To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an optimal balance between clarity and politeness. But how do interpreters identify the meaning of these ISAs? And how does the social context influence the use of ISAs? This book attempts to answer these questions. It deals with the main theoretical and empirical questions surrounding the meaning and usage of ISAs, drawing on the latest research and neuroimaging data. Adopting a truly interdisciplinary perspective, it will appeal to students and scholars from diverse backgrounds, and anyone interested in exploring this phenomenon, which is so pervasive in our daily lives.

This book grew out of a concern we have had that very many theoretical and descriptive work on the Kwa languages were not accessible to the general linguistic community. As a result, these languages were only referred to in the context of very specific discussions such as serial verb constructions. But as the reader of this book will notice, syntactic topics discussed in the context of Kwa range from bare nouns, relative clauses, negation, discourse markers and the interaction with the clausal periphery, to argument structure. Many issues remain that need to be brought to the fore of the community and we hope that this book will trigger the curiosity of the reader to get to know more about these languages. Much of the work presented here could not have been possible without the help of many colleagues and the contri- tors whom we thank warmly for joining this enterprise. We are also grateful to the editors of the series, Marcel den Dikken, Joan Maling, Liliane Haegeman to have offered us this platform to initiate the debate about Kwa. We will also like to thank Helen van der Stelt and Jolanda Voogd from Springer for their kind collaboration and patience. We are also very grateful to Joscelyn Essegbey and Leston Buell for helping with editing the manuscript. Enoch, O. Aboh James Essegbey v Contents 1 The Phonology Syntax Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Enoch, O. Aboh and James Essegbey 2 The Morphosyntax of the Noun Phrase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Enoch, O.

Since 1970-ties in the theory of syntax of natural language quite a number of competing, incommensurable theoretic frameworks have emerged. Today the lack of a leading paradigm and kaleidoscope of perspectives deprives our general understanding of syntax and its relation to semantics and pragmatics. The present book is an attempt to reestablish the most fundamental ideas and intuitions of syntactic well-formedness within a new general account. The account is not supposed to compete with any of today 's syntactic frameworks, but to provide a deeper understanding of why these frameworks succeed or fail when they do and to show a new way for cooperation between logicians and linguists which may lead in future to a unified, yet more specific account.

Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of the art in an important area of psycholinguistics. How are general constraints on prosody ('timing') and intonation ('melody') used to constrain the parsing and interpretation of spoken language? How are they used to assign a default prosody/intonation in silent reading, and more generally what is the role of phonology in reading? Prosody and intonation interact with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and thus are at the very core of language processes.

In the last 25 years foreign language teaching has been able to increase its efficiency through an orientation towards authentic language materials, pragmatic language functions and interactive learning methods. However, so far foreign language teaching has lacked a sufficiently strong theoretical framework to support the teaching of language in all its aspects. Arguably, such a linguistic theory has to be usage-based and cognition-oriented. Since cognitive linguistics - and especially cognitive grammar - is concerned with conceptual issues against the larger background of human cognition and because it is based on actual language use, it becomes a powerful tool for dealing adequately with the main issues of a pedagogical grammar. A pedagogical grammar aims at providing all the essential linguistic patterns considered relevant by theoretical and descriptive linguistics for the preparation of teaching materials and their exploitation in foreign language instruction. The volume contains thirteen contributions organized into three parts. In Part 1 Langacker, Taylor and Broccias introduce the basic grammar concepts, rules and models that are available in cognitive linguistics and which are directly relevant to the construction of a pedagogical grammar. Meunier, on the other hand, describes how such a grammar could benefit from corpus linguistics. Part 2 looks at some cognitive tools and conceptual errors with contributions by Danesi and Maldonado and also reconsiders contrastive analysis in the papers by Ruiz de Mendoza and Valenzuela & Rojo. Part 3, finally, discusses language-specific constraints on a number of linguistic phenomena such as the construal of motion events (papers by Cadierno and De Knop & Dirven), distinctions in the tense-aspect system (papers by Niemeier & Reif and Schmiedtova & Flecken), and voice (Chen & Oller).

Cross-linguistic studies on relative constructions in European languages are often centred on standard varieties as described in reference grammars. This volume breaks with the tradition in that it investigates relative constructions in non-standard varieties from a multidisciplinary perspective and addresses a crucial question: what does Europe's typological panorama actually look like?

Kopar is a very moribund, close to extinct, language spoken in three villages at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. This is the only description of the language available. It also discusses areas where rapid language shift is affecting the structure of Kopar. Although the period of fieldwork was necessarily short, this book provides as comprehensive a description as possible of the grammatical structure of this complex and fascinating language. It is quite thorough and detailed and goes well beyond what is normally considered a sketch grammar. It covers all the phenomena essential to description and comparison and gives clear, typologically sound definitions and explanations. The grammar is written with the research interests of language typologists and comparative grammarians foremost in mind. Typologically, Kopar can be described as a split ergative, polysynthetic language. The language lacks nominal case marking so ergativity or lack thereof is signaled by verbal agreement affixes. Tenses and moods which describe as yet unrealized events, like future and imperative, pattern accusatively for agreement affixes, while those express realized events, like past and present, pattern ergatively. In addition, the ergative case schema is overlaid by a direct-inverse inflectional schema determined by a person hierarchy, a feature Kopar shares with other languages in its Lower Sepik family. As a polysynthetic language, incorporation of sentential elements like temporals, locationals, adverbials and verbals is extensive, though noun incorporation is not. Sadly, this work is all the documentation we will likely ever have of Kopar, a language of potentially very high theoretical interest, given its rare typological profile. It will certainly be of interest to language typologists and comparative grammarians, and anyone who wants to explore the range of language variation

Is today's language at an all-time low? Are pronunciations like cawfee and chawklit bad English? Is slang like my bad or hook up improper? Is it incorrect to mix English and Spanish, as in Yo quiero Taco Bell? Can you write Who do you trust? rather than Whom do you trust? Linguist Edwin Battistella takes a hard look at traditional notions of bad language, arguing that they are often based in sterile conventionality.
Examining grammar and style, cursing, slang, and political correctness, regional and ethnic dialects, and foreign accents and language mixing, Battistella discusses the strong feelings evoked by language variation, from objections to the pronunciation NU-cu-lar to complaints about bilingual education. He explains the natural desire for uniformity in writing and speaking and traces the association of mainstream norms to ideas about refinement, intelligence, education, character, national unity and political values. Battistella argues that none of these qualities is inherently connected to language.
It is tempting but wrong, Battistella argues, to think of slang, dialects and nonstandard grammar as simply breaking the rules of good English. Instead, we should view language as made up of alternative forms of orderliness adopted by speakers depending on their purpose. Thus we can study the structure and context of nonstandard language in order to illuminate and enrich traditional forms of language, and make policy decisions based on an informed engagement.
Re-examining longstanding and heated debates, Bad Language will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers engaged and interested in the debate over what constitutes proper language.

This 1996 volume brings together ten chapters on the Celtic languages using the insights of principles-and-parameters theory. The leading researchers in the field examine Welsh, Irish, Breton and Scots Gaelic in comparative perspective, making reference to recent work on English, French, Arabic, German and other languages. The editors have provided a substantial introduction which seeks to make the volume accessible to theoreticians unfamiliar with the Celtic languages and also to Celtic specialists who are less familiar with the theoretical framework underpinning the work. The Syntax of the Celtic Languages makes a substantial contribution both to linguistic theory and to our understanding of the Celtic languages.

This collection of essays grew out of the workshop 'Existence: Semantics and Syntax', which was held at the University of Nancy 2 in September 2002. The workshop, organized by Ileana Comorovski and Claire Gardent, was supported by a grant from the Reseau de Sciences Cognitives du Grand Est ('Cognitive Science Network of the Greater East'), which is gratefully acknowledged. The ?rst e- tor wishes to thank Claire Gardent, Fred Landman, and Georges Rebuschi for encouraging her to pursue the publication of a volume based on papers presented at the workshop. Among those who participated in the workshop was Klaus von Heusinger, who joined Ileana Comorovski in editing this volume. Besides papers that developed out of presentations at the workshop, the volume contains invited contributions. We are grateful to Wayles Browne, Fred Landman, Paul Portner, and Georges Rebuschi for their help with reviewing some of the papers. Our thanks go also to a Springer reviewer for the careful reading of the book manuscript. We wish to thank all the participants in the workshop, not only those whose contributions appear in this volume, for making the workshop an int- active and constructive event. Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of 'existence', which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases."

Syntactic dependencies are often non-local: They can involve two positions in a syntactic structure whose correspondence cannot be captured by invoking concepts like minimal clause or predicate/argument structure. Relevant phenomena include long-distance movement, long-distance reflexivization, long-distance agreement, control, non-local deletion, long-distance case assignment, consecutio temporum, extended scope of negation, and semantic binding of pronouns. A recurring strategy pursued in many contemporary syntactic theories is to model cases of non-local dependencies in a strictly local way, by successively passing on the relevant information in small domains of syntactic structures. The present volume brings together eighteen articles that investigate non-local dependencies in movement, agreement, binding, scope, and deletion constructions from different theoretical backgrounds (among them versions of the Minimalist Program, HPSG, and Categorial Grammar), and based on evidence from a variety of typologically distinct languages. This way, advantages and disadvantages of local treatments of non-local dependencies become evident. Furthermore, it turns out that local analyses of non-local phenomena developed in different syntactic theories (spanning the derivational/declarative divide) often may not only share identical research questions but also rely on identical research strategies.

The Acquisition of German: Introducing Organic Grammar brings together work on the acquisition of German from over four decades of child L1 and immigrant L2 learner studies. The book's major feature is new longitudinal data from three secondary school students who began an exchange year in Germany with no German knowledge and attained fluency. Their naturalistic acquisition process - with a succession of stages described for the first time in L2 acquisition - is highly similar to that of younger learners. This has important implications for German teaching and for the theory of Universal Grammar and acquisition. Organic Grammar, a variant of generative syntax, is offered as a practical alternative to Chomsky's Minimalism. The analysis focuses on extensive monthly samples of the three students' German development in an input-rich environment. Similar to previous studies, the teenagers build syntactic structure from the bottom up. Two acquired correct word order by the end of the year, the third, who had greater conscious awareness of German grammar, had a divergent route of development, suggesting that language awareness can alter a natural developmental path. The results are addressed in light of recent debates in child-adult differences.

Over the last two decades, focus has become a prominent topic in major fields in linguistic research (syntax, semantics, phonology). Focus Strategies in African Languages contributes to the ongoing discussion of focus by investigating focus-related phenomena in a range of African languages, most of which have been under-represented in the theoretical literature on focus. The articles in the volume look at focus strategies in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages from several theoretical and methodological perspectives, ranging from detailed generative analysis to careful typological generalization across languages. Their common aim is to deepen our understanding of whether and how the information-structural category of focus is represented and marked in natural language. Topics investigated are, among others, the relation of focus and prosody, the effects of information structure on word order, ex situ versus in situ strategies of focus marking, the inventory of focus marking devices, focus and related constructions, focus-sensitive particles. The present inquiry into the focus systems of African languages has repercussions on existing theories of focus. It reveals new focus strategies as well as fine-tuned focus distinctions that are not discussed in the theoretical literature, which is almost exclusively based on well-documented intonation languages.

This study presents an account of object shift, a word order phenomenon found in most of the Scandinavian languages where an object occurs unexpectedly to the left and not to the right of a sentential adverbial. The book examines object shift across many of the Scandinavian languages and dialects, and analyses the variation, for example whether object shift is optional or obligatory, whether it applies only to pronouns or other objects as well, and whether it applies to adverbials. The authors show that optimality theory, traditionally used in phonology, is a useful framework for accounting for the variation as well as the interaction of object shift with other syntactic constructions such as verb second, other verb movements, double object constructions, particle verbs and causative verbs. The book moves on to investigate the interaction with remnant VP-topicalisation in great detail. With new and original observations, this book is an important addition to the fields of phonology, optimality theory and theoretical syntax.

Split intransitivity has received a great deal of attention in theoretical linguistics since the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis by David Perlmutter (1978). This book provides an in-depth investigation of split intransitivity as it occurs in Italian. The principal proposal is that the manifestations of split intransitivity in Italian, whilst being variously constrained by well-formedness conditions on the encoding of information structure, primarily derive from the tension between accusative (syntactic) and active (semantic) alignment. In contrast to approaches which consider the selection of the perfective operator to be the primary diagnostic of unaccusative or unergative syntax, this study identifies two morphosemantic domains in intransitive constructions on the basis of the analysis of a cluster of related phenomena (including agreement, argument suppression, ne -cliticization, past-participle behaviour, the morphosyntax of experiencer predicates and word order, as well as the selection of the perfective operator). Analysing the degree to which semantic, syntactic and discourse factors interact in determining each manifestation of split intransitivity, this work captures successfully the mismatches in the scope of the various diagnostics. Drawing upon insights provided by Role and Reference Grammar, and relying on corpus-based evidence and crossdialectal comparison, this study makes new empirical and theoretical contributions to the debate on split intransitivity. The book is accessible to linguists of all theoretical persuasions and will make stimulating reading for researchers and scholars in Italian and Romance linguistics, typology and theoretical linguistics.

The book is concerned with a hitherto underresearched grammaticalization process: the development from quality-attributing adjective to determiner in the English noun phrase. It takes a bottom-up approach, based on extensive synchronic and diachronic corpus studies of six English adjectives of comparison: other, different, same, identical, similar and comparable. Their functional diversity in current English is proposed to constitute a case of layering, representing the original descriptive use, which expresses how like/unlike each other entities are, and a range of grammaticalized referential uses, which contribute to the identification and/or quantification of the entities denoted by the NP. Diachronic and comparative data material is invoked to verify and further develop the grammaticalization hypothesis. The development of adjectives of comparison involves several key concepts identified in the literature. Crucially, it is described as a case of textual intersubjectification driven by the optimalization of recipient-design. The actual grammaticalization paths are diverse and are characterized by lexical as well as structural persistence, i.e. the same lexical meaning develops into different grammatical functions in different syntagmatic configurations. In order to define the NP as a locus of diachronic change, this study offers a new angle on the description of adjectives and the modelling of NP structure. It advocates the abandonment of the traditional class-based model in favour of a radically functional one, in which functions are defined in terms of prototypicality so as to allow for gradience between and within them. The described grammaticalization processes involve developments from prototypical lexical to grammatical reference-related use within the adjectival category, which can be the starting point of further gradual change to determiners. The traditional relation between classes and positions is envisaged as a correspondence between functional and syntactic zones. The change in form concomitant with grammaticalization in the NP is argued to consist of the reconfiguration of structural combinatorics and progressive leftward movement. The book is of interest to linguistic researchers and graduate students in linguistics who focus their attention on grammaticalization and subjectification, the functional description of adjectives, questions of deixis and theoretical issues relating to nominal reference.

This volume is a collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. The authors are specialists on one or more ergative language(s), on which many of them have produced grammatical descriptions. The sample of languages represented in these descriptive contributions covers most of the geographical areas and linguistic families in which ergativity has been known to exist jointly with well-developed morphological voice, and some languages belonging to families in which ergativity or voice were not previously recognized or adequately described up to now. Geographical regions covered are the Americas, the Caucasus, Asia, and Near East.

This volume collects papers that discuss theoretical or empirical problems from a multidimensional view of syntax and morphology, presupposing frameworks such as LFG, HPSG, the Parallel Architecture, or Integrational Linguistics, where syntactic and morphological objects are conceived as constructs with multiple, interrelated components.

This work is a reference grammar of Hup, a member of the Nadahup family (also known as Maku or Vaupes-Japura), which is spoken in the fascinatingly multilingual Vaupes region of the northwest Amazon. This detailed description and analysis is informed by a functional-typological perspective, with particular reference to areal contact and grammaticalization. The grammar begins with an introduction to the cultural and linguistic background of Hup speakers, gives an overview of the phonology, and follows this with chapters on morphosyntax (nominal morphology, verbs and verb compounding, tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, etc.); it concludes with discussions of negation, the simple clause, and clause combining. A number of features of Hup grammar are typologically significant, such as its strategy of inversion in question formation, its system of Differential Object Marking, and its treatment of possession. Hup also exhibits several highly unusual paths of grammaticalization, such as the development of a verbal future suffix from the noun 'stick, tree'. The book also includes a selection of texts and a CD-ROM with audio files.

This volume presents important results of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) "Situated Artificial Communicators," which was funded by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for more than twelve years. The contributions focus on different aspects of human-human and human-machine interaction in situations which closely model everyday workplace demands. The authors are linguists, psycho- und neurolinguists, psychologists and computer scientists at Bielefeld University. They jointly tackle questions of information processing in task-oriented communication. The role of key notions such as context, integration (of multimodal information), reference, coherence, and robustness is explored in great depth. Some remarkable findings and recurrent phenomena reveal that communication is, to a large extent, a matter of joint activity. The interdisciplinary approach integrates theory, description and experimentation with simulation and evaluation.

This volume explores the reversing language shift (RLS) theory in the Mexican scenario from various viewpoints: The sociohistorical perspective delves into the dynamics of power that emerged in the Mexican colony as a result of the presence of Spanish. It examines the processes of external and internal Indianization affecting the early European protagonists and the varied dimensions of language shift and maintenance of the Mexican colonial period. The Mexican case sheds light upon language contact from the time in which Western civilization came into contact with the Mesoamerican peoples, for the encounter began with a demographic catastrophe that motivated a recovery mission. While the recovery of Mexican indigenous languages (MIL) was remarkable, RLS ended after fifty years of abundant productivity in MIL. Since then, the slow process of recovery is related to demographic changes, socioreligious movements, rebellion, confrontation, and survival strategies that have fostered language maintenance with bilingualism and language shift with culture preservation. The causes of the Chiapas uprising are analyzed in connection with the language attitudes of the indigenous peoples, while language policy is discussed in reference to the new Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2003). A quantitative classification of the MIL is offered with an overview of their geographic distribution, trends of macrosocietal bilingualism, use in the home domain, and permanence in the original Mesoamerican settlements. Innovative models of bilingual education are presented along with relevant data on several communities and the philosophies and methodologies justifying the programs. A model of Mazahua language use is presented along the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale.

Morphology in English is a text which provides an in-depth analysis of the branch of linguistics which studies the formation of composite words and the form-meaning relationships between their subparts. It takes a cognitive viewpoint and provides full coverage of the essential topics of prefixation, suffixation and compounding. It covers categorization, configuration and conceptualization and enables readers to recognize the complexity of the English lexical system. It demonstrates the pivotal role which morphemes play in the expansion of a languages lexical store. The book combines two aspects of language: word formation and semantic distinctions regarding usage, enabling readers to understand the formation of composite words and their use in natural language. The book features: clear layout accessible style explicit definitions vivid illustrations actual data examples exercises further reading appendices companion website with full answer set

The volume addresses issues concerning prosody generation in speech synthesis, including prosody modeling, how we can convey para- and non-linguistic information in speech synthesis, and prosody control in speech synthesis (including prosody conversions). A high level of quality has already been achieved in speech synthesis by using selection-based methods with segments of human speech. Although the method enables synthetic speech with various voice qualities and speaking styles, it requires large speech corpora with targeted quality and style. Accordingly, speech conversion techniques are now of growing interest among researchers. HMM/GMM-based methods are widely used, but entail several major problems when viewed from the prosody perspective; prosodic features cover a wider time span than segmental features and their frame-by-frame processing is not always appropriate. The book offers a good overview of state-of-the-art studies on prosody in speech synthesis.

A Grammar of Mongsen Ao, the result of the author's fieldwork over a ten-year period, presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language spoken in Nagaland, north-east India. The languages of this region remain under-documented for a number of historical reasons. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the widespread cultural practice of head-hunting discouraged outsiders from entering the Naga Hills. Shortly after Indian independence in 1947, an armed rebellion by Naga separatists and a government policy of restricting access to the troubled area ensured that Nagaland remained a difficult place to conduct research. In this context, A Grammar of Mongsen Ao offers valuable new insights into the structure of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in a linguistically little-known region of the world. The grammatical analysis documents all the functional domains of the language and includes four glossed and translated texts, the latter being of interest to anthropologists studying folklore. Mongsen Ao is a highly agglutinating, mostly suffixing language with predominantly dependent-marking characteristics. Its grammar demonstrates a number of typologically interesting features that are described in detail in the book. Among these is an unusual case marking system in which grammatical marking is motivated by semantic and pragmatic factors, and a rich verbal morphology that produces elaborate sequences of agglutinative suffixes. Grammaticalisation processes are also discussed where relevant, thereby extending the appeal of the book to linguists with interests in grammaticalisation theory. This book will be of value to any linguist seeking to clarify genetic relationships within the Tibeto-Burman family, and it will serve more broadly as a reference grammar for typologists interested in the typological features of a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India.

Lao is the national language of Laos, and is also spoken widely in Thailand and Cambodia. It is a tone language of the Tai-Kadai family (Southwestern Tai branch). Lao is an extreme example of the isolating, analytic language type. This book is the most comprehensive grammatical description of Lao to date. It describes and analyses the important structures of the language, including classifiers, sentence-final particles, and serial verb constructions. Special attention is paid to grammatical topics from a semantic, pragmatic, and typological perspective.