The last decade has seen a rise in popularity in construction-based approaches to grammar. Put simply, the various approaches within the rubric 'construction grammar' all see grammar (morphemes, words, idioms, etc.) as fundamentally constructions - pairings of form and meaning. This is distinct from formal syntax which sees grammar as a system of atomized units governed by formal rules. Construction Grammar is connected to cognitive linguistics and shares many of its philosophical and methodological assumptions. Advocates of Construction Grammar see it as a psychologically-plausible, generative theory of human language that can also account for all kinds of linguistic data. The research programs it has spawned range from theoretical morphological and syntactic studies to multidisciplinary cognitive studies in psycho-, neuro-, and computational linguistics. This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to the theory, method, and applications of Construction Grammar, and will be a resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a representative overview of its many sub-theories and applications. It has 24 chapters divided into 7 sections, with an introduction covering the theory's basic principles and its relationship with other theories including Chomskyan syntax. The book's readership lies in a variety of diverse fields, including corpus linguistics, thoeretical syntax, psycho and neurolinguistics, language variation, acquisition, and computational linguistics.

Adopting a corpus-based methodology, this volume analyses phraseological patterns in nine European languages from a monolingual, bilingual and multilingual point of view, following a mostly Construction Grammar approach. At present, corpus-based constructional research represents an interesting and innovative field of phraseology with great relevance to translatology, foreign language didactics and lexicography.

This is the first book to cover the grammar of clitics from all points of view, including their phonology and syntax and relation to morphology. In the process, it deals with the relation of second position clitics to verb-second phenomena in Germanic and other languages, the grammar of contracted auxiliary verbs in English, noun incorporation constructions, and several other much discussed topics in grammar. Stephen Anderson includes analyses of a number of particular languages, and some of these - such as Kwakw'ala ("Kwakiutl") and Surmiran Rumantsch - are based on his own field research. The study of clitics has broad implications for a general understanding of sentence structure in natural language. Stephen Anderson's clearly-written, wide-ranging, and original account will be of wide interest to scholars and advanced students of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

Grammaticalization research looks back on a rich history, but recent empirical findings, as well as new insights from cognitive science and psycholinguistics, entice researchers to reassess and review what we know about the process. This book presents a detailed study of the grammaticalization of motion verbs in the Mayan languages. The focus lies on variation in the parallel grammaticalization of motion verbs into auxiliaries and directionals. It is demonstrated that the genetically related and areally close languages do not always grammaticalize source items in the same way - both from a formal and meaning perspective. The empirical findings suggest that traditional theories on grammaticalization do not capture the complex nature of the phenomenon entirely. Therefore, a Network Approach to grammaticalization is introduced which emphasizes a 'meaning-first' account. The approach seeks to combine the conceptual with the discourse-pragmatic while being firmly grounded in cognitive and psychological facts. New insights into the grammaticalization behavior of the world's languages are offered, while well-established notions and assumptions within the grammaticalization research paradigm are reviewed and challenged.

Making Sense of Japanese Grammar explains in a lively and highly informative manner basic principles that underlie a wide range of phenomena in Japanese.

This new edition has been updated and revised to accompany the Fifth edition of English Grammar in Use, the first choice for intermediate (B1-B2) learners. This book contains 200 varied exercises to provide learners with extra practice of the grammar they have studied.

This work argues that cause events, being the most tangible component of emotion, provide a rich dimension of how emotions should be classified. While it is often claimed that emotional concepts cannot be defined, this work views emotion as a response triggered by actual or perceived events, specifically focusing on the interaction between five primary emotions (Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Surprise) and cause events. Cause events are examined in terms of two dimensions, namely transitivity and epistemicity. By incorporating the semantic and syntactic information of emotion cause events, this representation of emotion not only provides deep linguistic criteria of emotion cause events, but also offers an event-based approach to emotion classification. A text-driven, rule-based system for detecting the causes of emotion is then developed to establish the validity of the proposed linguistic model for emotion detection and classification. The system shows promising results.

This volume brings together a series of studies of morphological processing in Germanic (English, German, Dutch), Romance (French, Italian), and Slavic (Polish, Serbian) languages. The question of how morphologically complex words are organized and processed in the mental lexicon is addressed from different theoretical perspectives (single and dual route models), for different modalities (auditory and visual comprehension, writing), and for language development. Experimental work is reported, as well as computational and statistical modeling. Thus, this volume provides a useful overview of the range of issues currently attracting reseach at the intersection of morphology and psycholinguistics.

This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.

This volume intends to fill the gap in the grammaticalization studies setting as its goal the systematic description of grammaticalization processes in genealogically and structurally diverse languages. To address the problem of the limitations of the secondary sources for grammaticalization studies, the editors rely on sketches of grammaticalization phenomena from experts in individual languages guided by a typological questionnaire.

A recent wave of research has explored the link between wh- syntax and prosody, breaking with the traditional generative conception of a unidirectional syntax-phonology relationship. In this book, Jason Kandybowicz develops Anti-contiguity Theory as a compelling alternative to Richards' Contiguity Theory to explain the interaction between the distribution of interrogative expressions and the prosodic system of a language. Through original and highly detailed fieldwork on several under-studied West African languages (Krachi, Bono, Wasa, Asante Twi, and Nupe), Kandybowicz presents empirically and theoretically rich analyses bearing directly on a number of important theories of the syntax-prosody interface. His observations and analyses stem from original fieldwork on all five languages and represent some of the first prosodic descriptions of the languages. The book also considers data from thirteen additional typologically diverse languages to demonstrate the theory's reach and extendibility. Against the backdrop of data from eighteen languages, Anti-contiguity offers a new lens on the empirical and theoretical study of wh- prosody.

This monograph explores the properties of passive and middle voice constructions in Norwegian and Swedish, concentrating on the linguistic variation related to these two constructions in Mainland Scandinavian. At an empirical level, we provide a detailed discussion of the morphosyntax and semantics of the two main types of passives in both languages, lexical (s-) and periphrasitic (bli-) passives. At a theoretical level, we propose an architecture of the language faculty where exponents play a central role. Exponents are selected to identify the structures generated by the grammar and provide a platform that make these units interpretable by the sensori-motor and conceptual-intentional interfaces. Exponents this play an essential role in determining the well-formedness of linguistic structures. We demonstrate how different syntactic structures identified and lexicalized by exponents in these two languages are capable of capturing the microvariation observed in the voice systems of these two languages in a straightforward way. The amount of linguistic information (i.e., aspect and mood) identified by each exponent in each language determines the types of complements and specifiers that can be integrated into and lexicalized by a given exponent. Although our approach shares certain affinities with other neo-constructionist approaches, a novel proposal we advance in this book is that exponents are housed in an intermediate level of structure that exists between the narrow syntax and its external interfaces. This exponency-level ( -structure) allows for a more parsimonious theoretical analysis that does not sacrifice descriptive adequacy.

This book contains updated and substantially revised versions of Angelika Kratzer's classic papers on modals and conditionals, including 'What "must" and "can" must and can mean', 'Partition and Revision', 'The Notional Category of Modality', 'Conditionals', 'An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought', and 'Facts: Particulars or Information Units?'. The book's contents add up to some of the most important work on modals and conditionals in particular and on the semantics-syntax interface more generally. It will be of central interest to linguists and philosophers of language of all theoretical persuasions.

For undergraduate and graduate level courses in English grammar, syntax, and writing; also appropriate for a course in teaching English at the secondary level. Approaching grammar as a process and not a product, this text engages students in a conversation about English that will help them reflect on how their language works and understand the social judgments that accompany language use-making them feel they are active participants in shaping their language rather than passive victims of grammar rules that someone imposes on them. Employing the terminology of traditional grammar combined with the insights gained by modern linguistic analysis, it describes English as an instrument of communication, and lays the necessary groundwork for thinking about language so that students can extend what they learn to new situations and apply their knowledge of language in ways most useful to them. Three different types of exercises support the learning and review processes and motivate students to think, talk, and write about English with increasing confidence and sophistication as the term progresses.

This book is a new contribution to syntactic theory. The reader will find a clear overview of the central facts concerning Brazilian Portuguese (BP) word order, as well as a comparison to the facts in other Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, and French). In relating other Romance languages to BP, the book shows that BP word order has a number of interesting restrictions that set this language clearly apart from the other Romance languages. This volume provides accounts for declaratives and interrogatives found not only in BP but also in the other Romance languages discussed, taking into consideration parametric differences among the languages studied.

This grammar provides the first modern, comprehensive description of Coastal Marind. It is a Papuan language spoken by the coastal-dwelling Marind-Anim, formerly expansionistic head-hunters of the Southern New Guinea lowlands. Like the other languages of the poorly known Anim family, Coastal Marind features astonishingly complex verb morphology and a range of unusual phenomena, including indexing of up to four arguments on the verb, verbal marking of focus (the 'Orientation' system), engagement prefixes tracking the attention of the addressee, and a system of four genders realised by intricate agreement patterns. The structure of the language is examined in a detailed but accessible way, and its many complexities are brought to life by contextualised spontaneous data, drawn from a rich audio-visual corpus.

This two-volume set presents a comprehensive syntactical picture of Singapore Mandarin and discusses the distinguishing characteristics of the Chinese language and especially Singapore Mandarin. As a variety of Mandarin Chinese, Singapore Mandarin is characterised by syntactic rules taking precedence over morphological rules. The first volume provides an overview of the grammar of Singapore Mandarin and argues that word order and functional words are specifically important in the study of Singapore Mandarin. It also explains the properties and functions of the nine grammatical components, including phrase types, word classes, sentences, subjects and predicates, predicates and objects, predicates and complements, attributes and adverbials, complex predicate phrases and prepositions and prepositional phrases. The second volume describes expressions of number, quantity, time and place and composite sentences, covering seven types of compound sentences, eight types of complex sentences and connective words with a focus on conjunctions. The concluding part of the study explores the characteristics of Singapore Mandarin grammar compared with Chinese Mandarin (Putonghua) and issues of language standardisation. 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.

The volume features a selection of new work presented at the 2004 meeting of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL). Main conference themes reflected in this volume are: the maturation and broadening of historical corpus linguistics, a new interest in English for Specific Purposes as a diachronic phenomenon, and the role of grammar writing in the process of change. A further thematic strand of this book is the significance of functional aspects in the development of grammar and discourse, especially in domains beyond phonology and morphology. Several contributions focus on the operation of socio-pragmatic and functional factors in historically identifiable social networks, especially in the 18th century. Apart from that there is also a strong emphasis on developments in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This book offers original theoretical accounts and a wealth of descriptive information concerning modality in present-day English. At the same time, it provides fresh impetus to more general linguistic issues such as grammaticalization, colloquialization, or the interplay between sociolinguistic and syntactic constraints. The articles fall into four sections: (a) the semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs; (b) the status of emerging modal items; (c) stylistic variation and change; (d) sociolinguistic variation and syntactic models. The book is of considerable value to students and teachers of English and Linguistics at undergraduate and graduate level worldwide.

This collection of papers is a product of the first international conference of the Society of Historical English Language and Linguistics (SHELL) held at Chiba University, Japan, in September 2005. The society aims at the reunion of linguistics and philology. The papers discuss current issues in the area of syntax, semantics and stylistics.

"This book takes theoretical linguistics by storm, moving our understanding of the passive construction onto a whole new level. Samirah Aljohani puts the adjectival passive under the empirical lexico-grammatical microscope, producing numbers which both dazzle and clarify. Inspired science from copious data presented in an accessible style - absolutely brilliant!" (Dr Christopher Beedham, University of St Andrews, Scotland) Most analyses of the English passive (formed with be + V-ed) claim that there is a verbal passive and an adjectival passive. How can the same form express polar opposite meanings? This study of the adjectival passive reconciles the contradiction using Christopher Beedham's aspect analysis of the passive, in which the so-called actional passive (verbal passive) is said to express an action and its resultant state. In the study, the author presented approximately one thousand 2nd participles, mainly from transitive verbs, to three native speaker informants in putative noun phrases such as an accepted practice and putative clauses with un-, such as It is unaccepted, and asked the informants to say if they are grammatical, ungrammatical or borderline. She also interrogated her participles in the British National Corpus for their adjectival properties. In this way, she arrived at five adjective-like properties which a 2nd participle can have. Finally, she put her participles into eight groups, ranging from "0% state, 100% action" to "50% state, 50% action", depending on how many and which of the five adjective-like properties they can exhibit. The result is a new gradient scale of adjectival passives.

This book explores the concept of complementation in the adjectival domain of English grammar. Alternation between non-finite complements, especially to infinitives and gerundial complements, has been investigated intensively on the basis of large corpora in the last few years. With very few exceptions, however, such work has hitherto been based on univariate analysis methods. Using multivariate analysis, the authors present methodologically innovative case studies examining a large array of explanatory factors potentially impacting complement choice in cases of alternation. This approach yields more precise information on the impact of each factor on complement choice as well as on interactions between different explanatory factors. The book thus presents a methodologically new perspective on the study of the system of non-finite complementation in recent English and variation within that system, and will be relevant to academics and students with an interest in English grammar, predicate complementation, and statistical approaches to language.

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

This volume presents an introduction to the basic ideas and concepts of minimalism, arguably the most important recent development in syntax.It succeeds in bringing together theoretical discussion of the concepts and techniques of the minimalist approach to syntax, and detailed empirical studies, some on phenomena that have not been investigated in recent syntactic frameworks.Minimalist Analysis clearly expounds important new ideas and their motivation, presents interesting new data with a fresh look at some old data, and places current ideas in their historical context.