Theories of language espoused by linguists during much of this century have assumed that there is a hierarchy to the elements of language such that certain constructions, rules, and features are unmarked while others are marked; "play" for example, is unmarked or neutral, while "played" or "player" is marked. This opposition, referred to as markedness, is one of the concepts which both Chomskyan generative grammar and Jakobsonian structuralism appear to share, yet which each tradition has treated differently.
Battistella studies the historical development of the concept of markedness in the Prague School structuralism of Roman Jakobson, its importation into generative linguistics, and its subsequent development within Chomsky's "principles and parameters" framework. He traces how structuralist and generative linguistics have drawn on and expanded the notion of markedness, both as a means of characterizing linguistic constructs and as a theory of the innate language faculty.

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.

The essays collected in this volume, most previously unpublished, address a number of closely interconnected issues raised by the comparative syntax of functional heads within the Principles-and-Parameters approach. The general theory of head movement, the properties of derived structures created by incorporation, and the parameterization involved are the main theoretical foci. One major empirical area which is addressed concerns head movement in configurations involving certain kinds of operator-like elements, for example, the different manifestations of Verb Second phenomena in Wh and other constructions and the syntax of negative heads and specifiers. In addition, properties of functional heads and head movement in nominal and clausal structures and the causative construction are investigated.

People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind. And for this new edition, they supply an afterword both extending their arguments and offering a fascinating overview of the current state of thinking on the subject of the metaphor.

Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

This book examines the evidence for the development of adnominal genitives (the knight's sword, the nun's priest's tale, etc.) in English. During the Middle English period the genitive inflection -es developed into the more clitic-like 's, but how, when, why, and over how long a time are unclear, and have been subject to considerable research and discussion. Cynthia L. Allen draws together her own and others' findings in areas such as case marking, the nature of syntactic and morphological change, and the role of processing and pragmatics in the construction of grammars and grammatical change.
Using evidence derived from a systematic examination of a wide range of texts, Dr Allen reviews the evidence for the nature of the possessive inflection in earlier stages of English and the relationship of the -es possessive to the 'his genitive. In doing so she shows that Middle English texts are more reliable witnesses to the grammar of Middle English than has sometimes been assumed. The texts may have been conservative, but their language, the author argues, is reasonable reflection of the spoken language, and where the written evidence runs counter to typological generalization about syntactic change it may be the latter, not the former, which is in need of qualification. While the book focuses on Middle English it also contains discussions of linguistic change before and since, and draws on comparative evidence from other languages, particularly Germanic languages such as Swedish and Dutch. This ground-breaking book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Middle English in particular and the history of English in general.

How do second language learners come to know the combinatorial properties of words and phrases -- the syntax - of the languages they are learning?
Do they develop knowledge systematically or randomly?
Can they acquire the same range of syntactic knowledge as native speakers of their target language?
What effects might different kinds of exposure to the second language have on their knowledge?

Adopting the objectives of Chomsky's Principles and Parameters approach to Universal Grammar, "Second Language Syntax" takes the reader through the main research findings in second language grammatical development. For each area, empirical findings are linked to proposals made by linguists working within the Principles and Parameters framework, with the aim of developing a theory of second language syntax.

"Second Language Syntax" presupposes that readers have some knowledge of the aims of linguistic enquiry, but does not assume that they are familiar with either research on second language syntax or the Principles and Parameters framework. Each chapter includes a set of exercises to promote assimilation of the material, as well as suggestions for further reading.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages to express predicative possession, as in "the boy has a bat." It presents the results of the author's fifteen-year research project on the subject. Predicative possession is the source of many grammaticalization paths - as in the English perfect tense formed from to have - and its typology is an important key to understanding the structural variety of the world's languages and how they change. Drawing on data from some 400 languages representing all the world's language families, most of which lack a close equivalent to the verb to have, Professor Stassen aims (a) to establish a typology of four basic types of predicative possession, (b) to discover and describe the processes by which standard constructions can be modified, and (c) to explore links between the typology of predicative possession and other typologies in order to reveal patterns of interdependence. He shows, for example, that the parameter of simultaneous sequencing - the way a language formally encodes a sequence like "John sang and Mary danced" - correlates with the way it encodes predicative possession. By means of this and other links the author sets up a single universal model in order to account for all morphosyntactic variation in predicative possession found in the languages of the world, including patterns of variation over time.
Predicative Possession will interest scholars and advanced students of language typology, diachronic linguistics, morphology and syntax.

This study offers a first comprehensive synchronic account of the Present-day English gerundial system. Most synchronic studies of gerunds have hitherto focused on the verbal gerund, scrutinizing its categorial status or comparing it with other non-finite clausal structures. A systematic comparison with its nominal counterpart, however, is lacking. Based on a detailed empirical analysis of lexico-grammar and semantics, this study develops an innovative cognitive-constructionist model of the English gerund system which depicts the usage profiles of nominal and verbal gerunds in terms of probabilistic trends rather than by means of categorical labels. It is shown that a better understanding of the functioning of the English gerund system requires a description that operates on multiple levels, accounting for both the abstract construal gerunds can impose on an event as well as the token-level constraints on variation between the two gerund types. This multifaceted approach, it is argued, not only offers a new perspective on the configuration of ing-forms in Present-day English, it can also be of relevance to the description of other complex grammatical structures.

There is a lot that we don't know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don't know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. What are these epistemic possibilities? They do not match up with metaphysical possibilities - there are various cases where something is epistemically possible but not metaphysically possible, and vice versa. How do we understand the semantics of statements of epistemic modality? The ten new essays in this volume explore various answers to these questions, including those offered by contextualism, relativism, and expressivism.

Using the Principles and Parameters framework, Henry analyses various syntactic constructions in Belfast English, and compares them with their Standard English counterparts to gain insight into both English syntax and general syntactic theory. The study will also make linguistic data on Belfast English readily available for the first time.

This book explores, analyzes, and compares the use of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms are considered, as well as their locative and temporal uses. The author observes that in both languages the demonstratives can be used to refer to referents. However, she departs from the common assumption that proximal demonstratives refer to entities or places close to the speaker, while non-proximal demonstratives refer to entities or places far from the speaker. Having analyzed a representative sampling consisting of a German text and a Chinese text, the author argues that both German and Chinese proximal demonstratives can signal the meaning of HIGH DEIXIS in a system of DEIXIS in the Columbia School of linguistics framework, whereas their non-proximal demonstratives can signal the meaning of LOW DEIXIS. In addition, Chinese demonstratives can be used under more circumstances than German demonstratives due to the lack of articles in Chinese. The author also argues that Cognitive Linguistic analysis is more helpful for new language learners, whereas the Columbia School of linguistics may be better suited to advanced learners who wish to know more about the intrinsic differences between words with similar meanings and uses. This book aims to help German learners better understand the German reference system. Readers with a Chinese language background will definitely benefit more from the book, as well as Chinese learners with a German language background. For pure linguistic enthusiasts and multi-linguals, the book offers an extensive introduction to the Columbia School of linguistics, and can open a new horizon for learning a new language comparatively.

This is the first book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The first volume presents linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, including French, Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic. Each outlines and analyses the development of sentential negation and of negative indefinites and quantifiers, including negative concord and, where appropriate, language-specific topics such as the negation of infinitives, negative imperatives, and constituent negation. The second volume (to be pubished in 2014) will offer comparative analyses of changes in negation systems of European and north African languages and set out an integrated framework for understanding them. The aim of both is a universal understanding of the syntax of negation and how it changes. Their authors develop formal models in the light of data drawn from historical linguistics, especially on processes of grammaticalization, and consider related effects on language acquisition and language contact. At the same time the books seek to advance models of historical syntax more generally and to show the value of uniting perspectives from different theoretical frameworks.

Word order is not a subject anyone reading Latin can afford to ignore: apart from anything else, word order is what gets one from disjoint sentences to coherent text. Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to the word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning, or at best using inferential procedures to guess at what is actually overtly encoded in the syntax. This book begins by introducing the reader to the linguistic concepts, formalism and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order. It then proceeds to present and analyze a representative selection of data in sufficient detail for the reader to develop both an intuitive grasp of the often rather subtle principles controlling Latin word order and a theoretically grounded understanding of the system that underlies it. Combining the rich empirical documentation of traditional philological approaches with the deeper theoretical insight of modern linguistics, this work aims to reduce the intricate surface patterns of Latin word order to a simple and general crosscategorial system of syntactic structure which translates more or less directly into constituents of pragmatic and semantic meaning.

This volume combines psycholinguistic experiments with typological investigations in order to provide a comprehensive exploration of the linguistic structure of verb-number agreement in bilingual speakers, with a particular focus on the Turkish language. It takes as its starting point the question of which linguistic structures pose difficulties for bilingual speakers, and then proceeds to evaluate the question by using the interface phenomenon of optional verb number agreement. In doing so, this volume investigates how the bilingual mind handles grammatical structures that demand high processing sources, working towards a processing-based linguistic framework for the bilingual mind. Beginning with a thorough survey of the current research of the interface phenomenon in the bilingual mind, the volume then proceeds to present two separate studies on each linguistic interface type, namely semantics-syntax interface and syntax-pragmatics interface, thus filling a number of gaps in the bilingualism research with regards to the interface phenomenon The results and conclusions of these studies are then integrated with current knowledge and research from the field within a theoretical and processing-based framework in order to explore new psycholinguistic insights for the bilingual mind, specifically the conclusion that the grammar of bilingual speakers is shaped according to cross linguistic tendencies. Ultimately, it provides a unified account and a comprehensive conclu sion regarding the non-native-like patterns in grammar of bilingual speakers. Serving as a fascinating and timely resource, Competing Structures in the Bilingual Mind: An Investigation of Optional Verb Number Agreement will appeal to bilingualism researchers, clinical linguists, cognitive scientists, experimental linguists, and any linguist specializing in Turkic or Altaic languages.

This book implements a multidisciplinary approach in describing language both in its ontogenetic development and in its close interrelationship with other human subsystems such as thought, memory, and activity, with a focus on the semantic component of the evolutionary-synthetic theory.The volume analyzes, among others, the mechanisms for grammatical polysemy, and brings to light the structural unity of artefact and natural concepts (such as CHAIR, ROAD, LAKE, RIVER, TREE). Additionally, object and motor concepts are defined in terms of the language of thought, and their representation in neurobiological memory codes is discussed; finally, the hierarchic structure of basic meanings of concrete nouns is shown to arise as a result of their step-by-step development in ontogeny.

This book presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the behaviour of negation in gapping sentences. Sophie Repp focusses on German and English with reference to Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Slovak. She shows that these languages exhibit important differences in the interaction of gapping and negation and further that no account in the literature explains why this should be. Dr Repp also argues that the precise interpretation of an elided negation depends on varying combinations of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic factors. Illustrating her argument by the interpretation of the negation in examples such as "Pete hasn't got a video and John a DVD," "Pete didn't clean the whole flat and John laze around all afternoon," and "To Mary, Pete didn't say anything and to Sue, only that he was hungry," Dr Repp questions a basic assumption in the analysis of gapping: that the meaning of the two conjuncts must be parallel in the elided material. This leads her to a wide-ranging discussion of the interpretation of scope and the nature of negation. She then proposes a syntactic analysis that both takes into account the interaction of the grammatical interfaces and is at the same time compatible with more general assumptions of current generative theory. She concludes by considering the implications of her findings for linguistic theory more generally.

This volume is a collection of previously unpublished articles focusing on the following aspects of Portuguese syntax: clause structure, clitic placement, word order variation, pronominal system, verb movement, quantification, and distribution of particles. The articles are written within the principles and parameters framework and contrast Portuguese with other Romance languages.

In this volume leading researchers present new work on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs, and their interfaces with syntax. Its concerns include the semantics of gradability; the relationship between adjectival scales and verbal aspect; the relationship between meaning and the positions of adjectives and adverbs in nominal and verbal projections; and the fine-grained semantics of different subclasses of adverbs and adverbs. Its goals are to provide a comprehensive vision of the linguistically significant structural and interpretive properties of adjectives and adverbs, to highlight the similarities between these two categories, and to signal the importance of a careful and detailed integration of lexical and compositional semantics.
The editors open the book with an overview of current research before introducing and contextualizing the remaining chapters. The work is aimed at scholars and advanced students of syntax, semantics, formal pragmatics, and discourse. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition interested in the syntax and semantics of adjectives and adverbs.

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the syntax of Palauan that will appeal to anyone interested in Austronesian languages or formal syntactic and morphological theory. This volume proposes that words in Palauan are not drawn directly from a mental lexicon, but are instead composed at least partially in the syntax. Using original data from syntactic constructions not previously explored in the language, the author entertains several competing theories of word formation and highlights the compatible and incompatible aspects of each, through an exploration into new corners of Palauan syntax and morphology.

This book provides a detailed exploration of negation and negative polarity phenomena and their implications for linguistic theory. Including new, specially commissioned work from some of the leading European, American, and Japanese scholars, Negation and Polarity covers all of the main approaches to this subjectDSsyntactic, pragmatic, semantic, and cognitiveDSin a variety of language contexts.

This book elaborates a theory of ellipsis that sheds new light on a well-known phenomenon, bringing it under the aegis of general and universal principles. Lobeck argues that ellipted categories in IP (VP Ellipsis), DP (N' Ellipsis), and CP (Sluicing) are empty, non-referential pronominals, subject to the same licensing and identification conditions as referential pro. She proposes that both types of empty pronominals must be licensed under head-government to satisfy the Empty Category Principle, and identified through strong agreement. In the case of ellipsis, agreement-type features make the empty category visible to interpretive processes of reconstruction. These licensing and identification conditions derive the result that ellipses are complements of functional categories DET, COMP, and INFL, but not of lexical categories. The analysis is supported by contrastive evidence from ellipsis in French and German, in which licensing and identification interact with Verb Raising, feature checking, and a parameter defining "strong" agreement.

The foundation of this book is a line-by-line analysis of enjambement, or the syntactical relationship between successive verses, in the Iliad. Such a study develops naturally from Milman Parry's work, which sought to show the importance for oral composition, and specifically for Homer, both of the syntactical link between lines and the frequency of each type of enjambement. In contrast to earlier studies, which utilized only portions of the text, Dr. Higbie's book is unique in presenting analyses of the complete poem. In doing so, she makes material available which can be used to answer larger stylistic questions of genre, effect, and the manipulation and enjambing of formulae. Speeches, similes, battle scenes, and catalogues, for example, can be distinguished by the length and structure of the sentences, as well as by the relationship between the individual sentence and the hexameter verse. Moreover, the flexibility and survival of the formula depend in part upon its grammatical construction. The importance of enjambement to Homeric verse makes this book an essential reference work for scholars and students of Homer alike.

In Motion and the English Verb, a study of the expression of motion in medieval English, Judith Huber provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English, and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English. Huber demonstrates how several non-motion verbs receive contextual motion meanings through their use in the intransitive motion construction. In addition, she analyzes which verbs and structures are employed most frequently in talking about motion in select Old and Middle English texts, demonstrating that while satellite-framing is stable, the extent of manner-conflation is influenced by text type and style. Huber further investigates how in the intertypological contact with medieval French, a range of French path verbs (entrer, issir, descendre, etc.) were incorporated into Middle English, in whose system of motion encoding they are semantically unusual. Their integration into Middle English is studied in an innovative approach which analyzes their usage contexts in autonomous Middle English texts as opposed to translations from French and Latin. Huber explains how these verbs were initially borrowed not for expressing general literal motion, but in more specific, often metaphorical and abstract contexts. Her study is a diachronic contribution to the typology of motion encoding, and advances research on the process of borrowing and loanword integration.

This pioneering research brings a new insight into derivational processes in terms of theory, method and typology. Theoretically, it conceives of derivation as a three-dimensional system. Methodologically, it introduces a range of parameters for the evaluation of derivational networks, including the derivational role, combinability and blocking effects of semantic categories, the maximum derivational potential and its actualization in relation to simple underived words, and the maximum and average number of orders of derivation. Each language-specific chapter has a unified structure, which made it possible to identify - in the final, typologically oriented chapter - the systematicity and regularity in developing derivational networks in a sample of forty European languages and in a few language genera and families. This is supported by considerations about the role of word-classes, morphological types, and the differences and similarities between word-formation processes of the languages belonging to the same genus/family.