Parenthesis has recently seen a considerable surge in interest. This volume presents the - often contrasting - theoretical positions on parenthetical verbs and examines them from different analytical perspectives. It covers parenthetical verbs in English as well as in several other languages. Methodologically, the volume is marked by its empirical orientation: Most contributions are based on data from experiments or corpora.

This book presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in England. Showcasing developments in sociolinguistic theory, method and application, the chapters examine sociolinguistic topics on different linguistic levels and in different geographical areas across the country. Allowing the reader to engage with contemporary research in the field, each chapter is unique in the topic or geographical area explored. Topics include historical sociolinguistics, British Sign Language, lexical variation, life-span change, and variation and innovation in urban and peripheral areas; while the regions covered range from Cornwall to West Cumbria. Edited and authored by a range of international scholars, this is sure to be a key research resource for students and scholars interested in language use in England.

The imperative clause is one of three major sentence types that have been found to be universal across the languages of the world. Compared to declaratives and interrogatives, the imperative type has received diverse analyses in the literature. This cutting-edge study puts forward a new linguistic theory of imperatives, arguing that categories of the speech act, specifically Speaker and Addressee, are conceptually necessary for an adequate syntactic account. The book offers compelling empirical and descriptive evidence by surveying new typological data in critical assessment of competing hypotheses towards an indexical syntax of human language. An engaging read for students and researchers interested in linguistics, philosophy and the syntax of language.

The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis, first formulated in 1978, claimed that there are two classes of intransitive verbs, the unaccusative (Jill arrived) and the unergative or agentive (Jill sings). The hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behaviour is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or a combination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines contemporary approaches to the subject with several papers that have achieved a significant status even though formally unpublished.

This work brings together classic and recent papers in the philosophical and linguistic analysis of fuzzy grammar, of gradience in meaning, word classes and syntax. Issues such as how many grains make a heap, when a puddle becomes a pond, and so forth, have occupied thinkers since Aristotle and, since the 1980s, have been the subject of increasing interest among linguists as well as in fields such as artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. The work is designed to be of use to students in all these fields. It has a substantial introduction, is divided into thematic parts, contains annotated sections of further reading, and is fully indexed.

The languages of mainland Southeast Asia evidence an impressive array of elaborate grammatical resources, such as echo words, phonaesthetic words, chameleon affixes, chiming derivatives, onomatopoeic forms, ideophones and expressives. Speakers of these languages fashion grammatical works of art in order to express and convey emotions, senses, conditions and perceptions that enrich discourse. This book provides a detailed comparative overview of the mechanisms by which aesthetic qualities of speech operate as part of speakers' grammatical knowledge. Each chapter focuses on a different language and explores the grammatical information of a number of well- and lesser-known languages from mainland Southeast Asia. It will be of great interest to syntacticians, morphologists, linguistic anthropologists, language typologists, cognitive scientists interested in language, and instructors of Southeast Asian languages.

The first usage-based approach of its kind, this volume contains twelve studies on key issues in Spanish syntax: word order, null arguments, grammatical-relation marking, inalienable possession, "ser" and "estar," adjective placement, small clauses and causatives. The studies are approached within a broad functionalist perspective. The studies strengthen the view that components of grammar intricately interact and that a usage-based approach to analyzing them offers new and insightful perspectives on some stubborn problems.

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.

This book investigates paradigms of person - both independent pronouns as well as bound person marking. Based on empirical and theoretical grounds, the author argues that the notion 'number' has to be redefined to deal with the cross-linguistic variation of person marking. Equipped with a new definition, a typology of the paradigmatic structure of person marking is presented, incorporating data from around 400 languages. Nothing appears to be impossible for the paradigmatic structure, although some patterns are clearly more probable than others are. Starting from the more commonly occurring patterns, the diachronic dynamics of paradigmatic structure are investigated by comparing close relatives that differ slightly in the structure of their person paradigms.

There are far more syntactically distinct languages than we might have thought; yet there are far fewer than there might have been. Questions of Syntax collects sixteen papers authored by Richard S. Kayne, a preeminent theoretical syntactician, who has sought over the course of his career to understand why both these facts are true. With a particular emphasis on comparative syntax, these chapters collectively consider how wide a range of questions the field of syntax can reasonably attempt to ask and then answer. At issue, among other topics, are the relation between syntax and (certain aspects of) semantics, the relation between syntax and what appear to be lexical questions, the relation between syntax and morphology, the relation between syntax and certain aspects of phonology (insofar as silent elements and their properties play a substantial role), and the extent to which comparative syntax can provide new and decisive evidence bearing on these different kinds of questions. To Kayne, comparative syntax can shed light on what may initially seem lexical questions, and antisymmetry on the evolution of human language itself. Taken as a whole, these essays elucidate the theoretical contributions of one the most influential scholars in linguistics.

As the first volume of a two-volume set that reexamines nouns and verbs in Chinese, this book proposes the verbs-as-nouns theory, corroborated by discussions of the nature and relationship between nouns and verbs in Chinese. Seeking to break free from the shackles of Western linguistic paradigms largely based on Indo-European languages and to a great extent inappropriate for Chinese, this two-volume study revisits the nature of nouns and verbs and relevant linguistic categories in Chinese to unravel the different relationships between nouns and verbs in Chinese, English, and other languages. It argues that Chinese nouns and verbs are related inclusively rather than in the oppositional pattern found in Indo-European languages, with verbs included in nouns as a subcategory. Preliminary to the core discussion on the verbs-as-nouns framework, the author critically engages with the issues of word classes and nominalization, as well as problems with the analysis of Chinese grammar due to the noun-verb distinction. Through linguistic comparisons, following chapters look into noticeable differences between Chinese and English, the referential and predicative natures of nouns and verbs, the asymmetry of the two, and the referentiality of predicates in Chinese. The volume will be a must-read for linguists and students studying Chinese linguistics, Chinese grammar, and contrastive linguistics.

This text explores the consequences for language acquisition, language evolution and linguistic theory of taking the underlying architecture of the language faculty to be that of a dynamical system. The authors investigate whether it is possible for a complex adaptive system to identify the categories, structures and rules of a language given access only to instances of grammatical utterances of that language. The linguistic tradition says that this is impossible, but there is a growing body of literature in psychology and computer science arguing that grammar can be uncovered using purely statistical techniques applied to the distribution of forms in a string of words. The book goes on to discuss whether a learner requires information about structure that goes beyond the information that is contained in the meaning. Does the learner have to have knowledge of grammar per se prior to language acquisition, as has been traditionally assumed? The authors ask whether it is possible to adequately describe and explain linguistic phenomena if we restrict ourselves to the relatively impoverished apparatus that we require for language acquisition. They explore the consequences of adopting a radical form of minimalism to try to reconcile the linguistic facts with the book's perspective of language acquisition. Culicover and Nowak investigate to what extent it is possible to account for language variation in dynamical terms, as a consequence of the behaviour of the complex social network in which languages and the properties of languages are acquired by learners through interactions with other speakers over time.

Originally published in 1951, this book by W. C. Matthews analyzes the phonology and morphology of the six major language groups most used in the Soviet Union: Uralian, Altaic, North Caucasian, South Caucasian, Indo-European and Palaeoasiatic. Appendices at the back break each of the languages and dialects down into their respective classifications, as well as providing statistics on the prevalence of each language and the ways in which each evolved. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in linguistics.

This book collects research contributions concerning quantitative approaches to characterize originality and universality in language. The target audience comprises researchers and experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students. Creativity might be considered as a morphogenetic process combining universal features with originality. While quantitative methods applied to text and music reveal universal features of language and music, originality is a highly appreciated feature of authors, composers, and performers. In this framework, the different methods of traditional problems of authorship attribution and document classification provide important insights on how to quantify the unique features of authors, composers, and styles. Such unique features contrast, and are restricted by, universal signatures, such as scaling laws in word-frequency distribution, entropy measures, long-range correlations, among others. This interplay between innovation and universality is also an essential ingredient of methods for automatic text generation. Innovation in language becomes relevant when it is imitated and spread to other speakers and musicians. Modern digital databases provide new opportunities to characterize and model the creation and evolution of linguistic innovations on historical time scales, a particularly important example of the more general problem of spreading of innovations in complex social systems. This multidisciplinary book combines scientists from various different backgrounds interested in quantitative analysis of variations (synchronic and diachronic) in language and music. The aim is to obtain a deeper understanding of how originality emerges, can be quantified, and propagates.

Pied-piping, the phenomenon that wh-movement may target categories not marked with the feature [wh], has generally been considered idiosyncratic and pathological. On Pied-Piping argues that this assessment is not correct. The book presents a compilation of crosslinguistic generalizations on pied-piping and a theory that derives them. Pied-piping is incorporated into a derivational theory of successive cyclic wh-movement that includes input-output optimization, the operation Agree, and phase theory. The resulting theory is a step towards closing a long-standing gap in syntactic theorizing.

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.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

The creation of new lexical units and patterns has been studied in different research frameworks, focusing on either system-internal or system-external aspects, from which no comprehensive view has emerged. The volume aims to fill this gap by studying dynamic processes in the lexicon - understood in a wide sense as not being necessarily limited to the word level - by bringing together approaches directed to morphological productivity as well as approaches analyzing general types of lexical innovation and the role of discourse-related factors. The papers deal with ongoing changes as well as with historical processes of change in different languages and reflect on patterns and specific subtypes of lexical innovation as well as on their external conditions and the speakers' motivations for innovating. Moreover, the diffusion and conventionalization of innovations will be addressed. In this way, the volume contributes to understanding the complex interplay of structural, cognitive and functional factors in the lexicon as a highly dynamic domain.

The null subject has always been central to linguistic theory, because it tells us a great deal about the underlying structure of language in the human brain, and about the interface between syntax and semantics. Null subjects exist in languages such as Italian, Chinese, Russian and Greek where the subject of a sentence can be tacitly implied, and is understood from the context. In this systematic overview of null subjects, Jose A. Camacho reviews the key notions of null subject analyses over the past thirty years and encompasses the most recent findings and developments. He examines a balance of data on a range of languages with null subjects and also explores how adults and children acquire the properties of null subjects. This book provides an accessible and original account of null subject phenomena, ideal for graduate students and academic researchers interested in syntax, semantics and language typology.

This edited book focuses on the role of different types of pedagogical solutions in the acquisition of the Japanese grammatical system by reviewing, assessing and measuring current theory and research. Findings from this research have implications for the way Japanese grammar is learned and taught in a classroom context. The editors and contributors address a number of questions around the role of Japanese grammar learning and teaching such as: what is the role of instruction in Japanese second language acquisition? What are the main findings of empirical research into the acquisition of Japanese grammar? Is any one particular pedagogical intervention or solution to the teaching of Japanese grammar more effective than another? What pedagogical options do we have for the teaching of Japanese grammar? This book offers a unique insight into its practical implications for Japanese language learning and teaching for applied linguists, researchers, language teaching professionals and curriculum developers alike.

Much has happened in the years since the publication of the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The world has transformed, and the Manual has risen to meet the moment. The eighteenth edition of this classic guide for writers, editors, and publishers is the most extensive revision in two decades.

Every chapter has been reexamined with diversity and accessibility in mind, and major changes include updated and expanded coverage of pronoun use and inclusive language, revised guidelines on capitalization, a broader range of examples, new coverage of Indigenous languages, and expanded advice on making publications accessible to people with disabilities. The Manual’s traditional focus on nonfiction has been expanded to include fiction and other creative genres in coverage of topics such as punctuation and dialogue, and the needs of self-published authors receive wider attention.

The citation chapters have been thoroughly reorganized for the benefit of new and experienced users alike, and the key concepts for editing mathematics have been integrated into the chapters where they will be most useful to generalists. Evolving technologies—from open-access publishing models to AI—are covered throughout. And naturally, there are some well-considered updates to familiar rules, including changes intended to align the Manual’s recommendations more closely with real-world usage.

As with every new edition, devotees of the Manual will find much to discover and ponder.

• Practical, with easy to follow rules, without getting into the technicalities of linguistics. • Includes examples of correct and incorrect ways to report stories, as well as examples of common mistakes, problem words, and real journalism headlines. • Suitable for practicing journalists as well as students of journalism. • Written by a respected and well known journalist, experienced in working on national newspapers and in teaching.

This volume explores the complex relationship between primary agreement by means of object marking or differential object marking (DOM), and secondary agreement through clitics in non-standardized variation data from Limeno Spanish contact varieties (LSCV). As such it is concerned with diachronic as well as synchronic morphosyntactic variation of the third person object pronoun paradigm, so called clitics, as used in Standard Spanish and non-standardized Spanish contact dialects. The argumentation as well as the data presented cross diachronic and synchronic boundaries."

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.