This book is a collection of key readings on Minimalist Syntax, the most recent, and arguably most important, theoretical development within the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory.
Brings together in one volume the key readings on Minimalist Syntax
Includes an introduction and overview of the Minimalist Program written by two prominent researchers
Excerpts crucial pieces from the beginning of Minimalism to the most recent work and provides invaluable coverage of the most important topics.

This volume introduces the study of language attrition - the forgetting of language. In this first collection devoted to second language attrition, the contributors focus on contexts of loss where Japanese is either the attriting language, or the replacing language. Bringing together research to substantiate previous hypotheses in the field, this book offers new theoretical and practical insights for those interested in language change.

This 1996 volume brings together ten chapters on the Celtic languages using the insights of principles-and-parameters theory. The leading researchers in the field examine Welsh, Irish, Breton and Scots Gaelic in comparative perspective, making reference to recent work on English, French, Arabic, German and other languages. The editors have provided a substantial introduction which seeks to make the volume accessible to theoreticians unfamiliar with the Celtic languages and also to Celtic specialists who are less familiar with the theoretical framework underpinning the work. The Syntax of the Celtic Languages makes a substantial contribution both to linguistic theory and to our understanding of the Celtic languages.

The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe explores the complex history of medieval pragmatic theory and ideas and metapragmatic awareness across social discourses. Pragmatic thinking about language and communication is revealed in grammar, semiotics, philosophy, and literature. Part historical reconstruction, part social history, part language theory, Amsler supplements the usual materials for the history of medieval linguistics and discusses the pragmatic implications of grammatical treatises on the interjection, Bacon's sign theory, logic texts, Chaucer's poetry, inquisitors' accounts of heretic speech, and life-writing by William Thorpe and Margery Kempe. Medieval and contemporary pragmatic theory are contrasted in terms of their philosophical and linguistic orientations. Aspects of medieval pragmatic theory and practice, especially polysemy, equivocation, affective speech, and recontextualization, show how pragmatic discourse informed social controversies and attitudes toward sincere, vague, and heretical speech. Relying on Bakhtinian dialogism, critical discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, Amsler situates a key period in the history of linguistics within broader social and discursive fields of practice.

Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher's theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher's and Bekesy's approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds -10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian "the Slavic Group," 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions: Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly? If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them? Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility? The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, a over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).

Originally published in 1990, Nature and History examines how Darwin's theory of evolution has been expanded by scholars and researchers to include virtually every scientific discipline. The book presents a morphological analysis of historical and social sciences - sciences which have traditionally have been viewed as too random in their progressions to conform to a model. Through the evaluation of empirical and factual evidence, the book builds a case for an evolutionary paradigm which encompasses both natural and social sciences, and presents the form's adaptiveness in working historical models.

This volume is a concise introduction to the lively ongoing debate between formalist and functionalist approaches to the study of language. The book grounds its comparisons between the two in both historical and contemporary contexts where, broadly speaking, formalists' focus on structural relationships and idealized linguistic data contrasts with functionalists' commitment to analyzing real language used as a communicative tool. The book highlights key sub-varieties, proponents, and critiques of each respective approach. It concludes by comparing formalist versus functionalist contributions in three domains of linguistic research: in the analysis of specific grammatical constructions; in the study of language acquisition; and in interdisciplinary research on the origins of language. Taken together, the volume opens insight into an important tension in linguistic theory, and provides students and scholars with a more nuanced understanding of the structure of the discipline of modern linguistics.

Originally published in 1977, On Case Grammar, represents a synthesis of various lines of research, with special regard to the treatment of grammatical relations. Arguments are assessed for and against case grammar, localism, lexical decomposition and relational grammar. The book surveys the important evidence to support the validity of the choice of a case grammar as the most satisfactory of current accounts of the notion of grammatical relations. This evidence is derived from a detailed examination of various processes in English and from a typological comparison of other languages, notably Dyirbal and Basque. The book also looks at the establishment of principled limitation on the set of case relations. Lexical, syntactical, semantic and morphological evidence suggests that the set of cases is in conformity with the predictions of a strong form of the localist hypothesis, which requires that case relations be distinguished in terms of source vs. goal vs. location.

This book investigates a set of marginal syntactic structures which have been singularly influential in the development of generative theory, spotlighting lesser-studied languages of the Indic family while emphasizing implications for linguistic theory more broadly. After first defining what constitutes a marginal syntactic structure, this book then undertakes a micro-comparative approach to the rigorous exploration of fundamental properties of human language, including displacement, ellipsis, unbounded dependencies, and the role of clausal peripheries in such languages as Kashmiri and Romani. In so doing, Manetta interrogates and ultimately affirms the relevance of marked and marginal strings which have proven to be crucial to generative syntax while simultaneously advocating for the role of lesser-studied languages to the study of such properties. This book is key reading for graduate students and researchers in linguistics and syntax more specifically, as well as those interested in the study of Indic languages.

This collection of essays sheds new light on the verb in English. The authors illustrate that verbs can only be properly understood if studied from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. In Part One, the authors explore topics such as the terminological problems of classification, verb complementation, the semantics and pragmatics of verbs and verbal combinations, and the notions of tense, aspect, voice and modality. In Part Two, computer corpora are used to study various types of verb complements and collocations, to trace the development in English of certain verb forms, and to detail the usage of verbs in different varieties and genres of English.

The book introduces a framework for examining the validity of tests that aim to assess second-language (L2) proficiency development over time and/or in relation to L2 instruction. It also reports the findings of a longitudinal study that aimed to examine the sensitivity to change of a test of L2 proficiency development. Specifically, the study examined changes over time in Progress scores and the linguistic characteristics of essays written in response to Progress by learners who took the test before, during and after a period of L2 instruction in different countries. The book furthers our understanding of the nature of L2 proficiency as it develops over time and in relation to L2 instruction and provides a framework that can be used in future endeavours to design and validate tests of L2 proficiency development. The book is intended for graduate students, test developers, and researchers doing research in applied linguistics and L2 assessment.

This book examines the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, and argues for a distinct processing component which is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and which utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a Government-Binding grammar. Paul Gorrell contrasts the primary relations (dominance and precedence) and secondary relations (case assignment, theta-role assignment, etc.) in a phrase-structure tree, and shows how this computational distinction of information types is reflected in the internal structure of the parser, which consists of two sub-components: a structure builder (responsible for creating nodes in a tree and positing primary relations between them), and a structure interpreter (responsible for analysing the tree in terms of secondary relations). This model can also predict garden-path phenomena in the processing of verb-final clauses.

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

Focusing mainly on classifiers, Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages offers a deep investigation of three major classifier languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This book provides detailed discussions well supported by empirical evidence and corpus analyses. Theoretical hypotheses regarding differences and commonalities between numeral classifier languages and other mainly article languages are tested to seek universals or typological characteristics. The essays collected here from leading scholars in different fields promise to be greatly significant in the field of linguistics for several reasons. First, it targets three representative classifier languages in Asia. It also provides critical clues and suggests solutions to syntactic, semantic, psychological, and philosophical issues about classifier constructions. Finally, it addresses ensuing debates that may arise in the field of linguistics in general and neighboring inter-disciplinary areas. This book should be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of East Asian languages.

Language Between Description and Prescription is an empirical, quantitative and qualitative study of nineteenth-century English grammar writing, and of nineteenth-century language change. Based on 258 grammar books from Britain and North America, the book investigates whether grammar writers of the time noticed the language changing around them, and how they reacted. In particular, Lieselotte Anderwald demonstrates that not all features undergoing change were noticed in the first place, those that were noticed were not necessarily criticized, and some recessive features were not upheld as correct. The features investigated come from the verb phrase and include in particular variable past tense forms, which -although noticed-often went uncommented, and where variation was acknowledged; the decline of the be-perfect, where the older form (the be-perfect) was criticized emphatically, and corrected; the rise of the progressive, which was embraced enthusiastically, and which was even upheld as a symbol of national superiority, at least in Britain; the rise of the progressive passive, which was one of the most violently hated constructions of the time, and the rise of the get-passive, which was only rarely commented on, and even more rarely in negative terms. Throughout the book, nineteenth-century grammarians are given a voice, and the discussions in grammar books of the time are portrayed. The book's quantitative approach makes it possible to examine majority and minority positions in the discourse community of nineteenth-century grammar writers, and the changes in accepted opinion over time. The terms of the debate are also investigated, and linked to the wider cultural climate of the time. Although grammar writing in the nineteenth century was very openly prescriptivist, the studies in this book show that many prescriptive dicta contained interesting grains of descriptive detail, and that eventually prescriptivism had only a small-scale, short-term effect on the actual language used.

Originally published in 1985. This study concerns the problem of treating identity as a relation between an object and itself. It addresses the Russellian and Fregean solutions and goes on to present in the first part a surfacist account of belief-context ambiguity requiring neither differences in relative scope nor distinctions between sense and reference. The second part offers an account of negative existentials, necessity and identity-statements which resolves problems unlike the Russell-Frege analyses. This is a detailed work in linguistics and philosophy.

With an appendix on the numerals by: Emerton, J. A.;

Halliday has claimed that neither spoken nor written language is more complex than the other per se, but that the two mediums show different degrees of complexity on different levels. He argues that written language uses more lexical items within the clause whereas spoken language uses more clauses within the clause complex. Thus, written language should use more complex noun phrases and spoken language should use more complex clause complexes. The aim of the study was to conduct a corpus-based study to analyse spoken and written language samples with regard to differences in complexity on the level of noun phrases and clause complexes. With the help of this study it was possible to refute Halliday's thesis as the data show that both noun phrases and clause complexes are more complex in the language samples under scrutiny.

A History of the Chinese Language provides a comprehensive introduction to the historical development of the Chinese language from its Proto-Sino-Tibetan roots in prehistoric times to Modern Standard Chinese. Taking a highly accessible and balanced approach, it presents a chronological survey of the various stages of the Chinese language, covering key aspects such as phonology, syntax, and semantics. The second edition presents a revised and updated version that reflects recent scholarship in Chinese historical linguistics and new developments in related disciplines. Features include: Coverage of the major historical stages in Chinese language development, such as Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, Early Modern Chinese, and Modern Standard Chinese. Treatment of core linguistic aspects of the Chinese language, including phonological changes, grammatical development, lexical evolution, vernacular writing, the Chinese writing system, and Chinese dialects. Inclusion of authentic Chinese texts throughout the book, presented within a rigorous framework of linguistic analysis to help students to build up critical and evaluative skills and acquire valuable cultural knowledge. Integration of materials from different disciplines, such as archaeology, genetics, history, and sociolinguistics, to highlight the cultural and social background of each period of the language. Written by a highly experienced instructor, A History of the Chinese Language will be an essential resource for students of Chinese language and linguistics and for anyone interested in the history and culture of China.

*Winner of AEDEAN Leocadio Martin Mingorance Book Award on Theoretical and Applied English Linguistics (2021)* *Winner of ESLA Guadalupe Aguado Research Award for Young Researchers (2022)* *Winner of ESSE Book Award 2022 for Young Researchers in the category 'English Language and Linguistics* This book uses corpus-based methodologies to investigate the wide variety of factors behind verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English. The literature on collective nouns and their agreement patterns spans an array of disciplines and approaches. However, little of the research conducted to date has focused on the influence of of-dependents on verb number with relational collective nouns, as in examples such as a bunch of or a group of. Drawing on data from two case studies - one based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and the other on the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) - Fernandez-Pena uses statistical modelling to unpack the different morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical dimensions of the variables affecting verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English. This multidimensional analysis of the significance of of-dependents in the patterning and contemporary usage of collective nouns offers new insight into and understanding of both synchronic variation and diachronic change. This book is an essential read for scholars of English language variation and change, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and usage-based approaches to the study of language.

Maku: A Comprehensive Grammar is a comprehensive reference grammar of the Maku language, spoken by the jukudeitse who once lived in Venezuela and Brazil. Based on fieldwork with the final two speakers of the language, it describes all core aspects of the grammatical system as they have been recorded; presented through lexical items, example sentences and texts. This book offers a description of the now-extinct language. It was written in response to the loss of linguistic information generally and the significance this language has for the study of the sociolinguistic history of the region specifically. This information contributes to our understanding of linguistic diversity and the indigenous linguistic ecologies in the Americas. Also included is data about language contact via loanwords with other indigenous language spoken in the Northern Amazonian region. The resources in this book are essential for language comparisons and language histories in Venezuela and Brazil. Maku: A Comprehensive Grammar is an important reference for researchers and students in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, history and the study of Amazonian languages.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Crucial Readings in Functional Grammar isan invaluable resource to anyone working in Functional Grammar, student and scholar alike. It contains important articles that have led to new avenues of research in the theory beyond Dik's two-volume Functional Grammar (1997), each concluded with a short paragraph with suggestions for further research. The book also contains an introduction to current Functional Grammar theory by the editors. Crucial Readings is uniquein bringing together in one volume the various ideas that complement Dik's canonical presentation of the theory.The editorial contributions provide a comprehensive review of Functional Grammar publications.