This volume contains the refined proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German (CAUTG), which took place at Ryerson University, Toronto, as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in May 2017.

This book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational -- e.g. self-repair at the word level -- to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. It also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quantification and anaphora. The Interactive Stance challenges orthodox views of grammar by arguing that, unless we wish to exclude from analysis a large body of frequently occurring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.

Lao is the national language of Laos, and is also spoken widely in Thailand and Cambodia. It is a tone language of the Tai-Kadai family (Southwestern Tai branch). Lao is an extreme example of the isolating, analytic language type. This book is the most comprehensive grammatical description of Lao to date. It describes and analyses the important structures of the language, including classifiers, sentence-final particles, and serial verb constructions. Special attention is paid to grammatical topics from a semantic, pragmatic, and typological perspective.

This book offers a comprehensive account of adjuncts in generative grammar, seeking to reconcile the differing ways in which they have been treated in the past by proposing a method of analysis grounded in simplification based on Simplest Merge. The volume provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature on adjuncts and outlines their characteristic properties and the subsequent difficulties in adequately defining and treating them. The book compares previous attempts to account for adjuncts which have tended to use additional mechanisms or syntactic operations as a jumping-off point from which to propose a new way forward for analyzing them grounded in minimalist theory. Adopting an approach in the spirit of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT), Bode suggests an analysis of adjuncts which applies a minimalist approach based on theoretical simplicity, one which does not resort to extra mechanisms in capturing the empirical properties of adjuncts. Offering a comprehensive overview of research on adjuncts and foundational minimalist principles, this book will be of particular interest to graduate students and practicing researchers interested in syntax.

This collection showcases the contributions of the study of endangered and understudied languages to historical linguistic analysis, and the broader relevance of diachronic approaches toward developing better informed approaches to language documentation and description. The volume brings together perspectives from both established and up-and-coming scholars and represents a globally and linguistically diverse range of languages.The collected papers demonstrate the ways in which endangered languages can challenge existing models of language change based on more commonly studied languages, and can generate innovative insights into linguistic phenomena such as pathways of grammaticalization, forms and dynamics of contact-driven change, and the diachronic relationship between lexical and grammatical categories. In so doing, the book highlights the idea that processes and outcomes of language change long held to be universally relevant may be more sensitive to cultural and typological variability than previously assumed. Taken as a whole, this collection brings together perspectives from language documentation and historical linguistics to point the way forward for richer understandings of both language change and documentary-descriptive approaches, making this key reading for scholars in these fields.

The papers collected in this volume explore the major mechanisms, that is derivations and constraints, claimed to be responsible for various aspects of the linguistic systems, their syntax, phonology and morphology. The contributors approach these issues through a detailed analysis of selected phenomena of Modern English, Old English, Polish, Russian, Hungarian and Icelandic, offering novel theoretical and descriptive insights into the working of human language.

The Iranian languages, due to their exceptional time-depth of attestation, constitute one of the very few instances where a shift from accusative alignment to split-ergativity is actually documented. Yet remarkably, within historical syntax, the Iranian case has received only very superficial coverage. This book provides the first in-depth treatment of alignment change in Iranian, from Old Persian (5 C. BC) to the present. The first part of the book examines the claim that ergativity in Middle Iranian emerged from an Old Iranian agented passive construction. This view is rejected in favour of a theory which links the emergence of ergativity to External Possession. Thus the primary mechanisms involved is not reanalysis, but the extension of a pre-existing construction. The notion of Non-Canonical Subjecthood plays a pivotal role, which in the present account is linked to the semantics of what is termed Indirect Participation. In the second part of the book, a comparative look at contemporary West Iranian is undertaken. It can be shown that throughout the subsequent developments in the morphosyntax, distinct components such as agreement, nominal case marking, or the grammar of cliticisation, in fact developed remarkably independently of one another. It was this de-coupling of sub-systems of the morphosyntax that led to the notorious multiplicity of alignment types in Iranian, a fact that also characterises past-tense alignments in the sister branch of Indo-European, Indo-Aryan. Along with data from more than 20 Iranian languages, presented in a manner that renders them accessible to the non-specialist, there is extensive discussion of more general topics such as the adequacy of functional accounts of changes in case systems, discourse pressure and the role of animacy, the notion of drift, and the question of alignment in early Indo-European.

This study addresses the problems scrambling langauges provide for the existing syntactic theories by analyzing the interaction of semantic and discourse functional factors with syntactic properties of word order in this type of languages, and by discussing the implications of this interaction for Universal Grammar. Three interrelated goals are carefully followed in this work. The first is to analyze the syntactic structure of Persian, a language which exhibits free word order. With this analysis, the author has accounted for the relative order of categorized expressions, the motivation for their possible rearrangements, and the grammatical results of those reorderings. In this respect, a broad range of major syntactic phenomena, including object shift, Case, Extended Projection Principle (EPP), binding, and scope interpretation of quantifiers, interrogative phrases, adverbial phrases, and negative elements are examined. This monograph is the first major theoretical work ever published on Persian, and therefore fills the existing gap by providing insight into the syntactic structure of this language. The second goal is to connect these insights to similar linguistic properties in languages in which scrambling occurs (e.g. German, Dutch, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, and Korean), and to provide a deeper understanding of this group of genetically diverse, but typologically related languages. The final and principal goal is to situate the results of this work within the framework of the Minimalist Program (MP). The investigations in this study indicate that scrambling is not an optional rule, and that certain principles of MP, such as the Minimal Link Condition, are only seemingly violated in these languages. Furthermore, it is shown that careful analysis of scrambling with respect to binding and scope relations, and a reanalysis of the properties of A and A' movements, cast some doubts on the relevance of a typology of movement in natural language.

This innovative work highlights interdisciplinary research on phonetics and phonology across multiple languages, building on the extensive body of work of Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk on the study of sound structure and speech. // The book features concise contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars who have worked with Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk across a range of disciplinary fields toward broadening the scope of how sound structure and speech are studied and how phonological and phonetic research is conducted. Contributions bridge the gap between such fields as phonological theory, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, and morphology, but also includes perspectives from such areas as historical linguistics, which demonstrate the relevance of other linguistic areas of inquiry to empirical investigations in sound structure and speech. The volume also showcases the rich variety of methodologies employed in existing research, including corpus-based, diachronic, experimental, acoustic and online approaches and showcases them at work, drawing from data from languages beyond the Anglocentric focus in existing research. // The collection reflects on Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk's pioneering contributions to widening the study of sound structure and speech and reinforces the value of interdisciplinary perspectives in taking the field further, making this key reading for students and scholars in phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech and language processing.

In today's global commerce and communication, linguistic diversity is in steady decline across the world as speakers of smaller languages adopt dominant forms. While this phenomenon, known as 'language shift', is usually regarded as a loss, this book adopts a different angle and addresses the following questions: What difference does using a new language make to the way speakers communicate in everyday life? Can the grammatical and lexical architectures of individual languages influence what speakers express? In other words, to what extent does adopting a new language alter speakers' day-to-day communication practices, and in turn, perhaps, their social life and world views? To answer these questions, this book studies the expression of emotions in two languages on each side of a shift: Kriol, an English-based creole spoken in northern Australia, and Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, non-Pama-Nyungan), an Australian Aboriginal language that is being replaced by Kriol. This volume is the first to explore the influence of the formal properties of language on the expression of emotions, as well as the first description of the linguistic encoding of emotions in a creole language. The cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists.

This book explores theoretical issues of the syntax-phonology interface within the Minimalist Program of linguistic theory and proposes an entirely new approach to prosodic categories. Conceptual as well as empirical questions are addressed, concerning how syntactic objects are mapped to the sensorimotor system through the processes of externalization. Elaborating on recent progress in the theories of labelling and workspace-based syntactic derivation, this book further develops a null theory of the prosodic domains, and recasts these as the domains of interpretation that are reducible to more fundamental concepts of linguistic theory. Phonological phrases are characterized by Minimal Search, a third factor principle of efficient computation. Intonational phrases are taken to be reflexes of the termination of syntactic derivation, which is formulated in terms of the workspace to which MERGE applies. This book explores the new implications this theory has for the general architecture of grammar as well as for linguistic interfaces. It provides a comprehensive review of the development of theories of the syntax-phonology interface from over the past three decades. The book is well-suited for general linguistic readers as well as phonologists, syntacticians, and any linguist interested in interface research.

Anybody who reads or writes Chinese characters knows that they obey a grammar of sorts: though numerous, they are built out of a much smaller set of constituents, often interpretable in meaning or pronunciation, that are themselves built out of an even smaller set of strokes. This book goes far beyond these basic facts to show that Chinese characters truly have a productive and psychologically real lexical grammar of the same sort seen in spoken and signed languages, with non-trivial analogs of morphology (the combination of potentially interpretable constituents), phonology (formal regularities without implications for interpretation), and phonetics (articulatory and perceptual constraints). Evidence comes from a wide variety of sources, from quantitative corpus analyses to experiments on character reading, writing, and learning. The grammatical approach helps capture how character constituents combine as they do, how strokes systematically vary in different environments, how character form evolved from ancient times to the modern simplified system, and how readers and writers are able to process or learn even entirely novel characters. This book not only provides tools for exploring the full richness of Chinese orthography, but also offers new ways of thinking about the most fundamental question in linguistic theory: what is grammar?

All languages and cultures appear to have one or more "mind-like" constructs that supplement the human body. Linguistic evidence suggests they all have a word for someone, and another word for body, but that doesn't mean that whatever else makes up a human being (i.e. someone) apart from the body is the same everywhere. Nonetheless, the (Anglo) mind is often reified and thought of in universal terms. This volume adds to the literature that denounces such reification. It looks at Japanese, Longgu (an Oceanic language), Thai, and Old Norse-Icelandic, spelling out, in a culturally neutral Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), how the "mind-like" constructs in these languages differ from the Anglo mind.

The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory provides a comprehensive overview of the major contemporary approaches to phonology. Phonology is frequently defined as the systematic organisation of the sounds of human language. For some, this includes aspects of both the surface phonetics together with systematic structural properties of the sound system; for others, phonology is seen as distinct from, and autonomous from, phonetics. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory surveys the differing ways in which phonology is viewed, with a focus on current approaches to phonology. Divided into two parts, this handbook: covers major conceptual frameworks within phonology, including: rule-based phonology; Optimality Theory; Government Phonology; Dependency Phonology; and connectionist approaches to generative phonology; explores the central issue of the relationship between phonetics and phonology; features 23 chapters written by leading academics from around the world. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory is an authoritative survey of this key field in linguistics, and is essential reading for students studying phonology.

Grammaticalization theory has played a major role in the developments in language typology and functional linguistics during the last three decades. Grammaticalization phenomena show that grammars evolve in a continuous way following cross-linguistically established diachronic paths. The contributions in this book shed new light on some central issues in grammaticalization theory such as the (uni-)directionality debate, the relation between grammaticalization and constructions, and the concept of multiple grammaticalization. Evidence for grammaticalization in several domains of grammar is presented: adpositions, numeral classifiers, honorifics, agreement markers, applicatives, reciprocals, delexical verbs, auxiliaries, relative clauses, and discourse particles. The empirical investigations come from several languages, among them many understudied languages such as Nanafwe, Maltese, Manambu, Chibchan and Siouan languages.

This book aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Of the many ways languages have of being complex, perhaps none is as daunting as what can be achieved by inflectional morphology: this volume examines languages such as Archi, which has a 1,000,000-form verb paradigm, and Chinantec, which has over 100 inflection classes. Alongside this complexity, inflection is notable for its variety across languages: one can take two unrelated languages and discover that they share similar syntax or phonology, but one would be hard pressed to find two unrelated languages with the same inflectional systems. In this volume, senior scholars and junior researchers highlight novel perspectives on conceptualizing morphological complexity, and offer concrete means for measuring, quantifying and analysing it. Examples are drawn from a wide range of languages, including those of North America, New Guinea, Australia, and Asia, alongside a number of European languages. The book will be a valuable resource for all those studying complexity phenomena in morphology, and for theoretical linguists more generally, from graduate level upwards.

Most natural languages display an inventory of pronominal elements that obligatorily or optionally remain phonologically null in a few, in many or even in all syntactic surroundings. The authors of the papers compiled in this book analyse such null pronouns in a synchronic and diachronic way and recover the specific morphological and syntactic prerequisites for their origin and insertion.

Based on original research and novel concepts, this book investigates the nature and use of terminology from linguistic and applied viewpoints. Throughout, problems with terminology, such as overuse by teachers and cases of synonymy and polysemy, are considered and solutions are offered. Part One looks firstly at some basic concepts, then draws important distinctions between pedagogic and scientific terminology, and between transparent, opaque and iconic terms, before examining the historical, lexical and grammatical nature of terms. Part Two attempts to estimate the value and relevance of terminology in language teaching and describes the use and knowledge of terminology in various language-teaching-related constituencies: learners, teachers, textbooks, grammars and research. It concludes with a discussion of the criteria for evaluating terms and an analysis of terms used in ELT.

This book is the first to explore how much ofknowledge based on research on spoken languages needs to be refined in the light of the growing field of sign linguistics. Drawing upon a broad cross-linguistic perspective, the contributors focus on topics of general theoretical interest: linearity and arbitrariness principles, definition of units and levels of analysis, expression of grammatical categories, semantic relations, and cohesion mechanisms. The book is of interest to language typologists, theoretical and descriptive linguists, scholars inthe fields of semiotics, anthropology, gesture studies, and cognitive sciences at large.

The proposition that there is a correlation between language and culture or culture-specific ways of thinking can be traced back to the views of Herder and von Humboldt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is generally accepted today that a language, especially its lexicon, influences its speakers' cultural patterns of thought and perception in various ways, for example through a culture-specific segmentation of the extralinguistic reality, the frequency of occurrence of particular lexical items, or the existence of keywords or key word combinations revealing core cultural values. The aim of this volume is to explore the cultural dimension of a wide range of preconstructed or semi-preconstructed word combinations in English. The 17 papers of the volume are divided into four sections, focusing on particular lexemes (e.g. enjoy and its collocates), types of word combinations (e.g. proverbs and similes), use-related varieties (such as the language of tourism or answering-machine messages), and user-related varieties (such as Aboriginal English or African English). The sections are preceded by a prologue, tracing the development of the study of formulaic language, and followed by an epilogue, which draws together the threads laid out in the various papers. The relation between language and culture in general has been explored in a number of important works over the past ten years. However, the study of the relation between English phraseology and culture in particular has been largely neglected. This volume is the first book-length publication devoted entirely to this topic.

El lexico-gramatica del espanol ofrece una aproximacion alternativa al estudio de la gramatica avanzada del espanol. Este libro brinda al estudiante un enfoque autentico y contextualizado del uso del espanol, basandose en datos provenientes de corpus de espanol-L1 y L2 junto a la investigacion linguistica a fin de describir las caracteristicas lexico-gramaticales fundamentales de la lengua y su variacion. Cada capitulo incluye actividades guiadas para que los estudiantes puedan realizar busquedas en estos corpus con el proposito de llegar a conclusiones fundamentadas en evidencias empiricas sobre como los aprendices de varios niveles de competencia usan ciertos elementos lexico-gramaticales. Este libro representa un recurso ideal para los estudiantes de la gramatica avanzada del espanol a nivel de pregrado y posgrado. El lexico-gramatica del espanol provides an alternative approach to the study of advanced Spanish grammar. Drawing on L1 and L2 Spanish language corpora and linguistic research to describe key lexico-grammatical characteristics of the Spanish language, this book gives students insight into real, variable, and contextualized usage of Spanish. Each chapter includes guided exercises so that students can conduct their own searches of the corpus and draw evidence-based conclusions on how particular grammar structures are used by Spanish speakers at varying levels of proficiency. This is an ideal resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Spanish language and linguistics.

The Grammar of the English Tense System forms the first volume of a four-volume set, The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase. The other volumes, to appear over the next few years, will deal with mood and modality, aspect and voice. The book aims to provide a grammar of tense which can be used both as an advanced reference grammar (for example by MA-level or postgraduate students of English or linguistics) and as a scientific study which can act as a basis for and stimulus to further research. It provides not only a wealth of data but also a unique framework for the study of the English tense system, which achieves great predictive and explanatory power on the basis of a limited number of relatively simple rules. The framework provided allows for an analysis of the semantics of individual tenses which reflects the role of tenses not only in locating situations in time relative to speech time but also in relating situations in time relative to one another to form temporally coherent discourse. Attention is paid to the relations between tenses. On the one hand, we can identify sets of tenses linked to particular temporal areas such as the past or the future. These sets of tenses provide for the expression of a system of temporal relations in a stretch of discourse in which all the situations are located within the same temporal area. On the other hand, there are many contexts in which speakers might in theory choose between two or more tenses to locate a situation (e.g., when we choose between the past tense and the present perfect to locate a situation before speech time), and the book examines the difference that a choice of one or the other tense may make within a discourse context. Thebook moves from a detailed exploration of the meaning and use of individual tenses to a thorough analysis of the way in which tenses can be seen to function together as sets, and finally to a detailed examination of tenses in, and tenses interacting with, temporal adverbials. Original data is used frequently throughout the book to illustrate the theory discussed.

The Historical Dictionary of Yukaghirhas two main purposes. First, it is intended as a relatively complete source of information on the lexicon of Yukaghir. Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir are closely related, highly endangered languages spoken in the extreme North-East of Siberia. No modern comprehensive lexicographic description of these languages is available for the international linguistic community. The dictionary presents all known varieties of Yukaghir in comparative format. Some of the materials included come from published sources, others were obtained by the author through fieldwork and are published for the first time. The dictionary also contains examples of now extinct early forms of Yukaghir, which began to be recorded in the late 17th century. Second, the dictionary provides a first reconstruction of the common ancestor of all known Yukaghir varieties. The proto-Yukaghir stems are established based on internal reconstruction, comparison between various Yukaghir idioms, and external data. Although the dictionary does not attempt to provide etymologies for all Yukaghir words, it includes possible cognates of some Yukaghir stems from other languages, mainly Uralic and Altaic. Since Yukaghir forms are not only cited in their modern shape but are reconstructed, the dictionary will provide a foundation for future etymological work and contribute to investigating the genetic affiliation of Yukaghir, usually classified as isolated. The book will also be useful for linguists interested in the distant genetic relations between language families and the reconstruction of the ethnic and linguistic situation in prehistoric northern Asia.

By integrating novel developments in both contact linguistics and morphological theory, this volume pursues the topic of borrowed morphology by recourse to sophisticated theoretical and methodological accounts. The authors address fundamental issues, such as the alleged universal dispreference for morphological borrowing and its effects on morphosyntactic complexity, and corroborate their analyses with strong cross-linguistic evidence.