the modular architecture of the human language faculty, a foundational topic of linguistic research. At the same time it develops a new theory for one of the core issues posed by the Minimalist Program: the relationship of syntax to its interfaces and the nature of uninterpretable features. The work sets out to establish a new cross-linguistic phenomenon to study the foregoing, person-governed last-resort repairs, which provides new insights into the nature of ergative/accusative Case and of Case licensing itself. This is the first monograph that explicitly addresses the syntactic vs. morphological status of uninterpretable phi-features and their relationship to interface systems in a similar way, drawing on person-based interactions among arguments as key data-base.

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.

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.

This study considers the use of they and he for generic reference in post-2000 written British English. The analysis is framed by a consideration of language-internal factors, such as syntactic agreement, and language-external factors, which include traditional grammatical prescriptivism and the language reforms resulting from second-wave feminism.

Traditionally, anaphor resolution focused on structural cues of the antecedent. Recently, the interaction between discourse factors and information structure affecting antecedent salience has been more thoroughly explored. This volume depicts selected peer-reviewed research papers that tackle issues in anaphor resolution from theoretical, empirical and experimental perspectives. These collected articles present a wide spectrum of cross-linguistic data (Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Yurakare) and also offer new results from L1 and L2 acquisition studies. Data interpretation span from typological to psycholinguistic viewpoints and are related to recent developments in linguistic theory. One data analysis puts the issue of anaphor resolution in a historical context. The experimental findings are complemented by reviews of the current literature on the role of discourse units. This volume gives a comprehensive overview of the state of discussion how the interaction between information structure and contextual discourse affects salience. That's why it will be welcomed by all linguists and psycholinguists who are theoretically and / or experimentally investigating several aspects of anaphor resolution.

This book covers anaphora resolution for the English language from a linguistic and computational point of view. First, a definition of anaphors that applies to linguistics as well as information technology is given. On this foundation, all types of anaphors and their characteristics for English are outlined. To examine how frequent each type of anaphor is, a corpus of different hypertexts has been established and analysed with regard to anaphors. The most frequent type are non-finite clause anaphors - a type which has never been investigated so far. Therefore, the potential of non-finite clause anaphors are further explored with respect to anaphora resolution. After presenting the fundamentals of computational anaphora resolution and its application in text retrieval, rules for resolving non-finite clause anaphors are established. Therefore, this book shows that a truly interdisciplinary approach can achieve results which would not have been possible otherwise. Open Access: In July 2019, this volume was retroactively turned into an Open Access publication thanks to the support of the Fachinformationsdienst Linguistik. https://www.linguistik.de/

Extra-grammatical morphology is a hitherto neglected area of research, highly marginalised because of its irregularity and unpredictability. Yet many neologisms in English are formed by means of extra-grammatical mechanisms, such as abbreviation, blending and reduplication, which therefore deserve both greater attention and more systematic study. This book analyses such phenomena.

The volume Passives Cross-Linguistically provides analyses of passive constructions across different languages and populations from the interface perspectives between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In addition to the theoretical contributions, some experimental works are presented, which explore passives from psycholinguistic perspectives.