A Grammar of Bjokapakha by Selin Grollmann constitutes the first description of Bjokapakha, an endangered language spoken in central Bhutan belonging to the Tshangla branch of Trans-Himalayan. This grammar comprises a description of the phonology, lexicon, nominal morphology, predicate structures and syntax. In addition to the descriptive parts, this book encompasses a historical-comparative account of Bjokapakha. The introductory chapter provides a comparison with the standard variety of Tshangla and corroborates the internal diversity of the Tshangla branch. The present-day structure of Bjokapakha verbal morphology is illuminated by means of an internal reconstruction. Moreover, this book contains a glossary and a text collection.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Controversy over gendered pronouns, for example using the generic "he," has been a staple of feminist arguments about patriarchal language over the last 30 years, and is certainly the most contested political issue in Western feminist linguistics. Most accounts do not extend beyond policy issues like the official institution of non-sexist language. In this volume, Anna Livia reveals continuities both before and after the sexist language refore movement and shows how the creative practices of pronoun use on the part of feminist writers had both aesthetic and political ends. Livia uses the term "pronoun envy" ironically to show that rather being a case of misguided envy, battles over gendered language are central to feminist concerns.
Livia examines a broad corpus of written texts in English and French, concentrating on those texts which problematize the traditional functioning of the linguistic gender system. They range from novels and prose poems to film scripts and personal testimonies, and in time from the 19th century to the present. Some withhold any indication of gender; others have non-gendered characters. Livia's goal is two-fold; to help bridge the divide between linguistic and literary analysis, and to show how careful study of the manipulation of linguistic gender in these texts informs larger concerns. This fresh and highly interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of several vital areas, including language and gender, sociolinguistics, and feminist literary analysis.

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.

This book is an introduction to Word Grammar, a theory of language structure founded and developed by Dick Hudson. In this theory, language is a cognitive network - a network of concepts, words and meanings containing all the elements of a linguistic analysis. The theory of language is therefore embedded in a theory of knowledge, in which there are no boundaries between one form of knowledge and any other. Contributors to this volume are primarily Word Grammar grammarians from across the world. All the chapters here manifest theoretical potentialities of Word Grammar, exploring how powerful Word Grammar is to offer analysis for linguistic phenomena in various languages. The chapters come from varying perspectives and include work on a number of languages, including English, German, Japanese, Swahili, Turkish and Ancient Greek. Phenomena studied include verbal inflection, case agreement, extraction, construction and code-mixing. This new collection will be of interest to academics encountering Word Grammar for the first time, or for those who are already familiar with this theory and are interested in reading how it has evolved and what its future may hold.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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 comprehensive introduction presents the basic goals and tools of syntactic analysis. The conceptual framework is theory-neutral, presenting a scientific introduction to the field. The chapters in the first half of the book present a detailed introduction to synchronic description. The second half of the book examines variation and change, syntactic typology, and language acquisition, and possible explanations from structural, evolutionary and functional perspectives.

It is the aim of INDICES to document recent explorations in the various fields of philosophical logic and formal linguistics and their applications in other disciplines. The main emphasis of this series is on self-contained monographs covering particular areas of recent research and surveys of methods, problems, and results in all fields of inquiry where recourse to logical analysis and logical methods has been fruitful. INDICES will contain monographs dealing with the central areas of philosophical logic (extensional and intensional systems, indexical logics, non-classical logics, philosophy of logic, etc.) as well as studies in which these systems are applied to specific issues in philosophy, in the formal semantics of natural languages, the foundations of linguistic theory, in computational linguistics, and in theoretical computer science. Constructive type theory was first presented in 1970, by the Swedish logician Per Martin-Lof. It has become one of the main approaches used in the foundations of mathematics and computer science. But it has remained relatively unknown among linguists and philosophers, although it provides a considerable extension of the concepts and techniques of logic. The book first gives an introduction to type theory from the point of view of linguistics and the philosophy of language. Type theory is then applied in the areas of quantification, anaphora, temporal reference, and the structure of text and discourse. By virtue of the type-theoretical concepts of proof object and context, various phenomena of dependence and progression in language can be discussed in precise terms, and several well-known problems can be solved. A categorial grammar is presented togenerate formally a fragment of English, together with an example of a computer implementation.

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.

New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax: Syntax of the Sentence is the first of four volumes dealing with the long-term evolution of Latin syntax, roughly from the 4th century BCE up to the 6th century CE. There are six pivotal chapters in this volume, each dealing with a subject which is critical to the understanding of the syntactic system. Topics covered include contact phenomena (from Greek and Semitic), the development of word order, particles, coordination, and the syntax of questions and answers. The volume is introduced by the editors in an explanatory "Prolegomena," and the textual parameters are set in a chapter on literary genres and sociolinguistics. Crafted in a functional-typological framework, chapters are user-sensitive, with a minimum of technical jargon and formalism, making them accessible to the widest range of readers. Key features first publication to investigates the long-term syntactic history of Latin generally accessible to linguists and non-linguists theoretically coherent, formulated in functional-typological terms does not require reading fluency in Latin, since all examples are translated into English

One of the most hotly debated phenomena in natural language is that of leftward argument scrambling. This book investigates the properties of Hindi-Urdu scrambling to show that it must be analyzed as uniformly a focality-driven XP-adjunction operation. It proposes a novel theory of binding and coreference that not only derives the coreference effects in scrambled constructions, but has important consequences for the proper formulation of binding, crossover, reconstruction, and representational economy in the minimalist program. The book will be of interest not only to specialists in Hindi-Urdu syntax and/or scrambling, but to all students of generative syntax.

Even though null subjects have been extensively studied in the past four decades, there is a growing interest in partial null subject languages (e.g. Finnish) and a subtler classification of null subject phenomena overall. This volume aims at contributing to this trend, focusing on Slavic and Finno-Ugric groups, with some extension to Baltic and Samoyedic languages. Interestingly, these groups offer an impressive array of macro- and microvariation. Moreover, given an increasing interest towards the internal structure of the pronominal elements and the role of various types of topics in the left periphery of the sentence structure, the enterprise taken up in this book is to investigate lexical and null, referential and generic subjects in order to understand and compare their feature composition, licensing conditions, and structural properties. Rather than trying to squeeze the studied languages into a predefined set of parameters, this volume highlights some properties that may lead to a refinement of the existing generalizations. It brings together contributors from both generative and typological traditions and will be of interest to any researcher willing to investigate argument-drop in a wider crosslinguistic perspective.

This text traces the many strands of study in the field of word formation that have developed since the seminal work of Marchand and Lees in the 1960s. It covers the historical development of theories of word formation within generative grammar.

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.

The book examines the originsof language and grammar and also looks at the nature of being human. As a species, we have a long history of trying to find aspects of ourselves that are exclusively human.Some of the features of humanity thought to be solely the realm of the spiritual - for example cognition andemotion -are increasingly being explained in terms of physical effects.Exclusive physical functions are now questioned too - bipedality, dexterity, socialisation, delayed gratification. Couldthe differences between the human and animal kingdombe a matter of degrees rather than absolutes? Language, and language grammar,is one territory that might provide an answer. Martin Edwardes builds a story examining the evolutionary sources of our self-recognition, of human culture and social institutions andof the cognitive forms that lie behind our linguistic grammatical forms.He covers the current thinking in the field of language origins and goes on todevelop an essentialnewtheory of the origins of grammar.

The alignment splits in the Neo-Aramaic languages display a considerable degree of diversity, especially in terms of agreement. While earlier studies have generally oversimplified the actual state of affairs, Paul M. Noorlander offers a meticulous and clear account of nearly all microvariation documented so far, addressing all relevant morphosyntactic phenomena. By means of fully glossed and translated examples, the author shows that this vast variation in morphological alignment, including ergativity, is unexpected from a functional typological perspective. He argues the alignment splits are rather the outcome of several construction-specific processes such as internal system harmonization and grammaticalization, as well as language contact.