Number is a major research domain in semantics, syntax and morphology. However, no current theory of number is applicable to all three fields. In this work, the author argues that a unified theory is not only possible, but necessary for the study of Universal Grammar. Through insightful analysis of unfamiliar data, the author shows that one and the same feature set is implicated in semantic and morphological number phenomena alike, with syntax acting as the conduit between the two. At the heart of the study is an original treatment of Kiowa, a North American language with a remarkable constellation of characteristics, including semantically based noun classification and complex agreement morphology.

This volume presents: (1) the foundations of a unified morphosemantic theory of number; (2) insight into the flow of information from the lexicon, via syntax, into the morphology; (3) wide-ranging topics: nominal semantics, noun classes, DP syntax, agreement, suppletion, complex morphology.

Directionality and Logical Form provides a detailed treatment of the syntax of focusing particles, such as only and even in a cross-linguistic perspective. The derivation of logical forms is shown to be under the control, not only of the ECP and subjacency, but also of directionality of government and the particular word-order parameter that holds in a given language: head-final languages systematically disallow certain derivations or readings that are available in head-initial languages. The reason is that heads that deviate in their selection properties from canonical head-finality project a directionality barrier. Various strategies are explored by which this barrier can be circumvented. Although the theory is developed mainly on the basis of the head position in German, it can be directly used to explain constraints on the scope of Wh-in-situ in Bengali and closely related languages. Audience: Syntacticians and semanticists interested in parametric variation, as well as linguists working on Germanic and/or Indo-Aryan languages.

Routledge Revivals presents a reissue of Noam Chomksy 's MA thesis, written in 1951, and first published in 1979. Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew is a landmark study in linguistics and generative phonology, which provides not only an analysis of morphophonemics but of the entire grammar of Modern Hebrew from syntax to phonology. Professor Chomsky 's goal in this thesis is nothing less than a complete generative grammar of the Hebrew language.

This work is of singular importance as it contains the genesis of the author 's work in the field of generative grammar which has had such a profound impact upon the study of linguistics. This reissue of a truly pioneering work will be of great interest to all those concerned with generative grammar and its origins, and with the progression of thought of one of the greatest minds of our time.

This book demonstrates the pivotal position of historical syntax within the larger domain of research into the nature, use, and acquisition of language. It shows how current work in historical syntax is responsive to theoretical advances in linguistic theory, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and theories of language use, as well as to less adjacent fields such as statistical techniques and evolutionary biology.

The study of orthography (spelling and writing systems), and its development over the history of language, is central to many areas of linguistic enquiry, offering insight into syntactic and morphological structures, phonology, typology, historical linguistics, literacy and reading, and the social and cultural context of language use. With contributions from a global team of scholars, this Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of this rapidly developing field, tracing the development of historical orthography, with special emphasis on the last and present centuries. Chapters are split into five key thematic areas, with a focus throughout on the interplay between theory and practice. It also explores the methods used in studying historical orthography, and the principles involved in the development of a spelling system. Providing a critical assessment of the state of the art in the field, it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in writing systems and historical linguistics.

Matheus Miller's Memoir reconstructs the world and worldview of a Lutheran merchant from the city of Augsburg in the 17th century. This story of his experience is based on his memoir and associated documents which explores universal institutions of early modern Europe: patriarchy, hierarchy, honor, community, and confession. Though Miller 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.

Are there common specific patterns in the Tense-Mood-Aspect systems of creoles? Do creoles constitute a structural type of language? This in-depth synchronic description of the Tense-Mood-Aspect system of contemporary Hawai'i Creole English is a language-internal analysis based on extensive firsthand data, both written and spoken. The language variety has been used as a basis for major linguistic hypotheses - a strength of this book is the use of a language-independent typological framework, placing the system in a cross-linguistic perspective.

The selection of papers reprinted here traces the development of syntax from structural linguistics through transformational linguistics to operator gram mar. These three are not opposing views or independent assumptions about language. Rather, they are successive stages of investigation into the word combinations which constitue the sentences of a language in contrast to those which do not. Throughout, the goal has been to find the systemati cities of these combinations, and then to obtain each sentence in a uniform way from its parts. In structural analysis, the parts were words (simple or complex, belonging to particular classes) or particular sequences of these. In transformational analysis, it is found that the parts of a sentence are elementary sentences, whose parts in turn are simple words of particular classes. The relation between these two analyses is seen in the existence of an intermediate stage between the two, presented in paper 4, From Morpheme to Utterance. A further intermediate stage is presented in the writer's String Analysis of Sentence Structure, Papers on Formal Linguistics I, Mouton, The Hague 1962 (though it was developed after transformations, as a syntactic rep resentation for computational analysis). Generalization of both of these analyses leads to operator grammar, in which each sentence is derived in a uniform way as a partial ordering of the originally simple words which enter into it: Each step (least upper bound) of the partial ordering (of a word requiring another) forms a sentence which is a component of the sentence being analyzed."

This grammar has been written to help the student to think in the Japanese way. Part One contains several introductory notes on Nomenclature, Syntax, Verbs, Aru, Iru, Oru, on Adjectives and on Foreign Words. Part Two concentrates on connectives - the particles and suffixes which modify the sense of other words or show the relationship of these words to each other. These connectives, the heart of Japanese grammar, present unusual difficulty to foreign students. Arranged alphabetically in dictionary form, each word is followed by a textual explanation of how it is used and of its various meanings, with cautions as to its translation. The forms covered include not only those of the "standard" colloquial literary or bungo styles, but also the more common colloquialisms and provincial forms, whether or not these are strictly grammatical. No other text available makes as through or as complete a classification.

When originally published in 1873 one of the aims was to protest against an idea that the Japanese language was very imperfect, and therefore it should be exterminated! The second was to give a general idea of the Japanese language as it is spoken.

Mini-set C: Language & Literature re-issues a century of publishing in 8 volumes originally published between 1896 and 1989 and covers phonetics, grammar and syntax of the Japanese language as well as some of its most iconic literature and drama.

For institutional purchases for e-book sets please contact [email protected] (customers in the UK, Europe and Rest of World)

This volume contains a collection of research papers centered around the concept of quantifier. Recently this concept has become the central point of research in logic. It is one of the important logical concepts whose exact domain and applications have so far been insufficiently explored, especially in the area of inferential and semantic properties of languages. It should thus remain the central point of research in the future. Moreover, during the last twenty years generalized quantifiers and logical technics based on them have proved their utility in various applications. The example of natu rallanguage semantics has been partcularly striking. For a long time it has been belived that elementary logic also called first-order logic was an ade quate theory of logical forms of natural language sentences. Recently it has been accepted that semantics of many natural language constructions can not be properly represented in elementary logic. It has turned out, however, that they can be described by means of generalized quantifiers. As far as computational applications oflogic are concerned, particulary interesting are semantics restricted to finite models. Under this restriction elementary logic looses several of its advantages such as axiomatizability and compactness. And for various purposes we can use equally well some semantically richer languages of which generalized quantifiers offer the most universal methods of describing extensions of elementary logic. Moreover we can look at generalized quantifiers as an explication of some specific mathematical concepts, e. g."

Impersonal constructions in the history of English form a puzzling category, in that there has been uncertainty as to why some verbs are attested in such constructions while others are not, even though they look almost synonymous. In this book, Ayumi Miura tackles this under-discussed question with special reference to verbs of emotion in Middle English. Through a careful study of the behaviour of impersonal and near-synonymous non-impersonal verbs, she identifies the factors that determined the presence, absence, and spread of impersonal usage with the verbs concerned. Miura utilizes modern linguistic approaches, including theories and methodologies adopted in the study of psych-verbs in modern languages, which bear close relevance to impersonal verbs of emotion but have traditionally been researched separately. She also draws on categorizations in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and harnesses the online Middle English Dictionary in a novel way, demonstrating that dictionary materials are in fact a valuable tool in the study of early English syntax and semantics. Miura concludes that a range of factors - such as causation, transitivity, animacy of the target of emotion, and duration of the emotion - influenced the choice of impersonal constructions with Middle English verbs of emotion. We can therefore make reasonable generalizations about when impersonal usage was licensed in these verbs. This careful analysis of the correlation between Middle English verbs of emotion and use or non-use in impersonal constructions represents a new empirical and theoretical contribution to the busy research area of impersonal constructions in the history of English.

This book introduces a new linguistic reconstruction of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Old Chinese, the first Sino-Tibetan language to be reduced to writing. Old Chinese is the language of the earliest Chinese classical texts (1st millennium BCE) and the ancestor of later varieties of Chinese, including all modern Chinese dialects. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart's new reconstruction of Old Chinese moves beyond earlier reconstructions by taking into account important new evidence that has recently become available: better documentation of Chinese dialects that preserve archaic features, such as the Min and Waxiang dialects; better documentation of languages with very early loanwords from Chinese, such as the Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai and Vietnamese languages; and a flood of Chinese manuscripts from the first millennium BCE, excavated or discovered in the last several decades. Baxter and Sagart also incorporate recent advances in our understanding of the derivational processes that connect different words that have the same root. They expand our knowledge of Chinese etymology and identify, for the first time, phonological markers of pre-Han dialects, such as the development of *r to -j in a group of east coast dialects, but to -n elsewhere. The most up-to-date reconstruction available, Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction brings the methodology of Old Chinese reconstruction closer to that of comparative reconstructions that have been used successfully in other language families. It is critical reading for anyone seeking an advanced understanding of Old Chinese.

"An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory "offers beginning students a comprehensive overview of and introduction to our current understanding of the rules and principles that govern the syntax of natural languages.Includes numerous pedagogical features such as 'practice' boxes and sidebars, designed to facilitate understanding of both the 'hows' and the 'whys' of sentence structureGuides readers through syntactic and morphological structures in a progressive mannerTakes the mystery out of one of the most crucial aspects of the workings of language - the principles and processes behind the structure of sentencesIdeal for students with minimal knowledge of current syntactic research, it progresses in theoretical difficulty from basic ideas and theories to more complex and advanced, up to date concepts in syntactic theory

This reproduction of Visser's volumes is more than welcome, and timely, as the volumes have been out of print for quite some time and were sometimes a little bit difficult to navigate. Having a searchable and easy-to-use online version, although maybe not perfect, available now means a revival for scholarship that celebrates its fiftieth birthday without losing any of its relevance.

Quantifiers: Logics, Models and Computation is the first concentrated effort to give a systematic presentation of the main research results on the subject, since the modern concept was formulated in the late '50s and early '60s. The majority of the papers are in the nature of a handbook. All of them are self-contained, at various levels of difficulty. The Introduction surveys the main ideas and problems encountered in the logical investigation of quantifiers. The Prologue, written by Per Lindstrom, presents the early history of the concept of generalised quantifiers. The volume then continues with a series of papers surveying various research areas, particularly those that are of current interest. Together they provide introductions to the subject from the points of view of mathematics, linguistics, and theoretical computer science. The present volume has been prepared in parallel with Quantifiers: Logics, Models and Computation, Volume Two. Contributions, which contains a collection of research papers on the subject in areas that are too fresh to be summarised. The two volumes are complementary. For logicians, mathematicians, philosophers, linguists and computer scientists. Suitable as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate specialised courses in logic. "

The genitive/accusative opposition in Slavic languages is a decades-old linguistic conundrum. Shedding new light on this perplexing object-case alternation in Russian, this volume analyzes two variants of genitive objects that alternate with accusative complements-the genitive of negation and the intensional genitive. The author contends that these variants are manifestations of the same phenomenon, and thus require an integrated analysis. Further, that the choice of case is sensitive to factors that fuse semantics and pragmatics, and that the genitive case is assigned to objects denoting properties at the same time as they lack commitment to existence. Kagan's subtle analysis accounts for the complex relations between case-marking and other properties, such as definiteness, specificity, number and aspect. It also reveals a correlation between the genitive case and the subjunctive mood, and relates her overarching subject matter to other instances of differential object-marking.

Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.

claim is that such morphological processes can be learnt without symbolization and innate knowledge. See Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) for the original model of past tense acquisition, Plunkett and Marchman (1993), Nakisa, Plunkett and Hahn (1996) and Elman et al. (1996) for developments and extensions to other morphological processes, and Marcus et al. (1992) and Pinker and Prince (1988) for criticism. One line of investigation supporting the view of language as a genetic endowment is closely linked to traditional research on language acquisition and argues as follows: If language is innate there must be phenomena that should be accessible from birth in one form or the other. Thus it is clear that the language of children, especially young children and preferably babies should be investigated. As babies unfortunately don't talk, the abilities that are available from birth must be established in ways different from the usual linguistic analysis. Psycholinguistic research of the last few years has shown that at the age of 4 and 8 months and even during their first week of life children already have important language skills. From the fourth day, infants distinguish their mother tongue from other languages. From the first months children prefer the sound of speech to 'other noise'. At the age of 4 months, infants prefer pauses at syntactic boundaries to random pauses.

Cleft constructions occur across languages and are much analyzed in relation to syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Mika Kizu, working in a Principles and Parameters framework, with some consideration of the Minimalist Program, provides the first coherent account of cleft constructions in Japanese. She claims that the construction is analyzed on a par with topic constructions and some types of relative clause. One of the most interesting properties, the syntactice phenomenon of 'connectivity' is closely examined.

Chicano English in Context is the first modern, comprehensive study of Chicano English, a variety spoken by millions of Latinos in the U.S. It is also one of the first studies of ongoing sound change within an ethnic minority community. It briefly describes the phonology, syntax and semantics of this variety, and explores its crucial role in the construction of ethnic identity among young Latinos and Latinas. It also corrects misconceptions I how the general public views Chicano English.

Georgian: A Comprehensive Grammar constitutes a complete reference work addressing all major elements of Modern Georgian grammar and usage. It provides a systematic and accessible description of the language's phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax. The focus is on contemporary spoken and written usage, with attention devoted throughout to differences of register and genre. Points are illustrated with examples drawn from a range of authentic written and recorded sources such as press, radio, and television. The grammar is designed for a wide readership including students of Georgian, particularly at the intermediate and advanced levels, as well as scholars of Georgian and theoretical linguistics.

Over half a century ago, J. L. Austin predicted developments in the discipline of grammar which, in properly establishing it as a science, would at the same time displace a large part of philosophy - philosophical logic, to be specific. With the boundary finally removed between what philosophers then called 'logical syntax' (essentially logical form) and what grammarians study as syntax, Austin believed that 'we shall have rid ourselves of one more part of philosophy ...in the only way we ever can get rid of philosophy, by kicking it upstairs'. It was a radical, almost heretical, vision - the study of logic, one of the original and fundamental planks of philosophy, subsumed under the science of grammar. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Victor Dudman developed an English grammar of the kind Austin had predicted. His work impressed many, but was ultimately misunderstood. Jean Curthoys' introduction explores the philosophical issues involved in those misunderstandings. Dudman's later, unfinished, but conceptually most complete, work is the second part of this book.