This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological, morphological and syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family, and with little historical contact with surrounding languages, the language provides evidence of the kind of languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion. The grammar provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory, morphology, syntax and select semantic fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds, a morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements, complex rules for negation, and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic fields, for example in partonymies of the body, taxonomies of the natural world, verbal semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic 'rara' suggest that linguistic evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of special interest to linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, anthropologists and researchers in Oceania and Melanesia. Endorsement: "This long-awaited grammar is a major contribution to Papuan and general linguistics, providing as it does by far the most comprehensive and accurate grammatical description of a language that has already assumed a position as one of the world's most complicated. Hitherto, the most extensive grammatical description of the language has been the survey-like Henderson (1995), and while Levinson explicitly acknowledges his debt to this earlier grammar and to unpublished work by Henderson, his own detailed grammar clearly takes the level of description and analysis of the language to a completely new level. In particular, Levinson's grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language's morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages envisage. In addition, it provides a much more detailed account of the language's syntax, based on a judicious combination of corpus attestation and careful elicitation (incl. using the kits developed by Levinson's group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics). The grammar thus not only fills a major lacuna in our knowledge of the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area, but also provides grist for future studies on the implications of the language's complexities." Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara

Clause structure is the most widely-studied phenomenon within syntactic theory, because it refers to how words and phrases are embedded within a sentence, their relationships to each other within a sentence, and ultimately, how sentences are layered and represented in the human brain. This volume presents a clear and up-to-date overview of the Minimalist Program, synthesizes the most important research findings, and explores the major shifts in generative syntax. As an accessible topic book, it includes chapters on framework, the clause in general, and the semantic, grammatical and pragmatic layers. Designed for graduate students and researchers interested in syntactic theory, this book includes a range of examples taken from data acquisition, typology and language change, alongside discussion questions, helpful suggestions for further reading and a useful glossary.

This work is the first comprehensive description of Sumerian constructions involving a copula. Using around 400 fully glossed examples, it gives a thorough analysis of all uses of the copula, which is one of the least understood and most frequently misinterpreted and consequently mistranslated morphemes in Sumerian. It starts with a concise introduction into the grammatical structure of Sumerian, followed by a study that is accessible to both linguists and sumerologists, as it applies the terminology of modern descriptive linguistics. It provides the oldest known and documented example of the path of grammaticalization that leads from a copula to a focus marker. It gives the description of Sumerian copular paratactic relative clauses, which make use of an otherwise only scarcely attested relativization strategy. At the end of the book, the reader will have a clear picture about the morphological and syntactic devices used to mark identificational, polarity and sentence focus in Sumerian, one of the oldest documented languages in the world.

After a "first wave" of traditional studies on prepositional accusatives and a "second wave" exploring the typological dimensions of Differential Object Marking in Bossong's footsteps, a new line of research is currently introducing new methods, deepening the level of analysis, and offering new perspectives on the issue. This volume presents 11 innovative, original contributions representative of this "third wave" of studies on DOM in Romance.

"Understanding Minimalist Syntax" introduces the logic of the Minimalist Program by analyzing well-known descriptive generalizations about long-distance dependencies.
An introduction to the logic of the minimalist program - arguably the most important branch of syntax
Proposes a new theory of how long-distance dependencies are formed, with implications for theories of locality, and the minimalist program as a whole
Introduces the logic of the minimalist program by analyzing well-known descriptive generalizations about long-distance dependencies, and asks why they should be true of natural languages
Rich in empirical coverage, which will be welcomed by experts in the field, yet accessible enough for students looking for an introduction to the minimalist program.

In this illuminating new theory of grammar, Hubert Haider demonstrates that there is a basic asymmetry in the phrase structure of any language, whatever sentence structure it takes. Moreover, he argues that understanding this asymmetry is the key to understanding the grammatical causality underlying a broad range of core syntactic phenomena. Until now, Germanic languages have been seen to fall into two distinct classes: those which take an object-verb sentence structure (OV) or a verb-object one (VO). However, by examining the nature of this universal underlying asymmetry, Hubert Haider reveals a third syntactic type: 'Type III'. In particular, he employs the third type to explore the cognitive evolution of grammar which gave rise to the structural asymmetry and its typological implications. Symmetry Breaking in Syntax will appeal to academic researchers and graduate students involved in comparative and theoretical syntax and the cognitive evolution of grammar.

Until recently, collaborative efforts between formal linguistics and literary studies have been relatively sparse; this book is an attempt to bridge this gap and add to the hitherto small pool of studies that combine the two disciplines. Our study concentrates on Emily Dickinson's poetry, since it displays a highly uncommon and therefore challenging use of language. We argue this to be part of her poetic strategy and consider Dickinson an intuitive linguist: her apparent non-compliance with linguistic rules is a productive exploration of linguistic expression to reveal the flexibility and potential of grammar, leading to complex processes of interpretation. Our study includes a number of in-depth analyses of individual poems, which combine formal linguistic methods and literary scholarship and focus on specific aspects such as ambiguity, reference, and presuppositions. One of our findings concerns the dynamic interpretation of lyrical texts in which the pragmatic step of establishing what a poem means for the reader is postponed to text level. We provide readers with a tool-box of methods for the formal linguistic analysis not just of Emily Dickinson's poetry but of linguistically complex literary texts in general.

This volume brings together cutting-edge experimental research from leaders in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics to explore the nature of a phenomenon that has long been central to syntactic theory - 'island effects'. The chapters in this volume draw upon recent methodological advances in experimental methods in syntax, also known as 'experimental syntax', to investigate the underlying cognitive mechanisms that give rise to island effects. This volume presents a comprehensive empirical review of a contemporary debate in the field by including contributions from researchers representing a variety of points of view on the nature of island effects. This book is ideal for students and researchers interested in cutting-edge experimental techniques in linguistics, psycholinguistics and psychology.

Differential argument marking has been a hot topic in linguistics for several decades, both because it is cross-linguistically widespread and because it raises essential questions at multiple levels of grammar, including the relationship between abstract processes and overt morphological marking, between case and agreement, and between syntax and information structure. This volume provides an introduction into the current state of the art of research on differential case marking and chapters by leading linguists addressing theoretical questions in a wide range of typologically and geographically diverse languages from the Indo-European, Sinitic, Turkic, and Uralic families. The chapters engage with current theoretical issues in the morphology, syntax, semantics, and processing of differential argument marking. A central issue addressed by all the authors is the adequacy of various theoretical approaches in modelling (different varieties of) differential case marking, such as those determined by topicality, those driven by cumulative factors, and those that involve double marking. The volume will be of interest to students and researchers working on cross-linguistic variation in differential marking and its theoretical modelling.

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.

Exponence refers to the mapping of morphosyntactic structure to phonological representations, a research area which is not only highly controversial, but also approached in fundamentally different ways in theoretical morphology and phonology. This volume brings together leading specialists from morphosyntax and morphophonology. The authors address common problems, questions and solutions in both areas, and formulate a coherent research program for exponence which integrates the central insights of the last decades and provides important new challenges for the future. The book is aimed at phonologists, morphologists, and syntacticians of all theoretical persuasions at graduate level and above.

Morphology is particularly challenging, because it is pervaded by irregularity and idiosyncrasy. This book is a study of word structure using a specific theoretical framework known as 'Network Morphology'. It describes the systems of rules which determine the structure of words by construing irregularity as a matter of degree, using examples from a diverse range of languages and phenomena to illustrate. Many languages share common word building strategies and many diverge in interesting ways. These strategies can be understood by distinguishing different notions of 'default'. The Network Morphology philosophy promotes the use of computational implementation to check theories. The accompanying website provides the computer coded version of the Network Morphology model of word structure for readers to test, customize and develop. This book will be a valuable contribution to the fields of linguistic typology and morphology and will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students in these areas.

This introduction to Japanese linguistics is designed to introduce students to all of the main areas of the subject. What makes this book distinct from other textbooks on Japanese linguistics is that linguistics is introduced by means of authentic texts which students might encounter in contemporary Japan. The book covers: * Speech sounds and sound structures * Japanese vocabulary * Writing in Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Roman letters * Word structures, ideograms, morphemes and compounding * Sentence structure * Word meaning Each chapter contains an explanation of the key concepts of Japanese linguistics, followed by activities, which are designed to promote the students' active understanding of the forms and functions of the language in authentic texts. This textbook will be an essential introduction to Japanese linguistics for advanced undergraduates, and postgraduates, studying either Japanese language, or linguistics.

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.

This book makes an original contribution to the understanding of perception verbs and the treatment of argument structure, and offers new insights on lexical causation, evidentiality, and processes of cognition. Perception verbs - such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, and listen - present unresolved problems for theories of lexical semantics. This book examines the relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and sound. In unravelling their complexity Nikolas Gisborne looks closely at their meanings, modality, semantic relatedness, and irregularity. He frames his exposition in Word Grammar, and draws extensively on work in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar.
After an opening chapter explaining the nature of the issues, Dr Gisborne presents a concise introduction to Word Grammar. He then considers the implications of his approach for a general theory of event structure. He looks at how the framework may be applied to causation, argument linking, and the modelling of polysemy. He examines the semantic similarities and differences between listen- and hear-class verbs, and analyses the cognate patterns of sound-class verbs. He concludes by drawing together his findings and exploring their implications for linguistic theory.
Clearly and readably written, with each point of the argument illustrated with well-chosen examples, this book will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions at graduate level and above.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.