The aim of this book is try to illustrate with numerous examples how quantitative methods can most fruitfully contribute to linguistic analysis and research. In addition, it does not intend to offer an exhaustive presentation of all statistical techniques available to linguistics, but to demonstrate the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. This book shows how quantitative methods and statistical techniques can supplement qualitative analyses of language. It attempts to present some mathematical and statistical properties of natural languages, and introduces some of the quantitative methods which are of the most value in working empirically with texts and corpora, illustrating the various issues with numerous examples and moving from the most basic descriptive techniques to decision-taking techniques and to more sophisticated multivariate statistical language models.

Book 3 of the book series is designed for intermediate to advanced learners of Cantonese. This volume provides an authentic and contextualized approach to the learning of the language. This volume includes language scenarios various language functions, such as expressing views, summarizing, suggesting, persuading, and presenting data. The language examples in Book 3 contain speeches, connected discourses and narrations. Some sample discourse structures are presented in the 'Learning points' sections. Learners can apply the structure templates to build up longer connected discourses. Book 3 of the book series can be used by universities, colleges, schools in Hong Kong, and by institutions around the world. This book is suitable for learners who are looking for self-study materials.

This is the first book in English to present cutting edge analyses on the grammar of little-explored Chinese languages and dialects. The contributors challenge the view that standard Mandarin should be taken as representative of all Chinese languages. By providing all necessary background information to the language covered in each chapter, in addition to full transcription and translation of all Chinese character examples, the book is made accessible to a general readership in addition to specialists within the field.

As the second volume of a two-volume set that presents a comprehensive syntactical picture of Singapore Mandarin, this title analyses various expressions relating to number, quantity, time and place, composite sentences and the characteristics and standardisation of Singapore Mandarin. The first two chapters discuss expressions of number, quantity, time and place in Singapore Mandarin and touch upon the differences in these expressions between Singapore and Chinese Mandarin (Putonghua). Composite sentences are then analysed, covering seven types of compound sentences and eight types of complex sentences, as well as connective words with a focus on conjunctions. The final part of the volume analyses the characteristics of Singapore Mandarin grammar compared with Chinese Mandarin, on the level of phrase, lexicon and sentence. From the perspectives of language contact, political and social contexts and bilingualism, it summarises the possible reasons for the differences between the two varieties of Chinese and points out primary challenges and major concerns of the standardisation of Singapore Mandarin. With rich and authentic language examples, the book will serve as a must read for learners and teachers of Mandarin Chinese and linguistics scholars interested in global Chinese and especially Singapore Mandarin.

This is the most comprehensive, integrated account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variations across languages. Movement in Language develops a new set of arguments for the controversial claim that syntax should be understood derivationally; that is, that the best model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The arguments are exemplified through reference to a number of languages, including Bulgarian, Japanese, English, Chinese, and Serbo-Croatian.

This is the most comprehensive, integrated account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variations across languages. Movement in Language develops a new set of arguments for the controversial claim that syntax should be understood derivationally; that is, that the best model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The arguments are exemplified through reference to a number of languages, including Bulgarian, Japanese, English, Chinese, and Serbo-Croatian.

Qur'anic idiomaticity, in its all aspects, poses a great deal of challenge to Qur'an readers, learners, commentators, and translators. One of the most challenging aspects of Qur'anic idiomaticity is Qur'anic idiomatic phrasal verbs, where significances of proper Arabic verbs are entirely fused with significances of prepositions following them to produce new significances that have nothing to do with the basic significances of those verbs and prepositions. By examining a corpus of ten of the most influential English translations of the Qur'an, this study scrutinizes how some translators of the Qur'an have dealt with the phenomenon of Qur'anic idiomatic phrasal verbs, the difficulties that they have encountered when translating them into English, and the strategies that they have employed in their attempts to overcome the inherent ambiguity of such expressions and provide their functional-pragmatic equivalents for English readership. The study proposes a working model for analysing and assessing the translation of the Qur'anic idiomatic phrasal verbs and provides a number of theory-based recommendations for translators in general and Qur'an translators in particular.

This volume is comprehensively designed to help prospective English Language Teaching (EFL) teachers specializing in EFL mainly in South Asian countries. It analyses the application of ELT theories, concepts, and methods to sharpen their understanding of the various techniques used for teaching English effectively in the EFL context. The book discusses the basic concepts of language aimed to develop a sense of the language phenomenon as a unique human attribute. It covers the theories of language from various disciplines such as biology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics. The book explains the underlying structures or components that shape the edifice of languages such as phonology, morphology, syntax, grammar, phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. While taking the reader through language learning theories with a focus on English as the second language, it discusses the different teaching methods that can be adopted by teachers in classroom settings. The book will be of interest to teachers, students and researchers of education, teacher education, and English Language Teaching. It will also be useful for educators, English language teachers, language learners, professionals working in the field of education and language, and those who aspire to teach and learn English in Foreign context.

This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.

Why do grammars change? The cycle of negation proposed by Jespersen is crucially linked to the status of items and phrases. The definition of criteria establishing when a polarity item becomes a negative element, and the identification of the role of phrases for the evolution of negation are the two objectives pursued by the contributions to this volume. The contributions look at the emergence of negative items, and their relation within a given sentence, with particular reference to English and French. The comparative perspective supports the documentation of the fine-grained steps that shed light on the factors that (i) determine change and those that (ii) accompany actuation, which are considered through a dialogue between functionalist and formalist approaches. By looking at the place of negation in the architecture of the sentence, they take up the debate as to the relevance of phrasal projections and consider the role of features. Focusing on the make-up of individual items makes it possible to re-conceptualise the Jespersen cycle as the apparent result of the documented evolution patterns of individual (series of) items. This novel perspective is solidly grounded on an extensive use of the complete, up to date bibliography, and will contribute to shape future research.

This book is all about the captivating ability that the human language has to express intricately logical (mathematical) meanings using tiny (microsemantic) morphemes as utilities. Languages mark meanings with identical inferences using identical particles and these particles thus creep up in a wide array of expressions. Because of their multi-tasking capacity to express seemingly disparate meanings, they are dubbed Superparticles. These particles are perfect windows into the interlock of several grammatical modules and the nature of the interaction of these modules through time. With a firm footing in the module where grammatical bones are built and assembled (narrow morpho-syntax), superparticles acquire varied interpretation (in the conceptual-intentional module - semantics) depending on the structure they fea- ture in. What is more, some of the interpretations these particles trigger are inferential and belong, under the standard account, to the realm of pragmatics. How can such tiny particles, rarely exceeding a syllable of sound, have such powerful and over-arching effects across the inter-modular grammatical space? This is the Platonic background against which this book is set.

First published in 1959, this book aims to provide a practical introduction to semantics, relating the critical study of language to real-life situation, with a wealth of anecdotes and numerous illustrations drawn from everyday personal predicaments. This book provides much information and much material for profitable discussion, helping to make accessible what can be a highly academic subject comprehensible only to a minority. This book provides a highly valuable foundation for students of linguistics and will provide preparation for further study.

The field of reading is a compelling one, characterised by many debates and discussions. It is also amenable to investigations through a range of theories and research studies. In this book, eight leading authorities provide a 'state-of-the-art' overview of reading, using perspectives that have informed their work. There are overviews from linguistic, psychological, sociological and literary viewpoints, as well as more hybrid ones from investigations of digital literacy and multi-modality. This book celebrates what has already been achieved by bridging research, scholarship and practice; it also suggests what still needs to be done to bring the positive rewards from reading to greater numbers of young people. It also recognises that the benefits of reading extend beyond the personal. Accomplished reading skills empower people to meet the challenges of everyday life: making decisions, solving problems, and dealing with unexpected events. The need to refresh and renew our knowledge of reading has gained further impetus in the 'information age'. New technologies for information and communication continually appear: manifestations of 'fake news', disinformation and conspiracy theories spread rapidly across the globe. The book underlines the importance not only of reading, but also the fact that reading between and beyond the lines is more important than ever, in print and across multiple media platforms. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education.

With a wide range of contributors from all over the world and from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook offers a truly global perspective on developments in research on writing. The new edition draws greater attention to writing and human development within a range of cultures, from childhood through adulthood. Attention to multimodalities, and writing/learning to write in digital spaces.

Noun Phrases and Nominalizations: The Syntax of DPs is a theoretical study of nominal expressions which covers central aspects of their syntax that have not been approached with concurrent tools in recent years. The study examines the functional structure, offers a structural definition of syntactic nominalization, and carefully draws the border line between the lexical nominalizing mechanism and its syntactic counterpart. The empirical base of the study is broad and varied: it explores the rich nominal system of Modern Hebrew with constant comparisons to relevant structures of other Semitic and non-Semitic languages. The analyses put forward have recourse to a minimal syntactic apparatus, thus lending support to Chomsky's recent view of language design. This book targets researchers in theoretical linguistics and comparative syntax. Alongside theoretical and cross-linguistic findings, the book also offers an abundant source of insights into Hebrew nominal expressions. It can be used both as a foundational book on the syntax of nominal expressions or as a reference book for linguists and graduate students of Semitic and comparative syntax.

This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.

The collected essays in this volume present an overview and state-of-the-field of traditional and recently developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading comprehension. It critically reviews and examines major findings from classical behavioral approaches such as the visual moving window, rapid-serial visual presentation (RSVP), and eye-tracking, as well as newly developing neuropsycholinguistic methodologies such as Event-Related Potentials (ERPS), and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Written to address a timely topic, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research updates the field of bilingual reading by critically examining the contributions of the various behavioral and technologically-based reading techniques used to understand psychological processes underlying written language comprehension. Each topic is covered first from a theoretical, and then from an experimental, viewpoint. Moreover, the volume contributes to the development and establishment of Bilingual Reading as a subfield of bilingual sentence processing and fills a significant gap in the literature on bilingual language processing and thought. Significantly, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research presents an overall view of some of the typical psycholinguistic techniques and approaches, as well as proposing other possible tasks that may prove viable in investigating such theoretical issues as bilingual lexical ambiguity resolution, or how bilingual speakers might resolve multiple sources of potentially conflicting information as they comprehend sentences and discourse during the communicative process. In addition, to aid reader comprehension and encourage readers to acquire "hands on" experience in the creation and development of experiments in the realm of bilingual reading research, each chapter includes a list of key words, suggested student research projects, and questions to both help the reader review the chapter and expand upon the reading. With its comprehensive coverage of a crucial subfield of psycholinguistics and language processing, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research is an invaluable and informative resource for all students and researchers in bilingualism, neurolinguistics, bilingual cognition, and other related fields.

One prominent function of natural language is to convey information. One peculiarity is that it does not do so randomly, but in a structured way, with information structuring formally recognized to be a component of grammar. Among all information structuring notions, focus is one primitive needed to account for all phenomena. Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese: A Comparative Perspective aims to examine from a semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese conspire to encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in Chinese. With both being tonal languages, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese manifest different morpho-syntactic configurations to mark focus. A general principle governing focus marking in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese is given in the book, which aims to give a better understanding of the underlying principles the two use to mark additive and restrictive meanings, and related focus interpretations. Particular attention is also drawn to the co-occurrence of multiple forms of restrictive and additive particles in Cantonese, including adverbs, verbal suffixes and sentence-final particles. Linearity has been shown to be an important parameter to determine how focus is structured in Cantonese. This book is aimed at advanced graduate students, researchers, and scholars working on Chinese linguistics, syntax and semantics, and comparative dialectal grammar.

This book is the third volume of a four-volume set on modern Chinese complex sentences, with a focus on adversative complex sentences and relevant forms. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. The author proposes a tripartite classification of Chinese complex sentences according to the semantic relationships between the clauses, i.e., coordinate, causal, and adversative. This volume analyzes representative forms of adversative type, including the prototype, the clauses linked by connectives referring to otherwise, the combinations of clause structures and certain adversative conjunctions or linking adverbs indicating an adversative relationship, the adversative factors and relationship in two typical progressive structures, factive sentences and concessive forms. It also discusses the adversative type in the broad sense, classifying the different forms and also analyzing the semantic meaning, pragmatic value, and implications for research and language teaching. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.

Earlier empirical studies on valency have looked at the phenomenon either in individual languages or a small range of languages, or have concerned themselves with only small subparts of valency (e.g. transitivity, ditransitive constructions), leaving a lacuna that the present volume aims to fill by considering a wide range of valency phenomena across 30 languages from different parts of the world. The individual-language studies, each written by a specialist or group of specialists on that language and covering both valency patterns and valency alternations, are based on a questionnaire (reproduced in the volume) and an on-line freely accessible database, thus guaranteeing comparability of cross-linguistic results. In addition, introductory chapters provide the background to the project and discuss its main characteristics and selected results, while a series of featured articles by leading scholars who helped shape the field provide an outside perspective on the volume's approach. The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in valency and argument structure, irrespective of theoretical persuasion, and will serve as a model for future descriptive studies of valency in individual languages.

This book addresses the three fundamental properties of V-V resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese: their generation, their syntactic structure, and their alternations. This book is original and new in the following aspects. First, adopting the 'inner vs. outer domain' theory, it provides new analysis and evidence that these compounds are generated in syntax, not in lexicon. Second, this book argues that the two subclasses of V-V resultative constructions, object-oriented vs. subject-oriented V-V resultatives, actually have different structures. Their syntactic contrasts have not been observed in the literature before. Third, this book is new in determining the syntactic structure of the V-V resultative constructions through their adverbial modification properties. It demonstrates that the previous isomorphism analysis of the syntactic structure of Chinese V-V resultatives does not hold. Finally, this book provides a new analysis of the issue of the alternations of V-V resultatives. In contrast to previous analyses, which generally view the causative alternation as the idiosyncratic property of particular V-V compounds, this book provides a principled analysis. This book makes a substantial improvement of the current understanding of the issues in the syntax of Mandarin Chinese and gives new support to certain theories of the generative grammar from the perspective of Mandarin Chinese.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the syntactic variation of the dialects of Spanish. More precisely, it covers Spanish theoretical syntax that takes as its data source non-standard grammatical phenomena. Approaching the syntactic variation of Spanish dialects opens a door not only to the intricacies of the language, but also to a set of challenges of linguistic theory itself, including language variation, language contact, bilingualism, and diglossia. The volume is divided into two main sections, the first focusing on Iberian Spanish and the second on Latin American Spanish. Chapters cover a wide range of syntactic constructions and phenomena, such as clitics, agreement, subordination, differential object marking, expletives, predication, doubling, word order, and subjects. This volume constitutes a milestone in the study of syntactic variation, setting the stage for future work not only in vernacular Spanish, but all languages.

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

This book is the first in-depth investigation of the expression of agency in verbal noun and impersonal/passive constructions in medieval Welsh and Irish, drawing on a database of texts from different genres: narrative, legal, and annalistic. The analysis is primarily data-oriented, rather than theory-oriented, although it draws on methods and concepts from functional grammar approaches and cognitive linguistics. Written with readers from a wide variety of backgrounds in mind, Agents in Early Welsh and Early Irish goes beyond earlier contributions in the field of Celtic syntax and semantics in several important ways: It presents data from both Welsh and Irish It discusses both the internal structure of verbal noun and passive/impersonal constructions and their contributions to their contexts It offers new analyses of agency and its markers in medieval Welsh and Irish, as well as analyses of the marking of instrument, cause, and indirect agency