This book examines the hypothesis of "direct compositionality," which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. Although associated with the dominant view in formal semantics of the 1970s and 1980s, the feasibility of direct compositionality remained unsettled, and more recently the discussion as to whether or not this view can be maintained has receded. The syntax-semantics interaction is now often seen as a process in which the syntax builds representations which, at the abstract level of logical form, are sent for interpretation to the semantics component of the language faculty. In the first extended discussion of the hypothesis of direct compositionality for twenty years, this book considers whether its abandonment might have been premature and whether in fact direct compositionality is not after all a simpler and more effective conception of the grammar than the conventional account of the syntax-semantics interface in generative grammar. It contains contributions from both sides of the debate, locates the debate in the setting of a variety of formal theories, and draws on examples from a range of languages and a range of empirical phenomena.

This study aims at developing a unified perspective on nonfiniteness, encompassing its morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. It puts the emphasis on clause types distinct from standard infinitives (gerund clauses, Celtic verbo-nominal structures, Portuguese inflected infinitives, Latin dominant participle constructions) and takes advantage of the most recent developments in syntactic theory. The notions of defectiveness and completeness, the inheritance hypothesis, the labeling requirement, the syntactic definition of lexical categories, once combined together, appear to make accessible tighter and more elegant analyses than previous accounts.

The volume contains most updated theoretical and empirical research on foreign or second language processes analyzed from the perspective of cognition and affect. It consists of articles devoted to various issued related to such broad topics as gender, literacy, translation or culture, to mention a few. The collection of papers offers a constructive and inspiring insight into a fuller understanding of the interconnection of the language-cognition-affect trichotomy.

This handbook provides a comprehensive account of current research on the finite-state morphology of Georgian and enables the reader to enter quickly into Georgian morphosyntax and its computational processing. It combines linguistic analysis with application of finite-state technology to processing of the language. The book opens with the author's synoptic overview of the main lines of research, covers the properties of the word and its components, then moves up to the description of Georgian morphosyntax and the morphological analyzer and generator of Georgian.The book comprises three chapters and accompanying appendices. The aim of the first chapter is to describe the morphosyntactic structure of Georgian, focusing on differences between Old and Modern Georgian. The second chapter focuses on the application of finite-state technology to the processing of Georgian and on the compilation of a tokenizer, a morphological analyzer and a generator for Georgian. The third chapter discusses the testing and evaluation of the analyzer's output and the compilation of the Georgian Language Corpus (GLC), which is now accessible online and freely available to the research community.Since the development of the analyzer, the field of computational linguistics has advanced in several ways, but the majority of new approaches to language processing has not been tested on Georgian. So, the organization of the book makes it easier to handle new developments from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint.The book includes a detailed index and references as well as the full list of morphosyntactic tags. It will be of interest and practical use to a wide range of linguists and advanced students interested in Georgian morphosyntax generally as well as to researchers working in the field of computational linguistics and focusing on how languages with complicated morphosyntax can be handled through finite-state approaches.

This monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian, among others. Starting from a close scrutiny of the environments in which subjunctive mood occurs and of its semantic contribution, we present a feature-based approach which reveals the common properties of the class of verbs which embed subjunctive, and which takes into account the variation in subjunctive-related complementizers. Two main proposals can be highlighted: (i) the lexical semantics of the main clause predicate plays a crucial role in mood selection. More specifically subjunctive mood is regulated by a specific property of the main predicate, the emotive property, which is associated with the external argument of the embedding verb (usually the Subject). The book proposes a nanosyntactic analysis of the internal structure of embedding verbs. (ii) Cross- and intra-linguistic variations are dealt with according to different patterns of lexicalization, i.e., variations depend on what portions of the verb's and complementizer's functional sequence is lexicalized and on how it is packaged by languages. In doing so, this approach provides a uniform account of the phenomenon of embedded subjunctives. The monograph takes a novel, feature-based approach to the question of subjunctive licensing, providing a detailed analysis of the features of the matrix verb, of the complementizer and of the embedded subjunctive clause. It is also based on a wide empirical coverage, ranging from the relatively well-studied groups of Romance and Balkan languages to less explored languages from non-Indo-European families (Hungarian).

This book represents the state of the art in the study of gradience in grammar - the degree to which utterances are acceptable or grammatical, and the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality. Gradience is at the centre of controversial issues in the theory of grammar and the understanding of language. The acceptability of words and sentences may be linked to the frequency of their use and measured on a scale. Among the questions considered in the book are: whether such measures are beyond the scope of a generative grammar or, in other words, whether the factors influencing acceptability are internal or external to grammar; whether observed gradience is a property of the mentally represented grammar or a reflection of variation among speakers; and what gradient phenomena reveal about the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality, and between competence and performance. The book is divided into four parts. Part I seeks to clarify the nature of gradience from the perspectives of phonology, generative syntax, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Parts II and III examine issues in phonology and syntax. Part IV considers long wh-movement from different methodological perspectives. The data discussed comes from a wide range of languages and dialects, and includes tone and stress patterns, word order variation, and question formation. Gradience in Grammar will interest linguists concerned with the understanding of syntax, phonology, language acquisition and variation, discourse, and the operations of language within the mind.

This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of auxiliary verb constructions, as in 'he could have been going to drink it' and 'she does eat cheese'. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and he presents his results within a new typological framework. The book's impressive range includes data on variation within and across languages and language families. In addition to examining languages in Africa, Europe, and Asia the author presents analyses of languages in Australasia and the Pacific and in North, South, and Meso-America. In doing so he reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution. His book will interest scholars and researchers in language typology, historical and comparative linguistics, syntax, and morphology.

The volume is dedicated to the German linguist Wolfgang Ullrich a oeGustava Wurzel (1940-2001), who has influenced linguistic thought in his work on paradigm-based morphology. All contributors to the volume deal with Wurzela (TM)s work and thinking, who in his theoretical writings focused on the concepts of naturalness, markedness and complexity in human language. The authors discuss diachronic and typological aspects of morphology, i.e. the nature of paradigms, the rise and fall of inflectional morphology, and the development and systems of gender marking, also in regard to the interface with phonology and syntax.

Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic constraint. Chapters in the book show how the syntactic predication relation is semantically interpreted, and how the predication relation explains constraints on DP-raising and on the distribution of pleonastics in English. The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew, of the use of be' in predicative and identity sentences in English, and concludes with a study of the meaning of the verb be'.

The preposition is of particular interest to syntacticians, historians and sociolinguists of English, as its placement within a sentence is influenced by syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints, and by how the 'rules' regarding prepositions have changed over time, as a result of language change, of change in attitudes towards language, and of processes such as standardization. This book investigates preposition placement in the early and late Modern English periods (1500-1900), with a special focus on preposition stranding (The house which I live in) in opposition to pied piping (The house in which I live). Based on a large-scale analysis of precept and usage data, this study reassesses the alleged influence of late eighteenth-century normative works on language usage. It also sheds new light on the origins of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. This study will be of interest to scholars working on syntax and grammar, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Drawing on extensive corpus-based research, this book explores the nature and behavior of coordinate constructions in three case studies, covering order in copulative compounds, binomials (bare phrases), and more complex phrases. Historically, research on order in coordination has concentrated on so-called irreversible binomials, but Lohmann's research places significant focus on reversible ad hoc coordination and also presents a detailed comparison between irreversible and reversible binomials. This book uses empirical analyses to explore a wide range of factors, ranging from pragmatic to phonetic influences on the ordering process. It also offers readers a processing perspective on the results obtained, and puts forth a processing explanation for the characteristics of irreversible binomials. The book is ideal for researchers and advanced students working in English linguistics, syntax and psycholinguistics, and due to the multifactorial methodology applied it will be of particular interest to quantitatively minded corpus linguists.

Proposing a novel theory of parts of speech, this book discusses categorization from a methodological and theoretical point a view. It draws on discoveries and insights from a number of approaches - typology, cognitive grammar, notional approaches, and generative grammar - and presents a generative, feature-based theory. Building on up-to-date research and the latest findings and ideas in categorization and word-building, Panagiotidis combines the primacy of categorical features with a syntactic categorization approach, addressing the fundamental, but often overlooked, questions in grammatical theory. Designed for graduate students and researchers studying grammar and syntax, this book is richly illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and explains elements and phenomena central to the nature of human language.

This book explores the concept of complementation in the adjectival domain of English grammar. Alternation between non-finite complements, especially to infinitives and gerundial complements, has been investigated intensively on the basis of large corpora in the last few years. With very few exceptions, however, such work has hitherto been based on univariate analysis methods. Using multivariate analysis, the authors present methodologically innovative case studies examining a large array of explanatory factors potentially impacting complement choice in cases of alternation. This approach yields more precise information on the impact of each factor on complement choice as well as on interactions between different explanatory factors. The book thus presents a methodologically new perspective on the study of the system of non-finite complementation in recent English and variation within that system, and will be relevant to academics and students with an interest in English grammar, predicate complementation, and statistical approaches to language.

Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles aims to introduce the reader to the exciting and important field of pidgin and creole studies. The book deals with the linguistic, historical and social aspects of the development of pidgin and creole languages. Detailed case studies of individual pidgins and creoles are based around texts drawn from a range of different types and contexts (mainly contemporary), with discussion and grammatical notes. Chapters are interspersed with exercises to consolidate and develop the reader's understanding.

This book investigates morpho-syntactic convergences that characterize the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund: Balkan Slavic, Greek, Romanian, Albanian, Balkan Romani. Apart from new data, the volume features contributions within different theoretical frameworks (contact linguistics, functional linguistics, typology, areal linguistics, and generative grammar).

This is the first book to cover the grammar of clitics from all points of view, including their phonology and syntax and relation to morphology. In the process, it deals with the relation of second position clitics to verb-second phenomena in Germanic and other languages, the grammar of contracted auxiliary verbs in English, noun incorporation constructions, and several other much discussed topics in grammar. Stephen Anderson includes analyses of a number of particular languages, and some of these - such as Kwakw'ala ( "Kwakiutl ") and Surmiran Rumantsch - are based on his own field research. The study of clitics has broad implications for a general understanding of sentence structure in natural language. Stephen Anderson's clearly-written, wide-ranging, and original account will be of wide interest to scholars and advanced students of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

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.

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths reflects on medieval and early modern Hebrew linguistics as a discipline that crossed geographic and religious borders and linked up with a plethora of scholarly activities, from Judaeo-Arabic Bible translations to the Renaissance search for the holiest alphabet. This collection of articles presents a cross-section of new research avenues on Hebraism, Karaite, Rabbanite and Christian, with an emphasis on the transmission of linguistic ideas through time and space among different communities, cultures and religious currents. The resulting picture is one of intrinsic variation and dynamic growth as opposed to the linear paradigm of development, culmination and stagnation current in the historiography of Hebrew linguistics.

This collection of new work focuses on issues at the lexicon-syntax interface. It presents innovative analyses of theoretical issues of aspectual interpretation in a variety of languages. The authors address questions such as to what extent can variation in verbal meaning, and thematic information can be determined in the syntax, and how the interpretation of various syntactic constructions is derived, once lexical information is minimized. A subset of the articles develops theories that take as their starting point the lexical-syntactic framework of the late Ken Hale and Jay Keyser, prominent among which is their own chapter.

The book is the most comprehensive account of the phonology of Danish ever published in any language. It gives a clear analysis of the sound patterns of modern Danish and examines the relations between its speech sounds and grammar. The author develops new models for the analysis of phonology and morphology-phonology interactions, and shows how these may be applied to Danish and to other languages. Danish has an unusually rich vowel system and exhibits radical reduction processes that make it difficult for foreigners to understand. The sound pattern is equally challenging for the analyst. Professor Basboll develops a non-circular model for the sonority syllable and applies it to Danish phonotactics. He presents a radically new and insightful analysis of stod, a syllable accent which has a complex grammatical distribution and is unique among the world-s languages. He also describes syllabic and word structures, and stress and intonation. The book is fully referenced and indexed. It will be widely welcomed by phonologists and scholars of Danish, and is likely to become the standard account of Danish phonology.

Depictive secondary predicates such as raw in George ate the fish raw are important for current issues in syntactic and semantic theory, in particular predication theory, phrase structure theories, issues of control and grammatical relations, and verbal aspect. This is the first book to approach depictive secondary predication from a crosslinguistic perspective. It maps out all the relevant phenomena and brings together critical surveys and new contributions on their morphosyntactic and semantic properties. In particular it considers similarities and differences between secondary predicates and other types of adjuncts, including adverbials of manner, comparison, quantity, and location. The authors are leading scholars with a first-hand knowledge of the languages they discuss. Their approach is theory-neutral and pragmatic: they draw on insights and research traditions ranging from the minimalist program to semantic maps methodology. The book will interest scholars working on the semantics or syntax of secondary predicates, adverbials, and the role of agreement and other morphological marking. It has also beeen designed for use in advanced syntax and typology classes.

This is the first account of Jarawara, a Southern Amazonia language of great complexity and unusual interest, and now spoken by less than two hundred people. It has only two open lexical classes, noun and verb, and a closed adjective class with fourteen members which can only modify a noun. Verbs have a complex structure with three prefix and some twenty-five suffix slots. There is an eleven-term tense-modal system with an evidentiality contrast (eyewitness/non-eyewitness) in the three past tenses. Of the two genders, feminine and masculine, feminine is unmarked. There are at least eight types of subordinate clause constructions, including complement clauses, relative clauses, coreferential dependent clauses, and 'when', 'if', 'due to the lack of' and 'because of' clauses.There are only eleven consonants and four vowels but an extensive set of ordered phonological rules of lenition, vowel assimilation and unstressed syllable omission. There are four imperative inflections (with different meanings) and three explicit interrogative suffixes within the mood system. The book is entirely based on field work by the authors.

This groundbreaking book highlights a phonological preference, the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation, as a factor in grammatical variation and change in English from the early modern period to the present. Though frequently overlooked in earlier research, the phonetically motivated avoidance of adjacent stresses is shown to exert an influence on a wide variety of phenomena in morphology and syntax. Based on in-depth analyses of extensive electronic databases, the book presents 20 exemplary studies from different structural categories. Among them are much-debated as well as novel issues, including the double comparative worser, 'predicative only' a- adjectives, variant past participles, the placement of the degree modifier quite, the order of conjuncts in binomials, the negation of attributive adjectives and sentence adverbs, variable adverbial marking, the use or omission of the infinitive marker, and the a- prefix before - ing forms. The studies provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of the importance of rhythmic alternation in synchronic variation as well as diachronic change, without neglecting interactions with a set of competing functional tendencies. Thus, the book contributes essential aspects to the description and explanation of the phenomena considered, calling for a fundamental revision of current thinking about the interface between phonology and morphosyntax. In addition, the empirical findings are brought to bear on theoretical discussions of more general interest, yielding a critical assessment of the merits and limitations of two nonmodular linguistic theories: Optimality Theory and spreading activation models. The latter type is developed into a comprehensive conception integrating functional factors such as the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation in an overarching framework for language variation and change. The wide range of subject areas covered makes the volume essential reading and a source of inspiration for linguists with interests as diverse as the phonology-morphosyntax interface, English grammar, the history of English, functional linguistics, Optimality Theory, as well as neuro- and psycholinguistics.

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.