1. OUTLINE German has the three main perfect constructions which are illustrated in (1. 1). 1 In each of these constructions, the verb appears in the past participial form and is combined with an auxiliary - in this case, haben ('have'); other verbs form their perfect constructions with the auxiliary sein ('be'). 2 The auxiliary can then be com bined with a tense -Le. the present tense as in (Ua), the past tense as in (b), or the future tense as in (c). 3 (1. 1) a. PRESENT PERFECT: Die Eule hat die Schule verlassen. the owl has the school left b. PAST PERFECT: Die Eule hatte die Schule verlassen. the owl had the school left c. FUTURE PERFECT: Die Eule wird die Schule verlassen haben. the owl will the school left have As will shortly become clear, the present perfect is the most intricate of the perfect constructions in German. It has been investigated intensely in the past, with the result that today there is little doubt about what the core problems concerning its semantics are."

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

The Structure of German is a description of the major features of German according to the principles of modern linguistics. This second edition represents full updates of aspects of German phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

This volume features cutting-edge research from leading authorities on the nature and structure of the verbal domain and the complexity of the Verb Phrase (VP). The book is divided into three parts, representing the areas in which contemporary debate on the verbal domain is most active. The first part focuses on the V head, and includes four chapters discussing the setup of verbal roots, their syntax, and their interaction with other functional heads such as Voice and v. Chapters in the second part discuss the need to postulate a Voice head in the structure of a clause, and whether Voice is different from v. Voice was originally intended as the head hosting the external argument in its specifier, as well as transitivity. This section explores its relationship with "syntactic" voice, i.e. the alternation between actives and passives. Part three is dedicated to event structure, inner aspect, and Aktionsart. It tackles issues such as the one-to-one relation between argument structure and event structure, and whether there can be minimal structural units at the basis of the derivation of any sort of XP, including the VP.

This volume features cutting-edge research from leading authorities on the nature and structure of the verbal domain and the complexity of the Verb Phrase (VP). The book is divided into three parts, representing the areas in which contemporary debate on the verbal domain is most active. The first part focuses on the V head, and includes four chapters discussing the setup of verbal roots, their syntax, and their interaction with other functional heads such as Voice and v. Chapters in the second part discuss the need to postulate a Voice head in the structure of a clause, and whether Voice is different from v. Voice was originally intended as the head hosting the external argument in its specifier, as well as transitivity. This section explores its relationship with "syntactic" voice, i.e. the alternation between actives and passives. Part three is dedicated to event structure, inner aspect, and Aktionsart. It tackles issues such as the one-to-one relation between argument structure and event structure, and whether there can be minimal structural units at the basis of the derivation of any sort of XP, including the VP.

I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc., differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc. Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some' (unstressed) , and this article cannot be used with singular count terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each', 'every', 'some', 'few', 'many'; and they use 'a(n)' as the indefinite article. They can, unlike the mass terms, take numerals as prefixes. Mass terms seem not to have a plural. Semantically, philo sophers have characterized count terms as denoting (classes of?) indi vidual objects, whereas what mass terms denote are cumulative and dissective. (That is, a mass term is supposed to be true of any sum of things (stuff) it is true of, and true of any part of anything of which it is true). Pragmatically, it seems that speakers use count terms when they wish to refer to individual objects, or when they wish to reidentify a particular already introduced into discoursc. Given a "space appropriate" to a count term C, it makes sense to ask how many C's there are in that space."

The book contributes to a fuller description and a uniformed analysis of Mandarin cleft constructions. The book provides the first Mandarin empirical data towards some heated theoretical debates. The book yields a good combination of theoretical formal semantics, semantic-pragmatic interface studies, corpus analyses, and the newly emerging experimental semantics. Typologically speaking, Mandarin shi...(de) presents some characteristics of the that are rarely found with its counterparts in other languages.

Hierdie is die eerste werklik omvattende boek in Afrikaans oor wat die tekslinguistiek as vakgebied behels. 'n Heel nuwe terrein vir taalkundige navorsing in Afrikaans word ontgin, want die klem val in die besonder op die insigte wat 'n studie van taaltekste (dus groter as die enkelsin) meebring. In hierdie opsig behoort die boek vir studente in die taal- en letterkunde asook almal wat belangstel in effektiewe kommunikasie van groot waarde te wees - as naslaanbron, maar veral as bron waarin 'n volume kennis byeengetrek is wat verdere selfstandige navorsing kan stimuleer.

This volume provides an introduction to word and paradigm models of morphology and the general perspectives on linguistic morphology that they embody. The recent revitalization of these models is placed in the larger context of the intellectual lineage that extends from classical grammars to current information-theoretic and discriminative learning paradigms. The synthesis of this tradition outlined in the volume highlights leading ideas about the organization of morphological systems that are shared by word and paradigm approaches, along with strategies that have been developed to formalize these ideas, and ways in which the ideas have been validated by experimental methodologies. An extended comparison of contemporary word and paradigm variants isolates the central assumptions about morphological units and relations that distinguish implicational from realizational models and clarifies the relation of these models to morpheme-based accounts. Designed to be accessible to a wide readership, this book will serve both as an introduction to morphology and morphological theory from the word and paradigm perspective for non-specialists, and for morphologists, as a detailed account of the history of the ideas that underlie these models.

*Provides a foundational understanding of linguistics as it applies to spoken and signed languages. *Covers numerous linguistic disciplines such as phonetics, semantics and sociolinguistics. *Makes linguistic theory accessible to speech-language pathologists. *Highlights the importance of integrating linguistic frameworks into clinical decision-making.

This study breaks new ground in describing how various linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms affect both the form of the narrative clause and the arrangement of the grammatical elements. The various possible forms that a narrative clause can take are classified in terms of their 'topic-comment' and 'focus-presupposition', and it is argued that the way in which these are articulated dictates the word order in the clause. The outcome of the study demonstrates that the traditional binary distinction between foreground and background, based purely on verb forms, is inadequate. A new model is offered showing how foregrounding is achieved by exploiting cognitive structures or by using specific evaluative devices.>

This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, linguists have in recent years found tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Daniel Buring presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. He explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research. This wide-ranging book involves aspects of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and will be of interest to researchers and students in all of these fields, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

Safir's monograph develops a theory about the role of anaphora in the formulation of general syntax. He presents the following proposals: firstly, that the complementary distribution of forms that support anaphoric readings is not accidental; secondly, that dependent identity relations are always possible where they are not prohibited by a constraint; and lastly, that there are no parameters for ana phora - that all anaphora-specific principles are universal, and that the patterns of anaphora across languages arise entirely from lexical properties. The goal of this thoroughly comprehensive look at the phenomenon of anaphora is to fundametally redirect current thinking on the subject.

This investigation of V2-movement addresses the question which role the lexical content of the moved element plays during sentence processing. It draws on original theoretical arguments, empirical data and results from psycholinguistic experiments. The main finding is that the lexical content of the V2-verb is interpreted only at the end of the clause, i.e. at the base position of the finite verb.

This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative alignment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative alignment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. Thus an entire cycle of alignment change can be traced, something which had previously been considered unlikely. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through which these alignment changes took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as 'see' and 'hear', which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.

This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinoehl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.

Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.

In this outstanding collection of new work, the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change. The editors open the volume with an extensive and accessible introduction to the ideas and techniques deployed in the book and the phenomena and issues on which they are brought to bear. Seventeen chapters follow, divided into two parts, the first concerned with grammaticalization and the second with parametric variation. These show what the application of contemporary theories of syntax and language variation can reveal about syntactic change and variation and the processes of parametric change which lie behind them. They also demonstrate the value of testing and constructing synchronic theories on the basis of historical data. The analyses range over many languages and language families, including Germanic, Romance, Greek, and Chinese.
This book will interest scholars and students of grammatical change and theory at graduate level and above

Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ( "The nature of variation and parameters ") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ( "Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies ") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.

This book explores the central concept of "syntactic relation" arguing that certain fundamental relations such as c-command, dominance and checking relations can be explained within a derivational approach to structure-building. The result is a level-free model of syntax in which derivations, rather than phrase-markers, undergo aemantic/phonological interpretation.

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides the first ever large-scale comparative treatment of there sentences (there copula NP), in over 100 Italo-Romance and Sardinian dialects spoken in Italy. It comprises detailed discussions of focus structure, predication and argument realization, definiteness effects, and the linking between semantics and syntax in there sentences, advancing novel proposals in each case. The authors test influential hypotheses on existential constructions against first-hand dialect evidence; they argue that existential and locative there sentences differ in focus structure and semantics, even though they display similar morphosyntactic features. The volume also provides the historical background of Romance there sentences, relying on the findings of the analysis of a substantial corpus of early Italo-Romance vernacular texts. Couched in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, the discussion fully engages with the vast available literature on existentials and locatives, thus being of interest to linguists of any theoretical persuasion. Through the investigation of existentials and locatives, the volume addresses key issues in linguistic theory, while offering an invaluable source of data for research on the Romance languages and a model in fieldwork-based microvariational analysis.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggregate of evidence, he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In the final chapter, the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous chapters, such as focalization in situ, follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) insight about the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, the book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization that posit a high, fixed, focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggregate of evidence, he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In the final chapter, the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous chapters, such as focalization in situ, follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) insight about the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, the book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization that posit a high, fixed, focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date.