Improving the quality of your writing starts with rethinking your assumptions and developing healthier writing habits. This book will help you do both.

Become a Better Writer: How to Write with Clarity and Simplicity is a practical guide for those who wish to write more clearly and concisely. Drawing on their extensive experience as writers and editors, the authors discuss tools and tips for making your writing accessible and meaningful to your target audience.

The book is readable and engaging, covering different kinds of writing (including reports, essays, emails, novels and speeches) across a wide range of subjects. The examples discussed are derived from real-world material and are particularly relevant to the African context. The book will be especially useful to writers of non-fiction.

Andrew Carnie’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction, Fourth Edition, and The Syntax Workbook, Second Edition, in a combined set

This set includes both the newly revised fourth edition of Syntax: A Generative Introduction and the new second edition of The Syntax Workbook. For a generation of students, Andrew Carnie’s introduction to syntax has provided a valuable first step into the study of sentence structure through clear, student-friendly descriptions and examples. The workbook provides extensive opportunity to practice and apply the lessons from the textbook. This combined book set provides students with all material needed for a full course in syntax.

In this set, students receive:

• The newest editions of Andrew Carnie’s textbook, updated with new material on Chomsky’s Merge and with new problem sets
• The newest edition of the workbook, which has been updated and revised to support the fourth edition of the textbook
• Access to the companion website for additional practice sets, videos, and other supplementary material

This combined set is ideal for undergraduates in syntax courses who will either need both texts for their courses or who wish to supplement the primary textbook with the workbook and companion website for further at-home practice.

How Words Mean introduces a new approach to the role of words and other linguistic units in the construction of meaning. It does so by addressing the interaction between non-linguistic concepts and the meanings encoded in language. It develops an account of how words are understood when we produce and hear language in situated contexts of use. It proposes two theoretical constructs, the lexical concept and the cognitive model. These are central to the accounts of lexical representation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (or LCCM Theory).
Vyvyan Evans integrates and advances recent developments in cognitive science, particularly in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. He builds a framework for the understanding and analysis of meaning that is at once descriptively adequate and psychologically plausible. In so doing he also addresses current issues in lexical semantics and semantic compositionality, polysemy, figurative language, and the semantics of time and space, and writes in a way that will be accessible to students of linguistics and cognitive science at advanced undergraduate level and above.

Diagnosis is an essential part of scientific research. It refers to the process of identifying a phenomenon, property, or condition on the basis of certain signs and by the use of various diagnostic procedures. This book is the first ever to consider the use of diagnostics in syntactic research and focuses on the five core domains of natural language syntax - ellipsis, agreement, anaphora, phrasal movement, and head movement. Each empirical domain is considered in turn from the perspectives of syntax, syntax at the interfaces, neuropsycholinguistics, and language diversity. Drawing on the expertise of 20 leading scholars and their empirically rich data, the book presents current thoughts on, and practical answers to, the question: What are the diagnostic signs, techniques and procedures that can be used to analyse natural language syntax? It will interest linguists, including formalists, typologists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists.

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.

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This collection of new typological and case studies is the first book-length investigation of semantically aligned languages for three decades. Leading international typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise or disappear and provide areal overviews of Eurasia, the Americas, and the south-west Pacific, the areas where semantically aligned languages are concentrated. This book will interest typological and historical linguists at graduate level and above.

Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.

This book is the final volume of a four-volume set on modern Chinese complex sentences, assessing the key attributes, related sentence structures, and semantic and pragmatic relevance of complex sentences. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. Following on from analysis on coordinate, causal, and adversative types of complex sentences, the ten chapters in this volume review the characteristics of complex sentences as a whole. The author discusses the constituents, related structures, semantic and pragmatic aspects of complex sentences, covering topics such !!as the constraints and counter-constraints between sentence forms and semantic relationships, six type crossover markers, distinctions between simple sentences and complex sentences, clauses formed by a noun/nominal phrase followed by le, the shi structure, subject ellipsis or tacit understanding of clauses, as well as double-subject sentences, alternative question groups and their relationships with complex sentences. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth International Symposium Russian Grammar: System-Usus-Language Variation, from September 22 to 24, 2021, at the University of Potsdam (Germany). The selected essays tackle the issues that arise when Russian Grammar meets new linguistic paradigms (such as corpus linguistics) and new challenges (such as heritage languages). The relevant findings are discussed with a particular focus on an updated version of the 1980 Academy grammar of Russian.

In Present-Day English, the only flexible sentence constituent in unmarked declarative sentences is the adverbial, which can often be placed in initial, medial, or end position. This book presents the first empirical and corpus-based study on the usage patterns and functions of medially-placed linking adverbials in conceptually-written academic English. By combining quantitative with detailed qualitative analyses of selected corpus examples, the present study explores whether the placement of linking adverbials in medial position can be regarded as a focusing strategy, similar to focusing adverbs and cleft sentences. Moreover, it investigates whether different medial positions are associated with distinct discourse functions, such as the marking of contrastive topics or different focus meanings.

This monograph presents a contrastive-corpus analysis of the semantic category of gratification. It takes as a case study the verb reward and its various forms in Polish and in English, as prototypical of the semantics of gratification. The study, set predominantly in the framework of semantic syntax, and drawing from the theory of valence and frame semantics, adopts a corpus-driven and usage-based approach to language analysis. By exploring the syntactic realization and distribution of arguments opened by the predicates of gratification in the two languages, the book offers new insights into language representation in English and Polish, and addresses the combinatoricity of human thought and cognitive mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of the situation of rewarding.

This book includes twelve articles that present new research on the Finnic and Baltic languages spoken in the southern and eastern part of the Circum-Baltic area. It aims to elaborate on the various contact situations and (dis)similarities between the languages of the area. Taking an areal, comparative, or sociolinguistic perspective, the articles offer new insights into the grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and textual patterns of different types of predicates or nouns or consider the variation of grammatical categories from a typological perspective. The qualitative analyses find support in quantitative data collected from language corpora or written sources, including those representing the less studied varieties of the area.

This volume provides a detailed and comprehensive description of the morphological system of Dutch. Following an introduction to the basic assumptions of morphological theory, separate chapters are devoted to the inflectional system, derivation, and compounding, the interface between morphology and phonology, the interaction between morphology and syntax, and, new to this edition, a more detailed study of the features of separable complex verbs. Geert Booij demonstrates in this book that the morphology of Dutch poses multiple interesting descriptive and theoretical challenges. The volume also contributes to ongoing discussions on the nature and representation of morphological processes, the role of paradigmatic relations between words - and between words and phrases - and the interaction between morphology, phonology, and syntax. This second, fully revised edition has been updated throughout with expanded coverage of Dutch morphological phenomena and results from new research. Alongside a brand new chapter on separable complex verbs, it also includes a more sophisticated analysis of the relation between morphology and syntax, and an introduction to the basic tenets of Construction Morphology.

Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas - New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist, mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial experience and new means of communication via social media. The volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition across indigenous languages.

This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.

In studies of copular clauses, the relation between specificational and predicative clauses has been a contentious issue. While most studies agree on the analysis of predicative clauses, specificational clauses have sparked much debate. A key concern is how specificational clauses with indefinite 'variable' NP (e.g. "A popular holiday go-to is Rome") compare to, and contrast with, other copular clauses, especially specificational clauses with definite 'variable' NP (e.g. "The main can't-miss in Italy is Rome") and predicative clauses with indefinite predicate nominative (e.g. "Rome is a great city"). This book addresses this concern by offering a functional-structural analysis of these three clause types in terms of their common characteristics and distinguishing features. The analysis of the clauses' structure and meaning is substantiated by evidence from corpus research which probes into various aspects of their actual usage (e.g. information structure and prosody, discourse-embedding). In doing so, the book offers an empirical basis for testing existing assumptions about predicative and specificational clauses, while also providing new insights into the interaction between the grammar and discourse usage of copular clauses.

This book documents modern Baba Malay, a critically endangered Austronesian-based contact language with a Sinitic substrate. Formed via intermarriage between Hokkien-speaking male traders and indigenous women in the Malay Peninsula, the language has less than 1,000 speakers in Singapore and less than 1,000 speakers in Malacca, Malaysia. This volume fills a gap for reference grammars of contact languages in general. Reference grammars written on contact languages are rare, and much rarer is a reference grammar written about a critically endangered Austronesian-based contact language. The reference grammar, which aims to be useful to linguists and general readers interested in Baba Malay, describes the language's sociohistorical background, its circumstances of endangerment, and provides information regarding the phonology, parts of speech, and syntax of Baba Malay as spoken in Singapore. A chapter that differentiates this variety from that spoken in Malacca is also included. The grammar demonstrates that the nature of Baba Malay is highly systematic, and not altogether simple, providing structural information for those who are interested in the typology of contact languages.

Grammaticalization has often been described as a gradual phenomenon. While many studies have discussed the quantitative aspects of grammaticalization, there has been little to no work that has tried to propose a way of measuring degrees of grammaticalization. This book addresses this gap by proposing a corpus-based approach to the measurement of grammaticalization, using binary logistic regression modelling. Such an approach has theoretical benefits as it can provide empirical evidence for the gradience and gradualness of grammaticalization. It can help substantiate observations that have been done on the basis of case studies so far, such as the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization. In addition, as the methods proposed in this book rely on corpus-based data only, it offers a way of comparing grammaticalization across multiple languages, which is currently a challenging endeavour. What this book hopes to achieve is to start a discussion on the measurement of grammaticalization. To draw a parallel, the field of morphological productivity has greatly benefited from the discussions (and disputes) regarding how its object of study should be measured, and I believe that so will the field of grammaticalization.

This investigation of V2-movement addresses the question which role the lexical content of the moved element plays during sentence processing. It draws on original theoretical arguments, empirical data and results from psycholinguistic experiments. The main finding is that the lexical content of the V2-verb is interpreted only at the end of the clause, i.e. at the base position of the finite verb.